Sager NP6652 (W650SR) questions - long

Greetings everyone. Sorry, but this is going to be long.

I have some questions about the Sager NP6652 (W650SR) that I bought two years ago and since I couldn't find an NP6652 Owners Lounge, I hope you don't mind me posting here.

Here are a few of the spec's: i7-4700MQ, GeForce GT 750M, 16GB RAM, Crucial M5 240GB SSD as the primary drive with a 1TB secondary drive, Win7 Pro and a few other goodies. I spec'd out the laptop instead of buying off-the-shelf it hope that I would be buying a laptop that would last me a few years. And it probably will if I don't toss it out a window first.

This laptop has always had one problem or the other. Blue screens, unexpected reboots, USB device drop-offs, progressively slower boot-ups and eventually got Windows AppHang B1 errors to name a few.

Mostly the problems were sporadic and when it was behaving flaky, it was just easier to turn on an older PC and forget about this Sager piece-o-crap.

But times have changed & I am ready to fix what ails the paperweight. So I am trying to get a handle on this machine and set a plan of attack. And here is where I hope that you will jump in - please.

First of all I need to understand the hardware architecture. From what I have read, Sager builds their laptops on a bare-bones Clevo motherboard that Sager configures with the CPU, GPU, RAM, drives, drive controller, NIC, display and whatever. Basically a Clevo W650SR mobo becomes a Sager NP6652 laptop. Is this correct?

Does Sager also write the BIOS for their laptops? The BIOS on the laptop is dated 8/13/13 and I can't help but wonder if a BIOS update may fix the USB device dropping problem. While I read somewhere that Win7 does not support USB 3.0, it also drops off the devices connected to the USB 2.0 and eSATA/USB combo ports.

I also read that running a BIOS update can be tricky due to something called UEFI. Would someone please expand on this?

This past week out of frustration, I contacted both the Xotic PC & Sager tech supt dept's to see about getting a new BIOS. A Sager tech emailed me back and asked me to show him the BIOS. Had to scratch my head on that one. I had already told him the version installed on the laptop and was at a loss on how to show him the BIOS. What? Take pictures of it and attach them to another email? I ended up running Belarc Advisor, snipping the part that included the BIOS info and attached that to my rely. Truthfully his request did not give me a whole lot of confidence in the direction we were headed. Although, maybe there is a way that a person can display the contents and settings of a BIOS from within an OS so that they can be printed out or snipped into a file. If so, I wish the Sager tech would have told me how to do so when I requested it.

So for now, I have decided to work with Xotic PC's tech support to get the BIOS update.

I realize that most of these problems are probably OS based and may be cured by a fresh install of Win7, but I have always made sure that the BIOS is current before I do an OS installation.

In summary of this dissertation, if you good people would please consider answering my questions about the Clevo/Sager hardware relationship, who writes Sager's BIOS (I think it is Sager), the UEFI stuff and maybe your thoughts on the USB drop-off's, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks,

Scott

 

Yes, except for the 'drive controller'.

No, they replace the splash screen with their own logo. Maybe they hide or show a few bios options as well, but don't think they waver from the stock version supplied by Clevo.

Appears v1.00.05 may solve that:

USB disconnect could also simply be due to the power-saving options in Windows.

It's all UEFI these days, don't worry about that.

Make sure to update EC first and bios second (files here). Also, read/follow the instructions to the letter and it should be fine:

1. EC firmware for W650SR & W670SRQ v1.03.03 (E0303.zip)
2. System BIOS for W650SR v1.03.04 (B0304.zip)

Both are at bottom of page. Use Rufus to create bootable MS-DOS stick (MBR+Fat32) and copy the extracted .zip content to the root of the stick and you're good to go. Just to be sure; read the instructions.

 

Well sager has input on the bios development of clevo is maybe more accurate.