Samsung R20 notebook (14" widescreen)

Try stopping the automatic restart on BSOD: My Computer > Properties > Advanced > Startup and Recovery and then deselect automatic restart.

It could be caused by RAM or by various hardware and driver issues. If you are running RMClock then increase the voltages.

Take a note of the code you get and then try Googling it.

John

 

I have recently noticed that if i bring my laptop out of sleep.
Within the next hour the windows audio service stops. Vista gives me an error message about a host process has stopped but others no further action.
vista is configured to restart the service if it fails.
When it restarts the Fn volume keys no longer work unless i reboot the system.

I have only noticed this since upgrading to SP1 but this may have been happening before i can not be certain.

My questions are has any one else had this issue, does any one known what service/process controls the Fn volume key combo as the brightness combo still works. Any ides what could be the cause.

ps running 4GB of ram
bios 15SH

 

Hi Guys. I have a r20f001/suk. I have removed vista and i'm running xp pro. for some reason my memory card reader doesnt seem to work. I have a Stick Duo with adapter and when i insert it, it clicks in but nothing happens. Any ideas?
Also my laptop came with the bluetooth software but it doesn't have bluetooth my model im sure. Am I wrong?

Thanks
Mike

 

Did the MS Duo work when you were running Vista?

What's the card reader hardware? (I see that I didn't include this in the spec of my R20 review). Does it list OK in Device Manager (it's under the IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers on my X60plus)?

What capacity is your MS Duo card? There's a patch for XP to work with SD cards of greater than 4GB. This patch might also work with MS Duo.

John

 

I did not try it with vista as i changed it when i got it. There is no mention of the ms reader in the device manager. My card is just a 256mb.

 

1. Does Device Manager show any unconfigured devices? Is the media card reader there in some form (eg SD card).

2. The R20 specs mention Memory Stick and Memory Stick Pro but not Memory Stick Duo. Do you have good reason that the Duo format is supported? I hope some other R20 owner can pass by and contribute.

John

 

hi,

my r20 got pretty loud recently, so I checked with CPU-Clock and the temp is around 75-80°. Any ideas what I can do? This is pretty annoying after just one year..

thanks,
poma

 

I would suspect that you've got a year's worth of dust and fluff that's been sucked in through the memory slots and is now clogging the cooling system. Do you have access to a household vacuum cleaner with a nozzle? If so, try and suck the muck out via (a) opening up the memory card cover and sucking towards the back of the computer and (b) through the fan exhaust outlet on the side of the computer. You might also be able to shift muck off the heat sink with a suitable thin blunt instrument.

Also, if you haven't tried to undervolt the CPU, now is the time. Even if you clean the heatsink then undervolting will further reduce the fan activity and therefore the speed at will it will suck up the next lot of dust. There's a good undervolting guide in the hardware forum. I was able to undervolt the T2250 in the R20 I reviewed down to 0.95V at 13x (ie full speed). At that voltage the CPU temperature was stable at 60C under full load.

Also, if you are inclined to use your R20 on a soft surface, don't. That is the source of the fluff.

John

 

There is no sign of any sort of memory stick device in the device manager no. I assume that duo is compatable as its a popular format and i just thought that when used with the larger adaper to make it standard stick size it would work as a standard stick would.

 

I can't help you any further with this one at the moment.

I suggest that you ask Samsung Technical support via email (link on an FAQ page). I can think of two questions (i) where does the memory stick reader show up in the list of devices in Device Manager and (ii) does the reader support MS Duo (with / without an adaptor).

Let us know what they reply.

John

 

Hey forum,
I have kind of simmilar problem with my ms pro duo. I do remeber that it workes with the card reader but after updating vista to sp1, it doesn't work anymore, maybe it lacks on other samung updates too. Somehow strange. It is just one with 512mb from my cellphone. If I put into the cell and connect it via usb it is detected. In a other cardreader it works. Really strange. SD cards just work fine. Maybe one of samsung's updates killed the support?!
By the way, I was trying to run Sidux on the R20 with a SD card which finally ended up pretty fast with frustration because of the horrible samsung bios. Would be kind of great booting your system from sd card which is in your card reader! And again not supported in bios (samsung is so poor!). If I put a bootable usb stick with sidux in it - it works great. No HDD using makes the batterylifetime much longer and the system really quiet. My conclusion is that the HDD produces the biggest amount of heat in this NB not the onboard gpu.
If somebody would try using an ms pro duo in his card reader and post his expiriences would be great. (I have 15sh)
Thanx!
Chris

 

John,

I tried to do clean with the vacuum cleaner. It seemed to stabilize on lower temp shortly but I am having still the same problem. The fan is being loud on my side, even though the backlit is of and I am not working on the r20. rmclock tells me 86 degrees, and I have always a plastic cover under it so the air can circulate.

Really annoying for a 1 year old laptop

Thanks for your help anyway, you have been always great in this forum!

Poma

 

I'll have to do some investigations into how to get at the R20's cooling system.

John

 

Remember my 2gig cap memory problem? I think the answer was that my R20 couldn't handle anything over 2 gigs. I swapped out the 2 gig module and put it into my friend's Mac without a single issue. I then put in two 1GIG Kingstons and it's running fine. So without having to spend more $$$$ on non-Kingston RAM I think it might be safe to say that the R20 doesn't like anything over 2Gigs inside of itself.

With the 1+1 Gig modules there have been no crashes and no sudden resets! And the Mac user (who is using 2+1gigs) is also having no issues at all.

 

I don't think it is that simple as having a 2GB limit. I have tested the R20 with 2.5GB. I do recall one of the several RAM configurations I tried depended on have the right module in the right slot - the first time I tried it wouldn't boot, then I swapped the two modules and it booted OK.

John

 

Regarding my RAM problem (2GB Crucial RAM didn't work on my R20, but worked fine on my brother's laptop) - I have now given that RAM to my brother, and I'm looking to buy more for myself. I would prefer to stay away from Crucial this time, which one of these is best?

http://www.dabs.com/productview.asp...gationKey=11150,4294959239,43190000,385080000
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/140717
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/123910 (x2)
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/142013

Cheers!

 

OCZ seems to be quite good, but maybe the R20 is happier with average RAM, not the "best". You can check back though this thread to see some of the brands that have upset the R20. I can't remember if anyone had problems with 2 x 1GB.

Also look at the RAM at play.com. Prices include delivery.

John

 

I had problems with 2x1GB - but I don't know if it was the size of the modules or the modules themselves. I'm thinking the latter because I tried 1x1GB and 1x512MB and it still didn't work.

http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/4-/35119...PC5300-DDR2-667Mhz-200pin-SODIMM/Product.html

I'll try buying 2 of those and see if they work. If they don't, I can always put them in my old laptop which my mum now uses.

 

Hi Guys,

my screen has all of a sudden gone dark, i can still make out the screen, but it's as if the back light has gone?

i've also read something about an inverter.

the guys in the repair shop say £130 to fix, but i don't know what the problem is...

do you have any idea?

Thanks for a useful forum on the R20.

 

Your description indicates that the backlight has gone off. This is a baby fluorescent tube which is powered by the inverter. The inverter is the most likely problem although there's a small chance it could be the tube or the wiring.

Did you contact the official Samsung repair people? I presume that you has passed the one year warranty validity.

John

 

You don't want to put a vacuum cleaner near your laptop, you want compressed air.

 

Hi John,

yes unfortunately my warranty was 1 week past the year mark!

i've taken it to a friend who repaired it by replacing the inverter, but also there was a short on the mobo, this has been fixed also and all seems to be well now.

thanks for your great forum posts.

 

I'm happy to know that you managed to get it fixed.

John

 

I leant on my laptop while trying to reach something and have managed to crack the screen. How costly is this going to be?

 

equiry how to dis assamble the R20 laptop.
Hi everyone, i have my R20 for more than one year. i have a petty good experience on this excellent machine. Recently, the cpu fan just keep running and quite noise and the exhaust exit is vy dusty. it's quite bother me. i think most of the ppl who has R20 had the same experience as mine. So i decided to dis assamble my laptop and clean up by using Dust Away( Co2 Compressed Air). unfortunately, I coouldn't manage to open the back cover after i disassambled all the parts(CD-ROM, memory, harddisk, and all the screws). It would be great that if anyone in this forum have the r20 disassamble experience, they can share how to dissamble my r20 by step by step. PS. by pictures would be great as well

Thank you so much.

 

I'm not sure, but I think you may have to take off/disassemble the display frame cover and then the hinges to get into the chassis - which would be a pretty stupid design, but I just don't see how you would get off the part that covers the hinges otherwise. Don't know it it'll help but you can find exploded views of the whole thing here.
If you find an easier/better way to get in there please let us know...

 

Yep. That's the way you need to go. There's lot of disassemble to do. See my reply in this thread.

 

My R20 runs at obscenely high temperatures. I bought it last year in August and even then it ran somewhat hot. I never thought to run tests on it or anything but this morning I finally got around to checking things out. I ran initial tests and my max core temperature was 89C. I looked around the forums and found the undervolting guide which I followed and after lowering the power usage my core temperature is still around 88-94C.

 

I want a bigger HD in my R20. Will SATA-II drives work (if not, do they have jumpers to force them into SATA-I mode like some 3.5" drives?) or does it have to be a SATA-I model?

 

Bump. Nobody knows?

In other news, 8.10 seems to be the first Ubuntu release that works "out of the box" on the R20. The integrated graphics are now supported so you don't need to do an alternate install and shoehorn the ATI drivers into the system on the command line, the mystery kernel freezing issue has been fixed, both sound AND brightness keyboard controls work, it doesn't even get confused anymore if you boot up with wireless disabled and then turn it on later. Recommended!

 

That is surprisingly hot. Is that under full load or idle? Check on the monitoring page of RMClock that your lower voltages are actually working.

In my experience SATA-II is backwards compatible. The hardware negotiates the fastest speed supported by both sides of the interface. However, there is a small chance that the ATI chipset is not as compatible as Intel in this respect (I've connected a SATA-II HDD to the Intel 945 chipset without any problems).

John

 

I have it running right now and even with the new voltages, my core temperature is around 78. It's at about 50% load right now.

 

I wonder if it is time to clean out the cooling system.

You may be able to shift some of the muck by sucking at the exhaust grill with a vacuum cleaner of pulling out any fluff with a paper clip reshaped to make a hook. However, the best fix is to get inside. There are some clues about getting inside in this thread.

John

 

Thanks, I'll get a dirt devil on it asap and I'll try and take the thing apart next weekend and run tests again after.

 

There's some more info and photos in this thread which relates to the Samsung X20, but clogged cooling systems will all look very similar.

John

 

Anyone able to get the R20 to boot from USB? If you are what BIOS are you using?

 

You definitely need to clean out your cooling system. I bet there's a felt like insulating cover of old dust covering your heatsink. I dropped my temperature from 70 to 50 after a cleanout.

 

Booting from a USB flash drive (listed as "USB HDD" in the boot menu for whatever reason) works fine here. BIOS is the latest one available, 15SH.

 

ahh, I've seen that, will try it
kthxbai

 

Well, I just found the time today to take apart the ol' lappy and cleaned it all up. I'm running a stress test right now and after 4 minutes, it's still only 68C!!! That's lower than my idle temperature was before i cleaned it. It idled around 48-50 so i'm very pleased.

Thanks for the help, John!

 

I remember talks about RAM some twenty pages ago. Is it confirmed that 667Mhz memory speeds are preferred over 533Mhz? As 533 would match the speed of the FSB thus making it run synchronous.

 

The performance difference between 533MHz and 667MHz RAM is not as big as the speed suggests provided by get RAM which is CL4 at 533MHz.

I recall that the R20 is a little fussy about the RAM so it is best to work back through this thread to find out which modules have worked for other people.

John

 

I'm not sure if you understood me there, John. I was asking whether 533 wasn't actually faster than 667 due to timing issues, but I might be totally off.

Anyone ever tried the Corsair Value 2Gb PC5300 together with the Samsung original 1GB?

 

I haven't seen any data which demonstrates that having RAM and FSB running at the same speed improves performance. In reality, the real performance bottleneck is the chipset itself.

John

 

Any ideas about possibility to find alternative cooling solution? Or another (quieter, better) fan? Or, at least, a new fan of the same type?

Is cooling system different for Celeron M and Core2Duo based R20's?

 

The Samsung service agents should be able to supply a new fan. Their address (for UK) is on the Samsung UK website under the FAQs.

Celerons tend to run hotter because they have no speedstep, but I expect the same cooling system is used for all the CPU options.

John

 

I have read peoples articles about the issues they are having with memory etc in the R20. I recently purchased 2 x 2Gb chips from crucial. I tried all over christmas to get them to work but without anyjoy. I could only get one of the new 2Gb chips to work on their own without anything else in the machine. I knew the machine was capable of having memory in both banks as it came with 2 x 1Gb chips in it. Anyway due to wanting the machine to run faster etc I decided to remove Vista and load XP on my machine and since doing this I can now run it with both of the 2Gb chips in the banks.
Not sure why I am not having probs with XP but its working!

 

Yes, the R20 can be fussy about the RAM, but it is strange that it works with XP but not Vista. The problem is usually at the BIOS / chipset level.

John

 

I went to reformat with windows vista and when installing installing it only displays one hard drive partition to install upon that only consists of 54mb. I reformated it to see if I was given more space but still only 54mb.

My laptop is now pretty much a brick as I cant get the vista installation to see my other hard drive partition. Are there drivers for the r20's HDD?

 

It is not normal to need any special HDD driver. The only possible problem I can think of would be the ATA / AHCI setting, but that, I think, applies only to Intel chipsets (ie not the R20).

The first step is to go into disk management (right click on My Computer and select Manage) and see if there is a partition without a drive letter. If so, try assigning a letter.

Next, I suggest you boot off a Linux live CD (eg Ubuntu) to see what partitions can be seen in Linux.

John