9262 W7-64 slowness

Howdy all!

I've recently installed Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit on my Sager 9262 that I bought through PowerNotebook a year and a half or so ago. The install went as smooth as could be and everything seemed to be going great until I fired up a couple of games.

WoW seems to be having slow framerate issues that feels like it's a video issue at first, but after playing around with it a bit (and after lowering my resolution/video options by quite a bit with no effect) I'm leaning towards it feeling like an I/O issue. With that, I went looking through the device manager and sure enough, under other devices it has "Mass Storage Controller" listed. I've been searching this forum (and the web in general) for a solution, but with no luck.

I've searched Intel's site under both the 965 desktop and 965 notebook chipset sections looking for drivers and the only one that I can find that looks at all similar is the Intel Matrix Drive Utility but that won't install saying that it's either not the right version or doesn't work on this OS.

Now, I'm still running the original BIOS and firmware versions that this laptop shipped with back in January of '08, so I'm not sure if that's a problem. I'd have to restart to get the firmware version, but dxdiag says that my BIOS is: 900C 1.00.10S LS2.

Info that I don't think have anything to do with this, but might:
Sager 9262
C2D CPU E6850 - dual 3Ghz
4GB RAM
single 8800M GTX - 186.81 from nvidia
Windows 7 Home Premium 64

So...I have a couple of issues. I'd like to get the unknown device (Mass Storage Controller) identified and its driver installed. But more importantly I'd like to solve my in game performance issues (I'm aslo experiencing a similar problem with Heroes of Newerth beta).

Thanks!

 

The Mass Storage Controller could also be your card reader.

as for your games, hunt around for a good driver that people have good results with
- make sure powermizer is disabled
- make sure your system is set to max performance

 

As far as we have found, the card reader is the only device that doesn't have Windows 7 support. I would try updating your drivers using the latest Vista 64-bit drivers at Sager's site for the NP9262, and you may want to try using the NP9280 graphics driver (for some reason, nVIDIA's mobile drivers just don't always seem to play nice, so it's good to rule them out as a problem by testing Sager's drivers). If you need the card-reader, Sager tells us that the NP5797 card reader driver SHOULD be compatible.

 

Thanks for the info. The mass storage controller was indeed my SD card reader. I installed those drivers and it's working just fine.

I also upgraded to the latest beta nVidia drivers from nVidia (195.39) themselves which has the powermizer option built in, so I was able to turn that off. I already had the machine's power saving setting set to high performance.

Would you still recommend I try the video card drivers from the N9280? Are they indeed different from the drivers downloaded from nVidia's site? I'm still experiencing performance issues while gaming (although I haven't had any *really* horrible frame rates like I was getting on the old drivers...but I'm also forcing the fan to full when I game now).

 

the GPUs are the same, then you can use other drivers.

try out the 9280's Nvidia drivers to see how it goes.

 

no luck with the drivers from the 9280 from sager's site. The 195.39 drivers from nVidia are a bit better, but I still have issues with them. Not as bad as before...but still having problems.

 

So I've gone through all of the drivers for both the 9262 and the 9280 and tried them all without any luck. I've also tried Left4Dead since then and it behaves very very poorly. It's insanely laggy and choppy.

Another interesting tidbit is that it seems to happen much more severely when I'm playing online. I tried L4D locally and I still had *some* issues playing single player mode, but it was playable. When I played online however, it was insanely laggy and choppy. Completely unplayable.

That suggests to me that it might have something to do with the NIC, so I tried it with the both the network cable NIC as well as the wireless NIC. Same issue with both.

D'oh! Any other ideas?

 

from the new drivers 187.62 and 187.66 in Win7 x64 are the best for games and i have test all newer version in my D901C donwload them from laptopvideo2go.com

 

no problems here with win7 ultimate x64 and 195.39 drivers. frame rates feel like they're up actually.

It might seem like two stupid questions to you but:

1) are you sure there are no driver conflicts? i know i keep insisting on this but try a full driver sweep and re-install the drivers.

2) you haven't dropped the machine or done something that could cause hardware issues since you installed 7 right?

 

I actually did a full driver update yesterday. Used as many of the W7 ones from the 9280 as applied to mine, and the rest I used Vista 94 ones from the 9262. The only difference I've noticed is a few more items in my systray that I didn't have there before (audio, touchpad, hotkey setup, etc.).

From my testing, changing video settings don't seem to noticeably affect my lag/choppiness...so I'm really thinking it's something besides the video.

I haven't dropped the laptop (or done anything else to it that my cause issue). Not only that but I've swapped back to my last hard drive (that still has my W7RC 32 bit install on it and am not experiencing any of these problems...everything is nice and smooth).

BAH!

 

So I tried installing Vista to see if I would indeed have no problems...but it seems to be having lag now as well. :/ Not sure what's going on. Has everyone else upgraded their BIOS/firmware? I haven't touched mine from when I bought it.

 

Maybe your video card is just going bad? What you should do is download GPU-z, then start a game, and in mid-game, minimize it (or just run it in windowed mode) then check GPU-z and see what the clock speeds of your video card are. If your clock speeds are normal, then it may be something else. If they're lower than they should be, (like when GTA4 crashes my video card it tends to slice the max clock speed of my GPU to something like 383 core, 241 memory and 737 shader) and the problem won't be fixed unless I do a restart.

Check to see what your clock speeds are during games so we can know if to rule out your video card for sure

 

Also clean out the fans, when GPU starts to overheat the GPU downclocks.... that was my experience one time...

 

As part of this process I did take off the back panel and blow out all of the fans. I'm actually surprised at how little dust there was accumulated in there.

I'll go out and grab GPU-z to check, but I've been watching the temps for the video card (as well as the CPU) and they haven't spiked during games. In fact, the temps go down while I'm gaming because I swap the fan control from automatic to full while I'm gaming (well, I have been since I've been having these problems in order to rule that out).

 

Okay...I have GPUz up and running now. I'll verify my clock speed the next time I get a chance to fire up a game.

Right now (just sitting at desktop) I'm sitting at
GPU Core Clock: 500MHz
GPU Memory Clock: 799MHz
GPU Shader Clock: 1250MHz
GPU Temperature: 57C
Memory Used: 109MB

I'll report back later when I get results during gaming.

Thanks for the help all. This is really driving me crazy!

 

For the win 7 x64 do you have any problems with the audio drivers? My drivers list as:

HIGH definnition audio device.

The sound is crackley though when playing games, using skype and the such.

 

I rarely use the built in sound card when gaming since I'm always using my headset which has a USB sound card with it. So I haven't noticed that problem much (although I have noticed some crackling...which may have been when I was testing without the USB sound card).

So I watched the values in GPUz while gaming and everything stayed the same except that the GPU temp dropped to 55C (because I turned the fans on full). Memory used fluctuated, usually in the 150MB-450MB range.

 

Wahoo!

So I ended up getting a hold of the latest BIOS and Firmware (13N and 22). I was still at the versions that it shipped with (10 something on both of them).

That fixed my gaming performance issues! The games that were choppy in multiplayer before the update are nice and smooth and high res and settings!! Wahoo!

Unfortunately I'm getting the crackley/staticy/jumpy sound when playing some games and using ventrilo. So now I need to try to track down that problem.

Thanks all for your help! I think I'll go look for other bperry threads since it sounds like that's what I'm experiencing as well.

 

Kenny.
Have you resolved the audio issue? I am thinking of upgrading to Windows 7 in a week or so.

It would be nice to have an update of your experience with W7 on the 9262

 

I found that that between fan and heatsink shroud, dust bunnys build up so much that you may not be able to blow it out. I would remove the GPU fan and you will be surprised what you would find there.

 

I haven't had any luck with the audio. It hasn't been as bad for me as for some others that I've seen.

I am also still seen an issue occasionally that will affect my gaming performance, but only happens after I've resumed after sleeping the laptop. Doesn't happen all the time (or even most of the time). It's annoying, but so far I've been able to just deal with it.

 

I bought a copy of Windows 7 and I was going to upgrade from xp (I really can't stand vista). Would you say its a downgrade? I don't really see the point after hearing about all the horror stories.

 

That's a tough one. I've definitely had a few weird issues (biggest one I'm having right now is that when I sleep my laptop from work and wake it up at home I'm seeing many of the performance issues I was describing above...but a machine restart fixes them...dunno).

I've been tempted to go back to XP/Vista myself...unfortunately I've used W7 too much and it would be really hard for me to go back.