Having problems with new Sager 9260

Hi,

Got my new sager 9260 yesterday am I'm pleased with the overall look, however I am having a few problems with it at the moment.

Machine specs are: WUXGA (1900x1200)
E6700 (2.66GHz) Core2Duo,
7950GTX's (dual) in SLI,
4GB Ram (667GHz)
(1) 200GB HDD 7200rpm (SATA II)
Intel wireless pro (N-draft)
Bluetooth 2.0
(everything else standard - from XoticPC)

One of the problems I posted yesterday but I managed to sort that out (concerning a win XP Pro installation). I'll list the questions/problems I have:

(1) The left trackpad button on the machine only goes down half the amount of the right one. This makes it difficult to make click/double on icons etc. (feels like something may be jammed under there..something restricting it's movement?). Does anyone have any suggestions? Is this common?
(2) Once I installed windows XP Pro (did long format and converted to NFTS file structure) and the wireless/TMP/Bluetooth drivers (said it couldn't find webcam, so won't install it's driver. Had no problems with the install. However, I noticed everything seemed sluggish, even after a restart.
(i) For example loading times for windows to start is comparable to my software bloated single core (1.8GHz) Packard Bell. This thing should be noticably faster.
(ii) When I try to move a window around the desktop it blurs and does so slowly rather than instantly. I thought this might be a problem with the screen refresh rate so checked out the display settings. Couldn't find refresh rate, but notice I could only put the screen res to 1600x1200 (doing this would change automatically change 32bit colour to 16bit colour) and there was no 1900x1200 option. Do I need to install a 7950GTX driver as none came with the drivers CD? Is there something I'm missing here?

(3) I installed coolbits+RivaTuner but they didn't show a lot of the details about my setup. The machine was still sluggish so I did a system restore from a save that I did as soon as I installed OS. Now the OS boots up but I can't get the trackpad to work (arrow frozen on screen and can't move it about). I'll have to reinstall when I get home.

Sorry about the long message. I guess this may be an example of a bad OS install?? If anyone has any hints about the above problems I would grateful.Do I need to mess around with anything in the Setup page (F2) or alter/install anything once in windows. Couldn't find Nvidia powermizer to set performance level of processors, is there some good software I can use to get these advanced display options.

 

Have you installed the drivers in sequence as they are on the driver CD that you may have got?

What is your BIOS version?

Trance

 

Yes I did install the drivers in the order they appear on the drivers CD. However I couldn't install the driver for the Webcam or "Intel" (something or other (very first one), can't remember off the top of my head) as it said the device(s) could not be found.

As for the BIOS I'm not sure which version it is as I'm as work at the moment, so I'll have to check this when I get home, but I would hope that it would have upto date BIOS as I just received it yesterday.

Do I have to install a Sager video driver (from their website) for 7950GTX SLI cards as this wasn't on the driver CD?
Thanks

 

Just had a quick read of the User's manual. I don't remember seeing a Chipset driver, Video driver, Audio driver etc. I think I just went to the custom install for optional devices?? I'll try and find the full install driver option when I get home. Might explain why it was being very sluggish, and had no 1900x1200 option in displays.

 

That is very weird. Check out the Sager site as they have lots of drivers there under "Support." Some newer than those the computers ship with afaict.

 

Yeah it is weird. There were only about 5 drivers in the custom install option on the driver disc, and none of them were the most important ones like video driver, audio etc. Just had Intel wireless, Bluetooth, TPM, RAID driver and Webcam. I've seen the ones on the sager site and will probably use those to make sure everything is upto date, but I'll check the disc first and see if they are hidden in another option. Thanks for the help.

 

look at the Device Manager (inside of System Properties).

whichever device that has a question (?) or (!) needs to have its drivers installed/updated.

Go to:
http://64.208.175.44/pages/notebooks/download.cfm?ProductType=9260
http://pro-star.com/index.cfm?mainpage=download&modelno=9191/D9C-D901C
http://www.eurocom.com/support/drivers/d900c_drivers.htm

 

Hi, I sorted it out in the end. The drivers CD had two different options for installing drivers: (1) All the drivers you need to install for your laptop (chipset graphics card, audio drivers etc,), and (2) drivers for optional laptop modules (blue tooth,intel pro wireless etc.). I chose the second one thinking it had all the drivers in it and was a custom (choose what you what) install option. No wonder the computer was sluggish and I didn't get an option for the max screen resolution. I'm suprised it worked at all without any of the core system drivers.

Only problem I've had since then is the bluetooth module drivers would sometimes give me an error on start up. I left this for a while and got about 100 Win xp pro updates (hotfixes etc.) to install. After installing all of these fixes it requested I restart the computer. Which I did and found that the computer would keep on rebooting once it hit the windows logo (a blue error screen appears too briefly to read, but I saw something about a diskette I think. I could access the safeboot option but it would reboot before asking which account you wanted to use. No matter what I did I couldn't bypass the reboot (I know I could have stopped the auto-reboot in the setup utility, and then read the message, but I didn't).

I didn't want to really do a clean install as I had already install some programs. So I did a XP Pro SP2 repair straight from the disc (not from the recovery console). Everything seemed fine except when it was installing driver devices, then it freezed up at 34mins left to finish repair- setup. At the point it tells me three of the bluetooth drivers have not been digitally verified with the windows logo (or something) and may cause instability, and do I which to install them (these are the drivers that came on the disc and are upto date). I said no to all three (the second time around- first time I said yes, which froze the setup to the point I had to reboot). The setup finished and windows booted normally. The bluetooth module still comes on even though I didn't reinstall drivers at setup. Haven't had any other problems except a message saying something about a wireless error. Rebooted the computer and error it didn't occur again for the wireless.

What was causing the reboots, bad Bluetooth driver installs or the multitute of MS updates?? I'm holding off updating the MS updates for a while until I figure it out. Funny thing is I gave my old computer to my girlfriend so I did a clean XP install for her, I included all the MS updates on it, but no problem occurred on that machine.

Has anyone else experienced any of these problems?

 

I've seen an ad on Cnet for a program(Version Tracker Pro) that claims to keep all your drivers up to date. Is this something worth looking into or something to stay very far away from?

 

If your system is stable and is performing well... then you do not need to update drivers.

 

Thanks Gophn! Appreciate the advice!

 

I suggest you do a clean install, now properly. I know it is a pain but then you will be sure that all drivers were installed nicely.

Have fun, stay cool,

Trance