Samsung R20 notebook (14" widescreen)

Hello there!

I recently bought a new hdd for the r20 as the old one was giving me problems and sometimes just "operating system not found", while it then could boot again.

The new hdd (wd scorpio blue) directly made problems too, but with the tool from wd I could fix it. So I put win 7 on there and all was fine till the other night when it became slow. I just a reboot would help out. But I was wrong, the next day it wouldn't even startup and recognize the drive in bios.

So I bought an external case for the drive, and it seems the drive is working flawlessly via usb on my desktop pc. Anyone know what this could be then? Can I through the baby away already?

thanks,
poma

 

I would suggest you run the WD diagnostics on the HDD in order to be sure it is healthy.

There's a chance that the ATI chipset in the R20 doesn't like the SATA-300. I don't know if WD offer a jumper option to force the HDD to run at SATA-150. It is worth investigating.

John

 

Thanks John! I did the test and it found errors. It directly repaired them and it says Status okay. I will check for the SATA but I guess it must be something in the R20 as it happened with the original disk too (the no operating system), thats why I changed the disk.

Greets
poma

 

Now after the diagnose while having the hdd in a case (before I tried to run the diagnose directly on the laptop from cd, but it wouldn't find the hdd) I just gave it a try and put the hdd back in. And voilà it works, did some checkdisk (orphaned files and such) and botted up fine.

There is no Jumpers for SATA-150, the drives are backward compatible.

I still don't get it if it's the drive or the connector..

 

Thanks for the update.

We need to wait and see if the problem repeats itself.

John

 

With windows 7 coming out soon, I had originally planned on making the switch over to 64 bit and with that, upgrading to 4gb of ram.

However, browsing through some of the back pages (I admit I haven't gone through all of them) as well as googling upgrading ram for the r20, it looks like there are a whole bunch of problems associated with it.

Has anyone been successful upgrading to 4gb of ram?

 

clincoln's post above is the only (semi-)successful report of an R20 running with 4 GB I've seen (though I'm not sure why the OS would make a difference... I wouldn't trust that setup enough to use it for critical apps/as my main computer). Other people tried the same and it either wouldn't boot properly or was just plain unstable, IIRC.

I recently put in a 500 GB SATA-II/-300 drive (Hitachi 5K500.B) in my R20 and it's working perfectly, no jumpers needed.

 

Hi, in my new flat I have range problems with the internal mini pci wifi card. I'am planning to solve them and it will be very helpful to get some advice from other samsung r20 users.

Currently, I'm considering four options:

- Connect the second antenna of the mini pci card or extend the already connected one. (check http://www.notebookreview.com/picture.asp?f=22819, as it is stated in http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3713, this antenna is not connected). Will this antenna fit?
http://www.oxfordtec.com/us/p120/La...eed-to-open-the-Base-or-LCD/product_info.html

- Use a repeater/range booster (I think that this option is too much, my flat is not that large).

- Replace the mini pci card. I'm not sure if this is the best option. How about this one?
http://www.oxfordtec.com/us/p125/GI...er-N300-Dual-Band-Mini-Card/product_info.html

- buy an external wireless (express card or usb). This, for example:
http://cgi.ebay.com/D-link-Wireless...ltDomain_3?hash=item56375b617a#ht_2112wt_1044

What do you think is the best option? Did you tried any of them with good results? Thanks!!

 

Hi everyone! It seems I came a little bit late to this thread, I recently got an r20 and I am wondering if anyone out there has managed to solve the memory upgrading problems and managed to get 3 or 4 gb of ram working STABLE?


Thanks in advance!

Nico

 

hi i`am new here any one direct me to graphic driver for samsung NT-R20Y yes that one, seems on samsungs site it dont exsist,or any other sumsung model that the drivers will work,been hunting for it for 3 days now. or site for the other drivers would be appreceated,your in hoping. thanks PS ive searched for the r20 but it shows the r40 drivers which dont work.

 

There are ATI chipset / graphics drivers (the R20 has ATI integrated graphics) for both XP and Vista here or you can rummage through the collection here.

John

 

the model is NT-R20Y which samsung don`t seem to have it`s as if it din`t exsist,found the r20 are they the same as r20y

 

I would assume that the R20Y is essentially the same as the normal R20. However, it is strange that the NT-R20Y isn't listed on the Samsung global download site. NT prefix is the Korean version and the rest of the world is NP.

John

 

thanks to very one who helped found the graphic drivers for the NT-R20Y, i used the driver for the NT-R20P and it worked again thanks for all who helped.ps jOHN NO THE NT-R20 are not the same graphic drivers they dont work on the NT-R20Y.cheers .

 

Thanks for the update and feedback.

John

 

For anyone who is interested, I have just put Windows 7 32 bit on the R20 prior to sending it off to a new home. Windows 7 sorted out most of the drivers (it had to download the ATI graphics driver) while I had to install the Vista touchpad driver. The Vista versions of the various Samsung software packages seem to work OK.

John

 

well I also was thinkin' about to make a final upgrade or downgrade - non Vista OS to the samsung r20.

John, can you confirm, that on Win7 the FN-Keys did work? I read that people had problems with the FN-Keys + Win7 and samsung r20.
I hope win7 performs better with 2gb of ram than vista did.
looking foreward to your reply !
greetings
Chris

 

The Fn keys (at least the brightness control) work OK from a start / reboot but not after hibernation (I didn't try sleep), so that is a residual bug. I haven't tried using a newer version of Easy Display Manager for one of the other recent Samsung notebooks. I will only be trying to troubleshoot this problem if the person who has just bought the R20 complains about the Fn key problem.

John

 

Hi i am a R20 owner from Estonia. I have upgraded to 4 gb of ram of which the laptop is able to adress 3,25gb and of what 256 mb is reserved by the integrated graphics.
Originally it came with a T2130 but i replaced it with a T5600 which i got from a local auction site for 9€. I have also added an internal bluetooth module.

Couple days ago i was messing around with my laptop looking for ways to improve it`s performance and battery life when i came across an interesting performance tweak. It seems that the video card drivers available on the samsung website are a bit outdated and there are better ones available at ATI´s website.
I installed the drivers and seem to be getting a lot better performance on Call of Duty, which with the original drivers was barely playable but with the drivers i got from ATI´s website it is t´running much smoother.
The only catch with these drivers is that they do not install automatically like the drivers provided by Samsung instead you get an error that no compatible hardware found or something like that.
I got around that by updating my driver manually from the device manager.
Luckily the installation program unzips it´s contents to C:\ATI directory.
I manually installed the radeon x1200 driver and for the last 3 days it has been working flawlessly.
BTW I am using Windows XP on my laptop.

 

A long time ago, i had tried to clean up my R20 laptop but i have no idea and no direction how to dismantle my R20. Now i would like to share the step by step service manual for all R20 laptop user in this forum. Beside, I am still using my R20 and it did a fantastic job so far. You guys can download from the follow link Service Manual for Samsung r20

Hope all you find this useful.

 

How can I enable both cores?
It's supposed to be dual core but Windows 7 task manager only shows 1, (and tools such as cpu-z or siv32)
The BIOS doesn't have any option to change it,

regards

 

Start Run > MSconfig and you should get the left hand of the windows below. Then click on Advanced to get the right window.



Then try to set the number of processors to 2, close and reboot.

John

 

But I only have 1 processor with 2 cores. Will this work or hang the computer?

 

I can't be sure but I think that Windows treats one CPU with 2 cores as being 2 processors. Device Manager is listing my 2 core 4 thread CPU as being 4 processors.

If you are worried about trying that route then your only alternative is to go digging for a newer AMD chipset (ATI Radeon Xpress 1250) driver or to uninstall the CPU in Device Manager on your R20, reboot and let Windows redetect the hardware. We are now so used to well behaved Intel chipsets that we forget that it's not so many years ago that other manufacturers made chipsets and they (or their drivers) weren't all so well behaved and this could well have prevented your Windows from properly enumerating the CPU.

John