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

Thanks for your reply John Ratsey...

I decided to remove bitdefender and stick it out with windows defender... It actually worked! I started downloading the updates and it didnt have a problem installing it.

Does that mean i have to stick it out with windows defender for windows 8?? Will it be enough??

 

13.11b1 is out. Basically only adds support for the newesst desktop gpu's: AMD Catalyst 13.11 BETA1 (13.200.16.0 September 26) Download

 

Windows Defender is a complete AV solution in Win8, combining the original Windows Defender and the newer Microsoft Security Essentials in one, coherent package, with a lot less footprint and less intrusion than most 3rd party products. I personally use only Windows Defender -- and some common sense, of course. I believe several other members do the same. But of course no one can guarantee that a particular AV product (any product) will catch everything.

 

You will probably find that now the updates are installed then Bitdefender won't cause more problems. I suspect it was being over-vigilant and blocking an update from installing.

Windows Defender provides basic protection - I'm not sure how frequently it gets updated.

John

 

I have question about keyboard backlight, is there any possibility how to turn it on/off, for now it has its own brain, it turns off and on randomly, maybe not randomly, but when I switch it on, it turns off after few mnutes off. Is there any way, how can I control this manually?

 

My Heath Robinson fix for this problem on my X4C was to cover the sensor with a small piece of black tape so the computer always thinks it is in a dark room and keeps the backlighting on. I can still control the backlight brightness and time out using the General tab in Settings (press Fn+F1).

Others may offer more scientific solutions to the problem.

John

 

Been away from the forum for a while, working stupid hours

What's people's take on the little stickers (Energy Star, Warranty, Radeon and Core i7) on the palmrest? Leave them on or take them off?

I can't decide whether to bite the bullet and rip them off, or whether to leave them there scratching my palm occasionally!!!

 

Rip em off, and clean off residue with isopropyl alcohol. Don't know why you'd want them there.

 

It's updated every few days, sometimes even daily. And again, it now contains the previous MSE features inn the same package. I have no reason to believe that 3rd party packages are any safer.

 

Well I've been using MSE for quite some time now and it has always worked well for me, so I guess it also depends somewhat on the user, but recently I found this article which basically says they won't try as hard as the others we'll see how it goes.

 

There are sites that report on extensive tests that compare the AV programs for detecting viruses, malware tec. Bitdefender and Kaspersky etc often have 100% detection rates whereas MSE is usually below but is still considered "adequate".

 

I am curious about the following scenario. Imagine I have installed a SSD drive but after a while lost all my USB backup sticks but still have the original hard disk which I use as an external drive in an enclosure. Due to carelessness I need to reimage the SSD drive. Can I do this from the old HDD without opening the case. In other words can you reimage from the original, external HDD to the internal SSD or does that external device have to be bootable. Can programs like Acronis do this? Most of the web sites refer to imaging from the internal bootable hard disk to an external device. Can this work the other way? I hope I have made this clear.

 

The machine is available in Hong Kong now in case someone is still interested in it. It is still the second smallest laptop with quad-cpu, IPS-grade display and powerful graphics (after gigabyte). Quite sad though it took them half a year to deliver it here. The price for the below config is slightly above 11k HKD or 1,1k EUR.

Intel Core i7-3635QM (2.4~3.4GHz)
Windows 8 64Bit
15.6 touch
DDR3 8GB
hdd 1000GB
AMD Radeon HD 8870M Graphics with 2GB
2.54kg
376 x 22.8 x 249.9mm

 

@John Ratsey / Dannemand / others

Chronos battery life issue

So I've had my NP780Z5E (touchscreen series 7 with 8870 GPU) since April, and all's been good so far...

Until the last few weeks, I keep BLE turned on as I run mostly on the mains power and my battery has been showing about 0.3% wear in HWInfo64 pretty much since the beginning - 0.3% seems acceptable to me!

In the last few weeks though, that's shot up to 27.8% wear. Yesterday I ran a calibration which has brought that down to 22%. That calibration pushed my charge cycle count to 5, so it's hardly been cycled really.

22% wear still seems excessive, but I'm loathe to re-calibrate. Conversely, my old Vaio laptop which was used a lot for 5 years only shows 14% wear without any kind of BLE.

I'm now wondering whether my battery has gone funny and whether I ought to contact Samsung. What are your thoughts?

 

Well that does seem excessive, do you think it could be some kind of glitch with HWInfo? If you usually don't use the battery I guess you can't tell if you're actually getting less run time from it, but you could check how much time you get. I've had mine since the end of April and I've always had BLE on but I do use the battery more often, HWInfo reports that I have 77 Cycles and 0.8% wear but I think that percentage changes every now and then, sometimes up sometimes down, so I don't know if I should believe it.

 

@damouk: Yes, I agree with OsoAlgo, that wear is too high, particularly since you have so few charge cycles. If you enabled BLE while the laptop was plugged in and fully charged, it won't drop to 80% until you actually unplug, and I suppose keeping it at that level for weeks or months could have some negative effect on battery. But still, 22% after only 5 charge cycles...

You could try one more calibration cycle (making sure you fully charge before and after -- keep charging till the LED changes color, not just till it says 100%).

If you don't get it significantly lower, I would say Samsung definitely owes you a replacement battery. Maybe John has advice about how to best frame the argument to them.

Oh, and BTW, haven't seen you in a while; good to have you back

 

I have suggested a few times to members with no Recovery on their internal drives and no bootable factory image backup, to try and boot Recovery from the external HDD, by adding it to the Windows boot menu, as described in this post (there is a link in that post with detailed procedure). But I don't think anyone actually succeeded in doing it. Indeed, I can think of several reasons why it wouldn't work.

As we discussed before, I think you are very safe, since you already used your USB backup successfully and know it works. If you want to have another fallback that doesn't require re-installing the HDD, I would say either (A) leave full Recovery on the SSD, so that you always have it handy, or (B) make a regular (non-bootable) factory image backup to any external media, then delete only the big Recovery Data partition, as described in this post.

But I am very interested if you manage to boot Recovery on the external HDD

 

A question for those who are not facing major drop in FPS on any beta driver after 13.8 Beta 2, do you guys uninstall the intel drivers and reinstall it after every AMD driver upgrade?

 

@Damouk: I would consider that you have got a bad battery. Re-run the full calibration cycle by charging to 100%, discharging till empty (you can use the computer on battery until it stops then go into the BIOS calibration to drain until empty) then fully recharge to 100%. Unless the wear drops to less than 5% (very unlikely), I would suggest you request Samsung to replace the battery because it is defective (mention that you have run the calibration twice).

Samsung claim this ( features tab): about the battery:

and this (overview tab):

If they don't want to cooperate then you keep doing the battery calibration. Before long that will get the wear to over 30% (ie capacity to below the 70% which Samsung indicate should not be reached for up to 1500 charges. They might try claiming that 10 charges is within their "up to" range but I think you could then chase them for misleading advertising. Capture and keep a copy a copy of those web pages until the matter is satisfactorily resolved. Samsung might delete the pages now the notebook is discontinued.

Once I had got my X3B's battery up to 30% wear they replaced it without fuss. There seemed to be a batch of bad X3B batteries because several members had this problem (and presumably a lot more people who aren't forum members). However, there are very few reports of problems with the Series 7 batteries, but that doesn't means that there's the occasional bad one.

John

 

Thanks for the advice. Sad to see this otherwise great laptop now having problems after only 6 months! I will try another calibration and see if it improves and then get on the phone to Samsung if needed!!

 

Hello, I am looking to see if anyone knows of any solution to my problem. I got Windows 8.1 Preview. What a mistake. My graphics have completely been screwed up now. I had to rollback the intel 4000 driver to even see my screen/ use dual monitors. Now, I don't have the AMD switchable graphics option when i right click on the desktop. It seems that the AMD card is no longer supported at this time. I have tried the new drivers/catalyst etc but they all say my hardware is incompatible. The games I play have seen a drastic decrease in fps. Anyone knowledgeable in this current state? Thank you

 

It's not that I was feeling I didn't have adequate backups, I was simply curious to see if the old HDD had a purpose other than external storage and last resort backup. I am an I.T. teacher and love experimenting (often my downfall) but those steps you provided to make that drive bootable have convinced me that its probably easier to open the case and reinstall it as an absolute last resort. I have worked on many desktops and yet watching those you tube videos on how to open the case, I have now developed a phobia called "opensamsungnotebookcaseitus"

 

I know, it's frustrating. But glitches and bad components happen on all product lines, even with the highest end products from the most highly reputed vendors. You have an excellent machine there, but bad luck on that battery. Lets hope Samsung promptly accepts responsibility and has a fast battery replacement for you.

Got it. The procedure I suggested there (using EasyBCD to add the Recovery on the external drive to your Windows boot menu) is actually not that difficult or time consuming for someone with your experience. If I had a model with SRS6 I would try it myself right away. There is never a better time to test and experiment than when the machine is new and you can just factory restore without loosing anything

If you DO decide to give it a shot, and it doesn't work right off, I have another idea that might help: Instead of adding the external Recovery to the boot menu of your regular Windows (on the internal SSD) you could boot a Windows installation on the external HDD (changing Boot Device in BIOS) and add Recovery to that installation. That will force BIOS to map the external drive as boot device BEFORE loading the boot menu, in case Recovery doesn't want to load from an external USB drive after the internal SSD has been booted. I assume you will have to disable SecureBoot in order for this to work, possible set OS Mode Selection=UEFI & CSM OS.

All that said, of course I cannot guarantee anything, including the safety of this. OK, enough prodding

 

That's worth a try! I'll let you know how I get on.

 

So, I've just spoken to Samsung. They've immediately accepted something isn't right and have arranged to collect the laptop on Monday, take it to their service centre and return it to me in 7 days.

All looking pretty good so far! Watch this space for an update!

 

Good news: Let's hope they have a spare battery in stock. My X3B was away for about 3 weeks while they discovered that the original battery had been discontinued, asked Korea what to do and then put in the X3C battery (which I could have told them from the reports here).

John

 

According to Samsungparts.com, it's the same battery for the NP780 and NP880. Hopefully that improves the chance that it's in stock.

 

I have question, as you recommended me I´m using my notebook plug to the electricity when I have the opportunity, but it says at 98% of battery that it is fully charged, why is that so? Normally it goes to the 100% of battery charge and now just 98%.

 

Hi guys, ive got one question. When i play a game that uses for example 1200 mb ram or so. It says that im using like 55% Memory in taskmanger. How is that possible when i have 8gb RAM? because i have been noticing my computer getting slower when i play a game recently. It didnt used to do that, so maybe it is because of that. Thankyou for your help .

 

Uh oh - what the hells going on? Just reconfigured my laptop back to factory build (swapped memory back to the default, recovery to stock install etc) - reinstalled HWInfo, just to check again - now it's only showing 9.3% wear!! Still seems excessive for a 7 month old laptop and 6 charges, but maybe not excessive enough for Samsung to swap out the battery! Doing a final calibration just to check!

 

That's normal with intellimemory. It uses some of your memory as a cache to speed up application load times. You can uninstall Intellimemory it if you need the memory for other applications (or if you've put an SSD in it's a bit wasted anyway). Intellimemory is supposed to release the memory when it's being used by other applications but in my experience that's a bit hit and miss.

 

my NP880Z5E-X01AU SW Update reports a new bios P03ADH available. Is there a place to read the change log for bios updates ?

 

I presume you have left the computer plugged into the mains. In this situation the charge has to drop several per cent (evidently more than 2%) before a top-up charge is initiated.

I agree. 9.3% is too much wear for only 6 charge cycles and the fact that the wear was at over 20% suggests there is something wrong with the battery. I would still push for a replacement since it is likely that the wear will go up again at an abnormal rate.

Print out a screen dump of the battery info from HWiNFO, write on the previous wear and what you have done and put it on top of the keyboard when you send the computer off.

Samsung never issue changelogs. I wonder whether the update is to improve the Windows 8.1 compatibility. There is a way to roll back the updates but it is easier if you have saved the previous BIOS update file using the Samsung BIOS Update program (in my experience it is also safer to update using that program instead of through SW Update).

John

 

Hi,

Now that I have my laptop in a state I am happy with I think it's time to tell you all about what worked and didn't work for me and how I got past some of the problem I was having.

1) I didn't really want to pay Samsung to re-image the laptop seeing as there is nothing actually wrong with it other than not having a functioning recovery partition, so I quickly took that option off the table

2) I have tried several times to install the SRS6 recovery tool, but each time it says that it cannot find the recovery partition and refuses to continue the installation, so it looked like that wasn't an option

3) I installed EasyBCD Edit and made a new Windows boot menu option allowing me to boot into the different recovery partitions that were still present on the hard drive. I made two menu links to each of the two partitions then rebooted the computer. One of them wouldn't boot, the other booted into the Windows recovery system (not the samsung recovery system). This was a minor breakthrough. It made me realise that what the reseller of these refurbished laptops has done is actually do a fresh install of Windows 8 and installed what he sees as the minimum set of drivers and software needed (Samsung settings, intel WiDi, catalyst control, switchable graphics etc) to run all the features of the Ativ book 8.

It turns out that recovery partition is actually an image of the factory state of this new Windows 8 install with minimal set of Samsung software/drivers (but not SRS6). This links me to..

5) I unhid the recovery partition and mounted it as a drive in windows. I then installed 7-Zip which if my memory serves me allowed me to browse through the WIM file on the 11GB recovery partition. Looking through the program files / windows / system32 folder it was clear that there was no Samsung Recovery Service executable, which confirmed that this was a recovery image of the new installation, not the original factory Ativ Book 8. Therefore, I decided to abandon trying to get the recovery / F4 button back and move on to try and create my own clone / backup of the hard drive and migrate to the SSD drive.

4) I didn't bother with the GRUB bootloader tip. After discovering the recovery partition was not in fact the factory one there was pretty much no benefit in attempting it.

Browsing around the internet a bit, people suggested Paragon or Acronis TrueImage. Both of these seemed capable of dealing with Windows 8, proper SSD alignment and GPT partition tables / EFI. However, being commercial products I didn't want to shell out without knowing they would work. Doing a bit more research I fund a piece of software that had a trial licence as well as a freeware version called Macrium Reflect. With this I was able to image the whole hard drive (or specific partitions) whilst in Windows 8. With this I can also create a bootable USB with Macrium reflect's bootable environment. This can be used to clone/backup or recover when you cant boot into a Windows environment

The backup image that I created of the Ativ's 1TB drive condensed down to about 16GB of image files on a removeable USB drive. Needles to say the reflect software only copies the used data portion of partitions and the GPT partition information etc.

After installing the SSD drive in the laptop I put the Macrium reflect bootable usb in and booted from that (You may need to change some BIOS/UEFI options but this has been documented many times elsewhere on the forum). From there I could restore the image onto the new SSD drive and even resize or selectively restore only certain partitions. Once this was done I had a complete copy of my windows 8, including the recovery partitions on my super fast new SSD. After running Windows Experience Index tests again, this tells windows to turn on TRIM support and removes any defragmentation schedules.

I also checked with various tools to ensure that the sector alignment was correct so as not to slow down and put unnecessary wear on the SSD. It seems windows 8 already uses 4K sectors and I think it might use 512e compatibility on older drives

So there you have it, I don't have a working "F4 recovery" option, or an original samsung recovery partition. But I do have a new method of backing up / restoring (without having to do a full block by block copy), a superfast SSD which now boots to the metro tile screen in 12 seconds and an awesome super fast laptop.

Thanks to Dannemand and others that gave me the tips that helped diagnose the problem and spurn me on to find other solutions. I hope this may help others trying to migrate or backup non-factory Windows 8 images on the Samsung Ativ book or other UEFI / GPT based laptop

 

Still having switchable graphics issues. Different drivers don't seem to help. Whenever I alt-tab in most games, aside from a very select few, the laptop reverts to the intel card, and then refuses to use the AMD one again until I restart the laptop entirely. I've gone into the catalyst control settings to force it to use the AMD card, but it doesn't do anything.

 

@thetron: Thank you for the update. It sounds like the former owner badly messed up that Recovery. Very possibly, he confused Windows Recovery Tools (which uses the 499MB Window RE Tools partition at the beginning of the disk) with Samsung Recovery Solution (which uses the SAMSUNG_REC and SAMSUNG_REC2 partitions at the end of the disk). They are completely independent tools.

In light of the damage done to the Samsung Recovery partitions, I agree, there is little chance of getting Samsung Recovery working again, so better just move on -- as you did. Good job getting it all working. And thanks again for sharing it here.

 

Thanks John, that's a great idea. I've done that. FWIW, before packaging it up to go, I tried 1 more calibration (if they're hopefully changing the battery anyway, I figured it wouldn't matter doing another calibration!!), jumped up slightly to 10.7% worn now, and 1 more cycle added to the mix - still less than 10 cycles, though - nowhere near the 70% after 1500 charges they suggest it will last in their documentation.

I've tried to think what could have caused the reported wear to drop so dramatically from the 22% it was previously on after a calibration - the only thing I did was hit the little battery disconnect button before swapping the memory back to the original RAM. Anyone have any experience of whether that little switch helps during a battery recalibration? Might be worth a try - it went from 70000mWh to 81000mWh available after that simple button press!

BTW no courier showed up today - but they did say Monday or Tuesday, so here's hoping it's tomorrow. It's going to be a struggle to survive a week or two without this laptop now anyway!!

 

how do i know which RAM i can exchange for the 4gb one that can replaced. Theres only 8 gb ones right? which type does it have to be, and do i need to watch out for anything?

 

Aim for DDR3 PC3-12800 1600mhz to guarantee compatibility.

 

Small correction: That should read 1600 MHz (but PC3 12800 means the same).

John

 

Talking about battery... I got curious and wanted to check the wear on mine... After 5 monhts it's 25.6%!!!!!!!!!!!!! What can I do?? Something must be wrong!!
The cycle count is 144...

 

Do the battery calibration routine: First fully charge the battery, then run it down (you can use the computer on battery until it runs out of power, then go into the BIOS and run the calibration (which fully drains the battery), then fully charge, then recheck the wear.

BTW, which model? Do you have the Battery Life Extender facility in Settings and do you use it.

John

 

Same goes for the logo on the front - though I decided to keep the letters S, U and N for +1 brightness.

 

Thank you John

Yes I'm always using BLE on my NP770Z5E, I'm seldom charging to 100%, always keep it at 80%. I'm playing games almost every day, sometimes I forget to plug it in and I just do it when it reaches 10%. Most of the time I'm on AC power anyway, since I need max performance to play. I don't know if the way I'm managing the battery is killing it.. lol

I'll try the battery calibration asap anyway and let you guys know.

 

Regular draining down to 10% will add to the wear. 144 cycles is quite a lot for 5 months - almost one per day. Nonetheless, it shouldn't be wearing that badly.

The less you use the battery then the better it will last. see what the calibration does to the wear but you should be planning to get Samsung to replace it before too long. In preparation for that make a PDF of the Samsung web pages for your specific model (should be something like this) where they claim 70% of original capacity for up to 1500 recharges. That is many years of use for most people but I doubt that Samsung will entertain claims for replacement batteries once the normal one year warranty period has expired.

John

 

Ok so here's the situation of my battery after running battery calibration:



It went down, but it's still quite a lot.. Isn't it?

The thing is, I'm currently living overseas (Australia) and my laptop comes from Italy. What's my best shot, apply for a service now or wait till Christmas time since I'm probably going home? I'm going to be still covered by the warranty, so..

Btw I'm charging my laptop more than once a day - that's mainly because I play a lot with it, so the battery drains fast. My concern is always whether I should unplug it when it's fully charged, or leave it plugged in since I'm going to use plenty of power to run the game..

 

As a rule of thumb I always try to avoid playing intensive games while on battery, I usually plug the laptop even if the battery is still not under 20-15%

 

I just received my Ativ Book 8 (i7, 8870M, touch). I've been sorely disappointed.

The first impression was great - gorgeous device, solid build. But, the screen has a sparkly effect, similar to matte (or dirty) screens. I read about it before, but I didn't expect it to be this bad. Worse yet, the screen wobbles like crazy - even while I'm typing.

Is this normal, or did I get a defective unit?

EDIT: I've also discovered a tiny dark spot in the lower left of the screen. Doesn't seem to be a dead pixel; some dust perhaps. As fond as I was of the machine on paper, I'll probably return it.

 

1. How long will you be in Italy? turn-around time at the service agent could be more than two weeks during the holiday season. So I would try Australia first and if they give problems then you have Italy as a back-up.

2. There is no need to unplug the PSU once the battery is charged. Once the battery is at 100% (or 80% if BLE is enabled) then charging stops until either the charge level naturally decays by several per cent or you disconnect / reconnect the PSU. Gaming on battery, with its high rate of power drain, will give increased wear compared to light usage on battery. I now understand how you have accumulated so many charge cycles. If you leave the PSU plugged in whether possible the wear and charge cycles will be much reduced - look after the replacement battery.

John

 

Im trying to open my ativ book 6, but i just cant pass the hinge part, I dont know how to open that part, it seems impossible without breaking it, anyone here have some tips to open this part, or a video showing it?