Zepto Znote 6625WD - BIOS z15N015

Might I add PicLens and Greasmonkey for Firefox addons

If you install greasemoney you can make sites appear as you want, there are tons of useful scripts available for one click install at www.userscripts.org. One of my fav is found here

Were drifting away from the topic lol... Rene any comments on error log and another bios is in the works yes?

 

@stutter, yeah the 012 did "feel" more normal.
@Blackbird, I agree! We should do a "Zepto Owners Favorite Apps and Stuff" thread

@Everyone:
It might be worthwhile if Zepto hosted something for us to give our bios release opinions / issues and help collate that vital info in one place? We do this all the time after releasing software and can't live without it! Something like Bugzilla, Trac or FlySpray? This would be a tremendous help for both Zepto and us. I'm sure Zepto use a tracking system internally for repairs, but something public just for bios releases would be brilliant!

What do guys think?

 

good suggestions, too lazy to apply them at this time of the day.

 

For Rene S - Zepto:
I'm pleased you released a new BIOS. However, the latest (z15N015) still doesn't solve the AZ53 issue found in (page 37 and 38):

ftp://download.intel.com/design/mobile/SPECUPDT/31891502.pdf

I use my Znote 6625 WD with a Penryn T9300 to do a lot of MPEG4 AVC encoding and very often get hard lock-ups because of the bug mentioned in the PDF. I first thought it was a software or OS-problem but I've managed to reproduce it in both Linux and Windows Vista.

What I'm hoping for is that your Taiwanese BIOS-partner may solve this. This problem doesn't only affect mobile Penryn-CPU:s but all Penryn-based cores as shown in the PDF and here:
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/122440

I get the very same MCE-error as they do and the problem for them was solved by a BIOS-upgrade, so I'm hoping you as well can release a BIOS that solves the issue.

 

All I can say is that we are currently looking into this issue.

 

Afternoon all!

I've down graded back to 011 and thus far, the sudden shutdowns that
occured since upgrading have stopped. It would seem, though I can't
be sure, that the new bios for some reason increased temperatures
to a degree that the laptop didn't like and shutdown to protect itself.
I'm no tech-y so I'm not 100% certain.

I also tried disabling the turbo memory, which unfortunately seemed to
have no effect after being disabled one week.

This laptop goes back to Zepto next week as I just purchased an Alien
replacement. If Zepto can't fix to my satisfaction and specs that the
computer was billed at, I'll begin the request for a complete refund...
even if it takes 3 months!

It's important to note, I also had to swap hard-drives, the old hybrid
was faulty. I had to pay for the new one on the promise of a refund
of the difference, this was a month ago and still no refund.

 

All temperature readings are in Celcius:
=======================================================
Observations with 015 BIOS:

This BIOS causes GPU to idle at 63 and CPU at 46-48.

The fan's are horribly coded, they are a nuisance as the shut on and off.

There are random shutdowns

Santa Rosa chipset features are working

Very few screen brightness levels

DPC latency improved

CPU idle percentage is 5-8%

=========================================================

Ive had enough of the new BIOS and am back at 004 BIOS, here are my observations:

The GPU idles at 57 and the CPU at 41-43.

The fans are not a nuisance, come on less and they don't shut on and off.

No random shutdowns

Santa Rosa feature; SFLM and IDA are not supported.

More screen brightness levels

DPC latency a bit higher, if not the same as in 015

CPU percentage when idle is 0-5 %

 

My obervations:
I second all that Blackbird found... back to 004 here aswell.

Zepto... Please do a better one.

As i don't realy know how a bios is coded this question my seems to be stupid but still:

René, why can't you use the code for 004 and just add the Santa Rosa feature; SFLM and IDA, and ofcourse needed stuff for Penryn?

 

Any particular reason why you rolled all the way back to 004 and not just 011 -especially in view of the improvements ref Zepto's changelog.txt

 

011 is just as buggy as 015, it has the same problems / benefits as 015.

008 is a cross between 004 and 015, it has some of the benefits and some of the problems, but 004 is by far the best if your willing to give up sflm.

 

OK will give 004 at try. Am also experiencing the very annoying start/stop of fan with 015. Have not exactly experienced BSOD but almost everytime I open the lid again Windows starts by saying it has recovered from an unexpected shutdown- so something is very wrong with 015.
Noticed on Zepto's page that the 004 is bigger in byte size than all the other bios.

Are there any features one is to "activate" in bios setup before Vista loads?

 

I've been lurking in Notebookreview's forums for a while and from all the posts, it's enough to convince anyone that the 6625WD is completely broken.

I bought my 6625 back in November which came with the 011 BIOS. It worked fine, with the only problems I ever encountered were random BSODs while playing Adobe Flash videos in fullscreen (tho a Vista reinstall has fixed this) and the now-infamous GeForce 8600 stuttering problem (which I'd mostly managed to fix).

I have installed the 015 BIOS now and the laptop's still working like a charm, I get better frame rates + zero stuttering in games, the laptop runs cooler now. Yes, the fan "pulse" is mildly annoying, but tbh I don't see what's so badly wrong with this laptop..

 

After installing 015, I started getting stutters (temps much higher than in 011&008), stutters start @ 96C GPU and stops at 94C, after wich it climbs up again and so on..
Also, my CPU is running 84C whle gaming (and its undervolted to the max)
Im thinking about downgrading, 015 didnt bring anything, dcp latency is higher, temps are higher, no new features.

 

Im getting to the point... where a custom made cooling system could be worth trying to make, since its all 110% surely heat related, and Zeptos doesnt seem to be able to make any sort of fixes through BIOS... it seems were all kinda doomed.

btw, my cpu max temp while gaming is 65 degrees! undervolted like crazy must be a good cpu i have, not all can go as low as 0.978volt

 

I wonder what the timeframe of the next BIOS for the 6625 is and if they this time actually can fix some problems not just adjust them a bit.
How about custom fan control like some other zepto models.
Better light control of the screen.
Fix to the usb bug in hibernation mentioned in another thread
And why not let the fan's max mode kick in alot sooner than it does in current bios?, as for myself i only hear the fan at maximum when my computer starts, no more.
ofcource the dpc latency could use and overlook again

I still can't find a better bios then 004 so far and i can't understand why they don't use 004 as startpoint and modifing that version to support the santa rosa features.

 

I've had my second "total system freeze" with the Z15N015 last night within the last three weeks of use. I've gone back to Z15N011 as I "prefer" the consistent massive latency over random system freezes...

I thought I was one of the lucky ones too, but not anymore. This echos a recent post by NinaMaya.

Right now I would trust a D[H]ell machine more than Zepto as these bios problems would probably affect almost all 6625WD machines out there since although the hardware build is unpredicatable the bios is always the common predictable factor - either the flash programming passed or failed - period. Therefore a buggy bios on some machines would equate to buggy bios on all machines of that model which then equates to buggy machines of that model for all machines.

A Zepto representive will now give the statement that this is based on totally unfounded logic and that only a few machines are "buggy". Yes, right, I believe you completely...

 

We might be making history.

Sample news report : Zepto downfall, inevitable result of pissed off community.

 

Im also full in on a BIOS that has a possibility to change fan speeds (or kick-in temps). I have nothing against fans running full when Im gaming as I use a headset.

 

Well that must be the case, since I haven't seen much of the problems you guys are facing. In fact, I have now played many hours of TF2 without a single hitch and the laptop has been running non-stop for the last week without any problems.

Manual fan control would be a nice touch though, especially if it's controllable with something like SpeedFan

 

will manually changing the gpu bios to a newer version provided by nvidia have any effect on the stuttering in your opinion?

zepto's version of 8600m gt 512mb bios is 60.84.41.00.16

nvidia's version of 8600m gt 512mb bios is 60.84.62.00.29

 

I don't think it is possible with these machines. I've tried to read it out of the system using nibitor and get garbage. I don't want to try just in case it is tied to the main system board bios as is the case with many notebooks.

 

Hi,
yesterday i flashed my bios into the 004 version. After that, everything seems to be working better (before there was 011 i quess). But then my problems began. First of all i note that standby doesnt work. The laptop dont wake up after standby. Idle state dont work either because the booting-procedure dont end.

But the most annoying fact is that the fan dont stop working. Directly after the flashing the fan worked optimal, but after some reboots it changed. I dont know why, but now the fan is continuous running.

Can anyone help me?

and sorry for my bad english

 

If my memory is correct, BIOS 004 had problems reading the temperatures correctly. You may find it will work OK after restarting or hibernate / resume.

John

 

I say upgrade to 008, atleast I have much lower temps in 008 than 004

 

Mmmh, i have 32.0° Core Temp (RM Clock), this isn´t really much ^^. When does the fan stop? 20°C? so i´ve to wait for wintertime.

What do you mean with this? I restarted several times and either the Fan nor the hibernate/resume work correctly.

 

If you have tried a few times already without success then I think the temperatures don't want to reset. There are DTS settings somewhere in the BIOS (under the CPU options) but I don't know enough to be able to advise on what to try changing. The temperature / fan problem got fixed in the more recent BIOS versions.

John

 

@John, I'll have to disagree on "The temperature / fan problem got fixed in the more recent BIOS versions". Granted it's better in 015 than in 004 and 008 but it is still very erratic. Constantly in Vista (with 015) I have to do a standby+resume cycle just to "reset the stuck-on fan" when the CPU is way below 35C.

This is a terrible BIOS implementation of note and Zepto are keeping very quiet again on any possible fixes. This begs the question, are they silently moving on?

 

OK. I stand corrected regarding BIOS 015 and temperature / fan problems. I was extrapolating from my 6024W where this BIOS has had none of those problems.

Yes, our Zepto forum members have been unusually quiet recently.

John

 

well, they were quite quiet before 015 was released.
What's disappointing is that fan control in 012 was satisfactory, and worsened significantly in 015. Mine also seems to fail rebooting from standby on most occasions, and continues to stall on bootup on occasion (3 times in a row yesterday, not happy about that). Not good performance - I think (altough in an unsystematic, non scientifically proven way) that this BIOS revision may have decreased my stability.

 

I thought 012 fan was quite nice... 015 definitely felt like a hard coded temperature turn on/off job.

 

I was happy with it, but didn't think to backup the BIOS (not sure how to be honest, since the update program did not offer an opportunity to). I certainly prefer the improved DPC latency in 015 (although it could be better), but it feels like one step forwards, one step back.

 

You could request Rene to repost 012 onto the Zepto FTP site.

John

 

when I said "I was happy with it" I was referring to the fan control - I'm not sure that I want to return to it since the improved DPC latency is important to me, working with audio a lot (and aiming for low latencies there). I will consider it.
It might be a good idea to post it, in so far as those less interested in latency than fan control would then have a better option, but I presume their was some reason behind the decision made at Zepto not to publish it at the time (latency, perhaps).

 

I think Rene actually said that the reason why they dont post all the versions are cause the improvments was so small (not thinking about fan) so it was no point for everyone to upgrade just for those small improvments

 

more like there's no revisions..

 

I too would hope that 012 would be put to the ftp server 'cause it worked much more better for me than the 015.

 

The current fan behaviour is really beyond stupid.

In battery mode, the fan is ALWAYS on. The CPU is now at 31°. How much cooler is ist supposed to get? Frozen?

I have the slight suspicion that the BIOS "programmers" don't even know how to read the CPU temperature and control the fan by CPU load. Which they also can't measure properly (using RMClock with HLT enabled to make that annoying CPU whine go away, so the BIOS is as stupid as windows in detecting the REAL CPU load.)
So which whine to go with: fan whine or cpu whine? Do I only have the choice between them both?
Now, I'm almost sure about this:
The Zepto fan isn't controlled by CPU temperature, it's controlled by CPU load.
That's why they're so much problems with this issue.
What do you say to this?

 

If it is this way, Zepto cant probably control it as its a feature of the CPU, wich I highly doubt (a CPU without temp readers? I dont think so)

 

The CPU itself has temp readers of course. But somehow I doubt that the BIOS fan control makes use of it or that the BIOS programmers don't know how to read it...

I once worked on a photoshop image and every time I used a special brush, the fan went on IMMEDIATELY after holding down the button. A CPU can't get hotter that fast. It also immediately stopped after releasing the button.
Those are the moments which make me think about what actually controls the fan.

So where's the problem? Can't the temp be read out from the BIOS? Don't they have a proper SDK for it all? Is my T9300 not supported properly?

 

@NinaMaya, actually you can't read the "cpu load" from the bios AFAIK. Only thing available is the temps - which is MORE THAN ENOUGH to the damn job right! I know what you mean about the instant-on fan control when you do something to spike up the load. Temp == Load, basically. So it's just the crap algorithm (if you can even call it that!) in the bios that's causing all this nonsense. Most notebooks (like 99%) have a lot more "intelligent" temperature control systems from what I've seen.

Btw, the load displayed in the CPU monitor in windows 2000,XP,Vista is 100% accurate. I'm not one to say many good things about the NT OSes (esp Vista - ugh the pain), but from a power-user's view, it's spot on.

The chances of Zepto making available a bios that fixes everything is becoming more remote by the day...

PS: Is it SO damn hard to fix even something so simple as that CDROM bug - jeeze!?!

 

Of course, the Vista CPU monitor is accurate by default, but running RMClock with "run HLT when OS is idle" causes it to display constantly 100%.

When I used my Dell Laptop there was some great software "Ik8fan".
You could define temperature ranges and fan speeds for CPU, GPU, Chipset and HD. How great was that.
Like: Go to Fan Speed 1 when CPU is > 55°. Go to Fan Speed 2 when CPU is > 65°
Go back to Speed 1 when CPU is < 60°, turn fan off when CPU is < 45°.

Okay, the fan was as loud as a vacuum cleaner, so this tool was really necessary, because also Dell couldn't manage proper fan control with the bios. You also had to run "SpeedswitchXP" to lower temperatures by dynamic CPU speed switching which wasn't enabled by default.

It would be great if there was a way to control the fans via software...