2013 Series 7 chronos / Ativ Book 8 15" owner's lounge (NP770Z5E / NP780Z5E / NP870Z5E / NP880Z5E)

Sorry forgot to mention, 13.5 beta.

I'm not sure, but the issue might have started coming out with those driver, or maybe it was present but hot worse. Can't remember..

 

Well try restoring old drivers and see if the problem is still there

 

Thanks Dannemand.
I went for it, before your reply, and ordered a 24" 1920x1200.
Can post the result later.

 

I know the topic of HDD swapping for SSD has come up a few times, but I just wanted to confirm that the F4 boot functionality is still intact if you follow the cloning process shown here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/samsung/702308-introducing-2013-series-7-chronos-amd-hd8870m-519.html#post9176191

 

Thank you for sharing that, jeffrok. I don't have a model with the new Samsung Recovery Solution 6 myself, but I have been trying to advice others who do, based on my experience with SRS5 and on the posts I have seen here. I notice that I "liked" stevester's post when he made it a month ago, so I must have seen it back then. But somehow it escaped my attention again

Anyways, lacking an actual system on which to explore this, I made the ultimate sacrifice: I read the manual for one of these new models! And indeed, the feature is right there on page 115.







To those who have considered creating a bootable Factory Image backup to a 32GB USB stick as a way to clone the HDD onto an SSD, I would say this sounds like a more ideal solution. This feature was made for it!

I still think the Factory Image backup (either non-bootable to an external HDD or bootable to a USB stick) is a great feature, because it allows you to backup and restore your Factory Windows installation in a simple way -- something that was much more convoluted on previous models. And the bootable USB stick backup is a way to save your Windows 8 installation for lack of a Win8 DVD.

Now, can any of you owners of these machines tell me if SRS6 has a way to backup just the Recovery Partitions -- as an image to an external HDD or to a bootable USB media?

The manual doesn't mention this, but it would be a great feature for owners of SSD-delivered models, who simply want to reclaim the space, but still be able to get their Recovery back some day.

Thanks again!

 

Samsung is keeping a steady stream of updates coming, except for the video card.

A 128mb update for Samsung recovery and the 840 pro ssd got a firmware update.

Sent from my GT-N7100 using Tapatalk 2

 

Still not sure if Im doing this right...setting the power individually for each..like "high performance" is the only way to choose the Ati video card?

Is there another way?

Sent from my GT-N7100 using Tapatalk 2

 

exactly this is happening to me too, i am with the 13.5 beta 3 drivers.

PLEASE HELP ! in metro only

 

exactly this is happening to me too, with 13.5 beta 3 drivers !!! help plesae !!!!

 

The problem stems from some metro apps calling the radeon card for rendering for some reason when they obviously don't need it. The driver itself is the real problem, but apps such as mail shouldn't even be touching the GPU in the first place. The solution is to take your "standard" power plan and set it to force power saving graphics for both plugged in and on battery states in windows power settings. Then just switch to the high performance plan when you plan to use the dedicated card. Works well and this will even save you battery life by forcing the dedicated card to stay off when doing standard tasks.

 

As I suspected is driver's fault. 13.5 are still in beta after all...

 

Strange, I'm not experiencing any of these problems.

 

Neither am I, the beta drivers seem to be working perfectly fine for me.

So there should be no downside to going straight from the HDD to the SSD and not using the USB stick?

 

Maybe you are not experiencing these problems because it didn't yet happen to you that ati gpu had to render modern ui. I don't have beta 13.5, but I guess that if you try to force ati rendering this glitch will come out.

 

That is what I would think, based on the manual and on what I've read here. Certainly if it was me, I would try the Disk Copy feature first. If I had a 32GB US stick lying around, I would make that as well before swapping the drives, just in case.

Then once the SSD was installed, I would wait a few days until I had verified that everything is running correctly, then probably delete the Recovery Partitions to free up space on the SSD. At least the big SAMSUNG_REC2 (Recovery data). Then I would expand my Data partition to use the empty space.

As for the 32GB USB stick, I would save an image of that bootable Factory Image backup to an external HDD (using a 3rd party imaging tool). This will free up the USB stick for other uses.

And as for the now swapped out HDD, I would put that in an external USB3 enclosure, shrink the Windows partition to its smallest possible size, and use the empty space as Data partition for general storage. I would leave the small partitions at the beginning ( Windows RE tools, ESP/EFI, MSR) and the Recovery Partitions at the end ( SAMSUNG_REC, SAMSUNG_REC2) alone, so that the entire disk layout is intact if I want to sell the PC some day. They're only about 3% of total drive space anyway. If I HAD to find a bit more space on that HDD, I would delete the Windows partition, knowing that Recovery can simply re-create that for me.

I would be careful not to mess with the partition table on that HDD, knowing that it contains the F4 link required to boot Recovery, in case I want to swap the drive back into the laptop some day.

Again, that's what I would do if I had one of these models and were swapping in an SSD. But remember I haven't actually done this myself. I am trying to provide guidance based on experience from previous models, and from information shared by owners of these new models in this and other threads.

 

Well I don't have these problems even when BF3 is paused in the background. Maybe a re-install of the drivers can help.

 

Any updates on the backlit keyboard? I have the series 7 with the silver keys. Luckily I touch type; typically I can't see the letters on the keyboard. I can see the backlight leaking from the front edge of the keys, but not illuminating the letters on the keys. I keep the lights off in my office and work with whatever light comes in the windows. The keyboard back light comes on just enough to make the letters blend into the keys. When I turn it up to the maximum or down to the minimum, it quickly reverts back to its own halfway setting, making the keys invisible from the angle I'm looking.

Any suggestions? The Samsung settings window seems to have no effect.

 

Which method would you suggest?

- Uninstall
- Reboot
- Test brightness
- If it still works, proceed to installation of beta drivers

 

I've had the exact same problem since I got the laptop. I'm not sure anyone has come up with a software fix, but you can try covering the ambient light sensor. It's a little dot next to the camera on the top border of the screen. This should make the settings stick because the light levels are not changing.

 

yes, if brightness doesn't work uninstall and reinstall intel drivers and then amd.

 

Just tried it, bug is gone while having no AMD drivers installed, but it comes up again once the 13.5 beta 3 drivers are re-installed. :\

 

What intel drivers are you on? Maybe reinstalling them might help.

 

9.17.10.2875!

 

So am I. Are some metro apps active when you have the problem or not?

 

Hi Guys,

Just purchased the NP780Z5E-SO1UB. The first thing I did was a clean install to get rid of a lot of the pre-installed bloatware I found. Now I'm looking at re-installing some programs but as I'm relatively new to this kind of thing was wondering if someone would be able to point me in the right direction of which 'updates' I should install/avoid. Any help of guidance would be much appreciated!

 

Hey everyone I'm thinking of buying the Samsung NP770Z5E-S01 Laptop, Intel Core i7, 2.4GHz, 8GB RAM, 1TB, 15.6"

I plan to be using multiple CAD programs (Maya, Photoshop, Solidworks, Rhino 4.0 etc.)
And do a bit of Gaming (Planetside 2, Simcity5, Guildwars 2)

Would this laptop be capable of doing that? or would it overheat very often?
I've read that its max ram is 12gb? or can it go to 16gb?
How is the ventilation on the system? (seems like it would overheat if it was on your lap)

Thanks

 

Even if I have only one metro app open at a time, the bug comes up..

I'm using it for Solidworks (3D drawing) and it works smoothly. It's a pleasure to design on this machine!

The maximum RAM you can have on that model is 12 GB (4 GB soldered + 8 GB that you'll have to purchase separately)

I usually use it with a cooling pad (with its fan turned off) and I have stable and decent temperature while gaming at FHD and max details on recent games. (Around 70 for the CPU, around 65 for the GPU)

 

Ahh thanks for the reply
I don't know much about this sort of stuff but will 12gbs work normally? (don't usually see systems with 4+8gbs ram)

And where does the hot air get released from(cant find any air vents)? for £1000 this seems like an awesome system to buy, I've just had a lot of issues with my current laptop and overheating.

Oh and would you recommend this laptop even if I wont change the HDD with an SSD
And if I keep the HDD should I keep the intellimemory? or is it just a waste of memory when using CAD and Gaming programs?

Thanks again and sorry for all the questions.

 

I can confirm that this is almost exactly what I have done and I'm going on 3 days now with no problems. Basically, I bought the US Best Buy 15" model. Not knowing for sure whether Disk Copy directly to SSD would work, I also created an image to a USB stick.

I first tried swapping the HDD for the SSD, rebooted and it just worked, so I never needed to use the USB stick. I then configured Win8 and then rebooted to F4 and Recovery was all there functioning properly.

I may do like you recommend and move the USB image to another HDD. Or, maybe I should just nuke it completely because (also as you suggest) I took the original HDD and moved it to an enclosure, so if any problems do arise (or if I want to sell the laptop), I can just pop that sucker back in. Have any opinions on what's the better option? Not sure how much redundancy I really need.

Also, I'd like to take the old HDD and shrink the original Windows partition. Any recommendations on the best partitioning utility for the task? I've minimal experience with Acronis Disk Director...

And what about that the SAMSUNG_REC2 (Recovery data) partition on the SSD. Use the same app to nuke it? Actually, I have a question about this - wouldn't nuking this partition on the SSD mess up the functionality of Recovery?

Next up: upgrade to 12 GB RAM!

 

Losing confidence in SW Update ...anyone know what "PX Profile List" is? This morning, SW Update updated "Recovery" and "PX Profile List". Not sure what it is, but I let SW Update download and update it. When I restarted my machine, it wasn't very responsive. Task Manager is frozen and will not update. So I shut it down and restarted it and it said there's a new version of SW Update. Task Manager is still frozen.

Used the online Samsung Support to chat ... what a waste of time ... I let the person drive my machine. They looked around a bit; not sure what they were looking for, but was unable to notice anything. They were unable to tell me what "PX Profile List" is. I figured I would ask here as I'm guessing someone here will recognize what this is.

Sounds like there might have been some bugs/glitches with the server side of SW Update.

Found that my task manager wasn't updating since the update speed was set to "Pause". Not sure if the update did this. Still want to know what "PX Profile List" is.

 

Hello!

I have Samsung 7 Chronos NP770Z5E which is of course awesome. However when I plugged HDMI it still say (under Sounds > Playback devices) that HDMI audio is not plugged in. :S

I'm curious if anybody else has similar issues? Video is working correctly.

Sorry I didn't read all the previous posts. There are just too many...

Thanks!

 

Thank you for confirming that procedure -- and again for directing my attention to that Disk Copy feature in the first place, since I had forgotten about it after stevester's original post.

Personally, I would keep an image backup of that USB stick on an external HDD, just in case. But to clarify, I didn't mean to just copy the files from that USB to an external HDD -- in that case you could have just backed up Factory Image directly to the external HDD.

I assume you made a BOOTABLE Factory Image backup on the USB stick, right? That's what makes this one so brilliant: It is a self-contained backup of your Factory Image containing its own bootable Recovery software. If you want to free up the stick, you have to make an image backup of the USB stick (using Acronis or similar) and save the resulting image somewhere. That should allow you to re-create the USB stick later: With bootable Recovery software, Factory Image and all.

As for shrinking the Windows partition on the external HDD: You can use Windows Disk Management (WindowKey-X or right-click lower-left corner). But defrag the drive first to allow maximum shrinking. OR you can use a 3rd party tool. I personally use Parted Magic LiveCD for all such things.

Personally, I might go all in and just delete that Windows partition. Of course you won't be able to boot Windows at first when you put the HDD back in; but you should be able to F4 boot Recovery and restore Windows from there.

Finally about the Recovery Partitions on the SSD: I would say keep them until you're done messing with installations and tweaking your Windows setup: Makes it easy and quick to get back something that works. Once you have Windows configured the way you like and seen it working for a few days (and assuming you NEED the space consumed by the Recovery Partitions), you can delete both SAMSUNG_REC and SAMSUNG_REC2 -- heck once either of these is gone, you won't be able to boot Recovery anyway

Hope that clarified more than it confused

 

Hi thirdeyechai. Welcome to the forum, and congrats on that awesome machine you got.

If you scan a few pages back in this thread, you'll find a discussion between pranktank and myself about bloatware, latency and how to get a leaner installation. It includes links to previous posts on the subject.

If you have trouble locating it, let me know

 

Dannemand, thanks so much for the clarification and suggestions. I think this advice will prove useful to others out there. I'll probably move forward with most of what you've listed, I'll let you know how that goes. Though, I may keep the Recover partitions on the SSD. I got the Samsung 840 Pro 500GB SSD and it's plenty of space for my purposes. I try to keep most of my stuff on a server or ext. HDD anyway.

Thanks again!

 

How do the speakers compare to those of a macbook pro?

 

I had the opportunity to compare the speakers of the NP780Z5E with the 15" Retina Macbook Pro side by side running the same video at full volume. I didn't use any sound meters, just what I could notice. The Macbook can reach slightly higher volumes, but the Chronos has less distortion of sound at higher volumes. For day to day use, I doubt you'd notice much difference - they both have superb speakers and should be suitable for most people's needs. I am completely satisfied with the speakers myself, I haven't noticed any distortion yet.

 

Can anyone else achieve the 10 hours that notebookcheck claimed to get with this laptop just with wifi browsing? I cant even get a full six hours when wifi browsing with the occasional youtube video with BLE enabled.

 

Some new updates from SW Update:



Anyone knows what "PX Profile List" is for?

 

AMD catalyst application profiles for enduro

 

Well usually u hear about systems with the RAM modules with the same amount of RAM each (2x4, 2x8, etc) because (if I'm not wrong) they can work in dual channel mode. But I'm not sure what's best, having less GB of RAM while preserving the dual channel more, or using different RAM modules losing the dual channel. Anyway I'm planning to upgrade my RAM too so if anyone could clarify, that'd b great. And of course I'm gonna google about the dual channel mode right now, too


Anyway I'm definitely uninstalling the 13.5 beta drivers from my machine. This morning I tried to sketch a simple assembly on solidworks and my laptop froze twice. Completely! I could only force it to switch off and then boot it again (and you all know how painful this operation can be lol)

I wonder why this is happening.... Hopefully I won't lose any in game performance by rolling back to the older drivers..

 

@Xcellular & Obyboby: 4 + 8 GB should run as assymetrical dual channel. Not quite as fast as 4 + 4 (or 8 + 8) but still faster than single channel. See this discussion. It includes a post by John containing his famous RAM test of different combinations.

 

You have to play around with the power settings to achieve this, but it is quite possible to get 8 hour+ battery without trying. The youtube videos do kill the battery much faster (1.5x-2x)

I have my power settings to run at full performance on AC power (AMD GPU always on full and CPU at full) And when on battery I have it set to force use the intel GPU in maximum power savings mode as well as underclock the CPU to 1.2GHz using a 50% max CPU utilization under the windows power settings (no gaming on battery power for me).

I have the 8770m NP780Z5E model with a low power SSD for reference.

 

Just reinstalled the stock AMD graphics drivers, and both solidworks and the metro apps work fine. I hope the official 3.5 will come out soon..

 

Keep in mind that BLE extends battery LIFE, but since it stops the charge at 80% the autonomy of the laptop with one charge will obviously be reduced by a 20%. This should be the major cause of the difference you experience; besides, I guess you need an accurate tweaking of the power settings to squeeze the max out of the battery

Sent from HTC HD2 with Tapatalk

 

Just a poll. Did you guys disable W8 fastboot feature?

 

I assume you are referring to Win8's Fast Startup feature (the one that turns shutdown into micro-hibernate) and not one of the numerous other Fast This and Rapid That features (that was a link).

I think Fast Startup is one of Win8's most important improvements over Win7: My wife and I both use our NP700Z3A from different accounts (it's really her PC ) and hitting the power button will sign out and micro-hibernate in a few seconds -- and resume just as quick, ready for either of us to log in.

In Win7, we had to always choose between Sleep (requires manual logout first, doesn't fully power off), Hibernate (also requires manual logout and takes forever) and full Shutdown (takes forever).

Fast Startup combines the best of each of these, so I like that feature a lot. You can always select Restart whenever Windows needs a good flush.

Some people have problems using F2 (BIOS settings) and F4 (Recovery) on their Sammies because Win8 doesn't really shut down, so the BIOS power on routine (so-called POST) never runs. In those cases you can temporarily disable Fast Startup in Win8 under Choose what closing the lid does.

 

Yes I meant fast startup. But I was wondering whether it makes that much difference also with a ssd or not. Ssd should dramatically cut boot times down, so maybe that feature is not world changing with a ssd, but at least you have a real shut down...

 

Oh, that's a good point. How long does shutdown and bootup take on your SSD, with Fast Startup enabled and disabled, respectively?

Full shut down actually takes a little time regardless of disk read/write speed, because of all the processes that have to be closed down. The same when you boot. With Fast Startup those processes are kept running (frozen, of course) and simply saved in the hibernation file.

With Fast Startup enabled, I would think shutdown and startup must be insanely fast on an SSD. It's already very fast on my older model (with an HDD and ExpressCache).

Edit: This discussion prompted me to investigate something that has puzzled me: I always assumed that Win8's new 256MB swapfile.sys was the one used for Fast Startup's micro-hibernation (though admittedly the name didn't imply that).

Indeed, it turns out I was wrong about that: It's a special swapfile used for Metro apps (swapping contiguous blocks vs individual RAM pages). Fast Startup still uses the good old (and big) hiberfil.sys. This article explains it well.

That article also explains how you don't have to accept the default size of your hibernation file (75% of RAM). If you have a lot of RAM you may not need that much and can shrink it to 50% using powercfg.exe /hibernate /size 50. That's the minimum.

Maybe you guys all knew that, I apologize in that case. But I sure didn't. I'll be curious what happens if one tries to fully hibernate and hiberfil.sys proves too small for the RAM image

 

I see, but I think that there's no real need to cut the hibernation file with 8gb of ram. 4gb of saving is not that big deal even on a not large drive. Maybe it's a different thing if you have 16gb...

Anyway, guys with SSD installed (840pro is welcome), can you please check boot times of W8 with and without fast startup (checking the time between power button press and lockscreen showing up)?
Thanks.

 

I agree for my part. But for those with a smaller SSD and 16GB RAM, they'll be saving 4GB of otherwise wasted space.

BTW, I didn't mean to derail the discussion. Sorry about that.

I would like to see that too. Plus, if you could measure shutdown time as well: How long does it take from you select Shutdown till the power LED turns off?