Samsung R20 notebook (14" widescreen)

Okay, finally got mine. Dumb question time!

The charge status push button thingy on the battery shows 100%. If I plug in both the battery and the AC adapter, the "Charge Status" indicator on the front turns red - what does that mean? The manual only mentions green/amber/off. Red = amber?

This one is supposed to have a two year warranty, the sticker below the keyboard says one year. I'll assume Samsung is just too lazy to create different stickers and put them on the specific notebooks for each country...

 

The battery charge indicator has only five steps, so maybe a charge level above 80% will show as full. You can check the actual charge level under the power properties in Windows. Amber = orange which is close to red.

I would point out that most Samsung notebooks are set to charge the battery if the charge level is below 97%. If it is above 97%, the battery is not charged. This avoids unnecessary charge cycles (which use up the battery life) cause by the slow natural discharge.

By the time you read this the light should have turned green, which means fully charged.

John

 

Hello, right now i am interested in buying r20
could you say wich r20 has 667 ram speed ? cos i cant find it. they all are with 533 speed.
for example digiuk.com
also i could find info about 8cell battery life time. anyone found ?
also are there any chances to buy r20 with linux ? (they are more cheaper then vista) because i allready have both vista and xp, so its vaste of money for me
thnx guys, i am asking because, i couldnt find that info elsewhere.

 

I don't know if any of the R20s come with 667MHz RAM. I would recommend that you plan for a RAM upgrade because Vista with a few programs loaded will run much better with 2GB on board. The R20F002/SUK is probably the best value at the moment. Or, if you are a Vista sceptic, then there is the R20R000/SUK with XP Pro (but a smaller hard disk). RAM speed makes limited boost to the performance. More RAM with consequent less use of virtual memory will make a bigger difference.

You can read the R20 specifications here. It says the running time with the 8 cell battery is 3.8 hrs or 3 hrs of DVD playback.

I think you have 0 chance of buying the R20 without Windows. Your best option from that point of view would be to get the cheapest R20 which has Vista Basic. Unfortuately, this also has a Celeron CPU. However, it is a single core CPU and the lack of speedstep in the CPU may worsen the battery life. If you are good with a screwdriver, then I believe that you can drop in a Core Duo CPU.

John

 

thnx John
y about battery i red that holds ~3hours, but that says factory, i just wanted to know real time
cool thnx again.

 

The 8 cell battery should give twice the running time of the 4 cell since it has twice the capacity. You can see my measurements with the smaller battery in my review of the R20, but they are consistent with Samsung's claims. Note that you need BIOS 11SH (or newer) to enable the C3 state when running on battery to save a little more power. If Samsung / ATI ever get round to getting PowerPlay working for the GPU then that could give a little more running time.

John

 

What is the C3 state and what does it do?

(Tried searching, but all I get is results for the Citroen C3 car. )

 

This page from Trusted Reviews lists the C states for their future CPUs. The present CPUs only get as far as C4.

This paper on the Intel site is a bit more technical.

But, if you don't want to read all the details, when the CPU is idle then there are various levels of sleep that it can drop into to save power (and reduce heat generation). The deeper the sleep state (as indicated by the number) then the more power is saved but the longer it takes the CPU to get back to work. However, times are still measured in microseconds.

John

 

I hope you don't get confuse with the warranty sticker... cause normally... the 1 year warranty sticker is for the international warranty... n the 2 years you got is from your country provider... so that's why the sticker looks like that normally...

 

FYI

I just installed 2x 1gb into my R20, after not clicking in one stick correctly and panicking that it'd all gone wrong, i tried again, booted up and it's loving the extra memory.

does anyone know how to turn off the User Access Control warnings, i'm already bored of pressing 'allow' all the time.

fanx

 

Good news about the RAM. If what you got is good value, you could add it to the Samsung RAM thread.

I haven't actually tried it, but I read that the UAC can be kicked into touch using Start > Run > MSCONFIG. Disable UAC is on the Tools page. What baffles me is why UAC doesn't have any memory so that once you have said something is OK then it won't ask again.

John

 

If you go into the Control Panel and go to User Accounts, the UAC should be there too.

 

Is anyone here who has XP installed on their R20 (yes I hated Vista that much) experiencing a weird scenario where they're being asked to install the ATI drivers every few days? I'm not sure if the drivers are being updated that much, and I've downloaded the "new" version a couple of times but that's the only update I get when I use the samsung update service.

Even more bizzarely, the drivers I download for the xpress 1250 rom AMD/ATI's site aren't recognised.

 

Yes.

No, but I haven't installed Samsung's "Update Plus" application/service or whatever it's called.

That's because Samsung are too lazy to register their Device IDs with AMD/ATI.

I tried to add the proper Device IDs to the current drivers (by comparing Samsung's and AMD/ATI's .inf files), but the installer still failed, so it's too complicated for me.



XP runs perfectly for me with 7xx MB RAM available (it will still be upgraded to 2 GB the next time I order hardware parts, but I'm in no real hurry as long as the prices stay where they are currently). The Vista install was slow at times under normal use, always slow to boot up and shutdown properly, some of the added software junk didn't uninstall cleanly (McAffee) or at all (some Office Trial components), and I didn't like the partition scheme either.

New firmware (SC04) for the optical drive TS-L632D seems to be available here (or via Samsung's updater, I guess).

Here's a picture of the 8 cell battery (not Samsung's official one) I bought for ~100€, hope that will extend the anaemic run time a bit when I need it...

 

My Q35 automatically picked up the SC04 firmware update. I'm puzzled that the TS-L632M (lightscribe version) is still at SC02 firmware.

Please tell us how much running time you can get from that bigger battery.

john

 

hi there
could you people help, who are from uk.
now i live in padstow. could you help me, from where i could buy R20 ? with celeron procesor.
i want to buy from store, but i dont know where are they. i know 1 in truro (comet) but they sell only with dual core..
thnx for help..

 

If you are confident that the Celeron is powerful enough for your needs, go to Laptops Direct. It's now down to £345. This model has disappeared from DigiUK's site so I suspect that they are being phased out. But note that the Core Duo version is now below £450.

If you have a spare £25 then get some more RAM from Crucial. I'm sure this would help to improve the performance since Vista, although it is the cut down Vista Home Basic, must struggle with only 512MB RAM.

John

 

Just a word of caution, sometimes these budget CPU(like celeron/sempron) has some of the power saving feature disabled or crippled.

 

hey guys,
does anyone know if its possible to connect an external Lcd to the R20 and do seperate things on both screens?if it is,can you pls tell me how?

thanks

 

According to the R20 manual (relevant part attached) you can do it using the Dual View option.

John

 

I think that C3 probably means that the Power Management enables a much longer battery life.

Go to the bottom of the page and then to the section, ' Postscript to R20 Review (20 May 2007)' just above the green and brown graph diagram, above the web link below:

http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3713

 

There's a bios update (version 13SH) available here. The release notes mention DC mode - is that dual channel?

 

I think it probably means DC (ie on battery) as opposed to AC (mains power) and it seems that the bug only occurrs with XP.

John

 

...Doh!

 

hey guys!
does anyone know where i can get a new mains charger for the R20?mine's beginning to get a little touchy.

 

If is causing problems then contact Samsung support for a replacement under warranty. For some reason the retailers only stock the 90W PSUs but I was assured by Samsung support that the companies who handle warranty work stock the 60W PSUs.

If you want to buy a non-Samsung PSU, then this site claims to have suitable ones.

John

 

Today Samsung put all Vista drivers on the German Website, before there only XP drivers. The Ati driver was newer than the one from the ati website. When I installed it. there was something about northbridge 1.0 and southbridge 1.0. But I did not so differences afterwards. I am still waiting for new BIOS which includes Powerplay for the r20.

 

There is a new R20 BIOS ( 13SH) which was posted on 19th July although it doesn't mention PowerPlay.

The two places I watch for Samsung drivers and software are the global download site ( drivers & software) and SamsungPC. Usually, the global download site (to which the national sites link) is the most up-to-date but occasionally SamsungPC has something newer.

And yes, there is a lot of new XP drivers / software for the R20.

John

 

I have two Vista accounts set up on my R20 - one for me and one for my wife.

If my wife logs in, the function keys to control the screen brightness work perfectly. However, if I switch users and log onto my account, the function keys to control the screen brightness just will not work. Other functions keys such as the Home key will work.

If I restart the laptop but this time I am the first to log in, then whem my wife switches to her account, the function keys wont work for her.

I have tried re-installing the Samsung drivers and I have tried changing the settings at re-boot so that brightness control is user controlled rather than automatic - no joy.

I wouldn't be that bothered, if there was a way to stop the screen dimming when the mains is unplugged.

Any help greatly appreciated because it's driving me mad.

 

I recall some issues with the Samsung software not working properly with Vista's User Account Control. See if the latest versions of Easy Battery Manager and Easy Display Manager are newer than what you have (they are dated 25 July 07) and give them a try.

John

 

I downloaded the latest versions of the drivers and that has solved the problem.

Thank you very much for your help.

 

I did contact the German Samsung Support but they told me that they do not have any information about a new BIOS release which will implement Ati Powerplay. I think it is allready implemented but hidden, not accessable in the BIOS. There are only few changes which you can make in the BIOS. I was searching a little in the www and read a lot about this topic that especially in notebook BIOS the functions are restricted by the notebook OEMs.
I also tried using softwaretools like ATI Tray Tools (which was not able to detect the Maninbord), RM Clock (which did not have any reasonable result on battery life), Notebook Hardware Control "NHC" (which was either able to acces the grafic card and forced me to reinstall the system because of kicking out all "FN" Functions like changeing the brightness of the display) and finally rivatuner (with which I did not really work with because of beeing affraid of damageing my notebook). I was thinking, if it is possible to overclock the graficcard, then it must also be possibele to underclock it but I was affraid of useing the tool because I wasnt shure which result would be caused by changeing the parameters. And it is primarely designed for Nvidia.
Maybe there is somebody who is fit in accessing a phoenix bios and in enableing the hidden functions.

 

Managed to upgrade my R20 to 2 GB of RAM , then spill milk on it a few hours later

Fortunately it was turned off, no cables were plugged in, and the keyboard was partly covered. My perception went into 'bullet time' mode (that's usually reserved for injuries for me), and I was able to flip it over and remove the battery pretty damn fast.

Looks like only a few drops made it beyond the keyboard plate, and they were stopped by the plastic covering most of the guts below. Quite a lot also splashed against the display, but the frame cover sits very flush with the panel surface, so it wasn't able to reach anything vital before countermeasures (i.e. gravity and my shirt) were deployed.

Wiped dry/clean what I could, pointed a fan at it for two days, and it's still running fine (for now). I'd like to do a full tear-down, just in case I missed something and it starts to corrode/get smelly
If anyone has a service manual or something like that, I'd appreciate a link/PM. I think I've located all of the relevant screws, the main obstacle seems to be getting the plastic part with the power button and artex/scroll pattern off the hinges...

 

I would be most worried about the milk upsetting the keyboard. If you managed to avoid that problem they you may be OK. Dried milk is probably relatively harmless compared with some liquids.

John

 

Keyboard is still working fine, but I had been thinking about picking up a spare anyway...

Found this offer, €47 shipped sounds almost reasonable considering the common price gouging when it comes to notebook replacement parts.

 

Hello, i'm thinking about buying a Samsung R20 for uni in sept. I was wondering which one i should go for though, http://www.samsunglaptop.co.uk/proddetail.php?prod=Samsung_Laptop_NP-R20R001%2FSUK this one seems ok but it is only dual core, i was wondering if that matters, if it makes it a lot slower? I kind of want to go for XP because i've heard vista needs a lot of memory and power behind it to work well, and i'm not too bothered about it so i thought XP would be better?

I was also thinking about getting the R70, http://www.samsunglaptop.co.uk/proddetail.php?prod=Samsung_Laptop_NP-R70T001%2FSUK this one seems really good (and runs on XP with 2GB), but i'm not sure whether it's worth the difference in price over the R20. I do like to play games sometimes, but mainly i'm just looking for a notebook that i can rely on and won't crash on me when i'm working. Is Samsung considered a reliable brand for laptops? It would be great if anyone could recommend any other good reliable laptops for £700 and below, i'm fairly clueless regarding them as i've only ever had desktops so thankyou for your advice!

 

The T2350 version of the R20 has good pricing and a 1.86GHz Core Duo will out-run a 1.73GHz Core 2 Duo. All you are losing out on is 64-bit compatibility but that's something which most of aren't planning to invest in for some time to come.

As for the XP vs Vista debate, Vista does like more RAM (I would recommend 2GB minimum), but once it is properly bedded in then some things happen a bit faster. However, that XP model would benefit with having an extra 1GB of RAM because the GPU will be limited with only 512MB on board.

One plus of the R20 is that you can use ClockGen to boost the FSB if you do want a bit more speed from the GPU. See my review (link below).

The R70 has a bigger display and a more powerful GPU. It also has a 6 cell battery compared with the R20's 4 cell battery but it is less portable.

Samsung scores quite well in the reliability ratings. There have been a limited number of horror stories but that happens with all the brands.

Alternatives are the Asus A8 series (14.1") and F3 series (15.4"). Laptops Direct have a good range.

Dell also has some new products, particularly the Vostro 1400 and 1500 models. However, some Dell products are currently having significant delays.

John

 

Maybe it is time to start a petition at gopetition.com to unite the samsung customers request for enabling and developing hidden bios features like Ati Powerplay in several Notebooks like the R20. What do you think about this? It can be much more effective than writing to the customer support...
And it could rise the preasure on Samsung if people will see it if they google a samsung notebook because it could change their decission to buy a samsung nb in a negative way...

 

We definitely need to step up the pressure somehow before this model gets discontinued or Samsung won't have *any* incentive to fix this.

I just set up a cheap (€475) HP Compaq 6715s using the same or a very similar chipset (same Radeon Xpress 1250 graphics), and guess what? It supports Powerplay just fine. I don't know what Samsung are smoking (especially since they're still advertising "up to three hours" of runtime on the small battery)...

 

Sumsung is obviously not telling the truth, if you compare the specification on http://www.samsungpc.com/products/r20/r20_specification.htm concerning battery life with the description of batterylife on Samsung's Global or lokal websites. 3h compared with 1,9h!
THIS IS OBVIOUSLY CHEATING!

It would be great if someone of you, native English would write the text at gopetition.com because my english is not that good. I do not think that I am able to find the right words. I could translate the English into German and post in the German Forums that there is petition running. I was also informed, that the R40 useres do have the same problems maybe this could help.
I know that a lot of digicam user made a petition for firmware, e.g. panasonic fz50.

 

new bios update (14sh) on samsung's website but no powerplay

 

It says:

John

 

i purchased a new r20 from ebuyer.com with 1 gb of ram last week. unfortunately windows states it has 768 mb. I checked the bios which states there is 2 banks of 512. why is windows not recognising this?

also the little charger runs red hot after about 30 minutes of charging and using it, so much that the plastic lead coming out of it seems to be beginnig to get soft and the early stage of melting. is this normal? how hot are they supposed to get. it does not say samsung on it, just someting like lin li , only for use with IT equipment. thanks for all help.

 

The "lost" memory is actually being used by the video adapter, so can't be seen by Windows. It defaults to using 256MB, but you can reduce it to 128MB in the BIOS.

Regarding the adapter, I've noticed mine gets hot but not scalding. Have to admit I've never really checked it to see how bad it gets.

 

If you are in an doubt about the memory, check it out with CPU-Z. As already noted, the graphics gets allocated some of the RAM. If you are not into 3D gaming then I think you can change in the BIOS the amount of RAM allocated to the GPU.

The mains adapter can get quite hot when under full load, and the worst case is when running the computer and recharging the battery. However, it should not get so hot that you cannot hold it in your hand. The adapters are made by specialist companies under contract. The PSU for my X60 plus is made by Li Shin. Is that the name you meant? If so, it should be a good product. The aforementioned 90W PSU is smaller and more efficient than the 90W Liteon PSU provided with my Zepto computer.

John

 

Has anyone else noticed that the mic-in volume in the recording panel is permanently greyed out? I'm trying to connect my guitar via the mic-in but I can't get any sound, and when I tried going to the sound settings in control panel for recording control, both mic-in and line-in weren't selectable. Can anyone offer any advice?

 

I've just noticed this compatible 8-cell battery that is suitable for the R20.

<£60 is getting reasonable.

John

 

I've decided I'm going to cancel my order for the HP DV6330ea laptop and purchase the Samsung R20. I'm going to go to a local computer shop first however just to see if I will like the look and feel of the laptop.

One hopes he will not be disappointed.

Mark

 

by the way, I've joined the R20 owner's club. My daughter felt the X60 plus is too big for her so, when I saw an R20 in Laptops Direct's factory outlet section, I grabbed it. Model R20F001/SUK - T2250 + 1GB + 80GB. It appears to be OK. There are some slight marks on the top right corner of the cover.

It's taken a day to get all the software set up and working but it is almost ready for handover. For those who are interested, the R60+ / R60plus has much the same internal hardware and a newer set of Vista drivers / software.

John

 

I bought an r20 for uni.
Its come with 1gb ram, Dual 1.73Ghz. Its also come with Vista installed and I was thinking of replacing this with XP, will I notice any large changes in system performance?

Also I'm going to buy a portable HDD for it, anything I should know?