Windows 8.1 Update Issues and Discussion

Tonight the Windows 8.1 drivers update for NP700Z5C appeared in my SW Update. I did all the driver update and also Windows Update had an update for WIndows 8.1 as well so I installed it too.

Look like my NP700Z5C boot up normally again and back to it previous loading speed. Everything seem to be working now for me. All the extra functions etc.

If you don't see drivers in your SW Update yet, give it a day or two, I bet they will start showing up for you and also be sure to check Windows Update as well too because mine did had a Windows 8.1 update which updated the Windows.

Bill

 

did you update the windows 8.1 from 'windows store 'or from 'SWupdate'? , and also did the drivers show directly from SW update, or did you need to find model then choose option 'windows 8.1' first?

 

Hey!

I am using a Samsung Series 9 NP 900X3C - A02DE (German version). It runs fine with Windows 8.1, but has some small performance issues. Unfortunately, Windows 8.1 drivers are not yet published for A02DE, A03DE and A04DE, but are available for NP 900X3C - A05DE and - A06DE.

The overall hardware specifications seem to be the same (HM 75 Chipset, i5, 128 gb SSD, 4 Gb ram, Centrino Network...), but i don't know if they are really the same (no information available for sound etc). Can i just use the drivers offered for the A05DE on my A02DE?

 

I have a NP900X3C-A01PT and there aren't drivers updated on SW Update too. But I have for A02PT and other versions of 900X3C so having the same doubt if I can use them or not.

I'm already running 8.1 for a couple days and so far no major problems. The only problem so far is battery... It seems to me it is draining quite fast, more than double the usual I think.

 

I can confirm this. Since I've recovered to factory state and Win8 my battery lasts at least 50% longer...
Strangely enough that my CPU was capped at 800 MHz because of some unknown bug with 8.1 and the battery still drained faster.

 

At present Samsung seems to be officially supporting only those notebooks that were shipped with Windows 8. Did your X3C originally ship with Windows 7? The basic hard is the same between the older and newer X3Cs but, based on my experience with the X4C, the Windows 7 versions used a P**AAC BIOS and the Windows 8 versions a P**ABK BIOS and were shipped with UEFI enabled. I have to wonder whether Samsung anticipate more problems with putting 8.1 on the machines shipped with Windows 7, or maybe they are just being lazy.

Given that you have already moved to 8.1 I suggest you try the drivers for the newer versions of the X3C and hope they solve more problems than they create. One package that is currently missing from the 8.1 list is Settings which, in addition to providing some controls, also does a lot of configuration during its installation. It might be a key missing link.

John

 

I have had zero problems with an NP700G7C-S01 and windows 8.1..

I suppose I can check if the brightness and such is working properly I always leave it on 100%.

 

I have NP900X4C-A03CA. I installed "Setting" for windows 8 on windows 8.1 and it works just fine for me. Setting for Windows 8 can be downloaded using SW Update by selecting "Find Model". It may be a good alternate while waiting for Setting for Windows 8.1.

 

I update it all from SW Update. I did not need to do a "Find Model",

The drivers appeared in the list yesterday all by itself and I been checking the SW Update everyday since the release of Windows 8.1 update last week..

Bill

 

I already posted this comment on another thread: " I installed 8.1 on my NP900X3E-KO1SUS. Everything seemed to be ok until I updated 6 updates on swupdates. All except the Bluetooth driver 3.1.1309.386 Then at boot I got a message error "error in C:\programs files (x86) Intel\bluetooth\btmshellex.dll missing entry trat"

The only way to fix it was to do a system restore. Even doing the restore and uninstalling the old driver and then applying the new bluetooth got the same error message. So for now, I did another restore and using the old BT driver and it seems to be working. Samsung told me none of their systems are ready for 8.1. The question is, should I just bite it and do a refresh and start over? Will this delete the paid modern applications I have already bought? I updated from the windows store. Will 8.1 show up on SWupdates? Should I wait until then? Or maybe a better BT driver will show up with my 8.1 system and I can just wait for that? Not sure what I should do. If the refresh is inevitable I feel like I should just do it now and be done with it.

I saw windows 8.1 available in the store awhile back and assumed all would go well. Everything seems to be doing ok, I got swupdates for trackpad, lan, chipset driver, intel me interface, intel rapid storage, sound driver, all of which seem to be ok. But the new3.1.1309.386 BT driver gave errors on boot as mentioned above. I chatted with Samsung and John Ratsey and agree to just hold on or "limp along" as John says until Samsung sorts this mess out lol.

I just wanted to report this issue. Also notice that 8.1 is no longer listed on the store. I guess my bad luck I just came across that the short moment it was there. I assumed it would be ok.

 

Hi

My Samsung Series 7 Ultra Notebook (NP740U3E-S04UK) has finally popped with "Get Windows 8.1 for free... Go to the Store", (in a big blue stripe across the screen) which it certainly didn't do previously. In fact I dont know how to get rid if the message. Escape and Alt/F4 both fail.

Does this mean that Samsung have got the drivers working?

J

 

NO! Be careful! I have exactly the same model - NP740U3E-S04UK. And as I was adventurous enough, I installed Windows 8.1 on the very first day of its release. I had almost no problems, compared to some other users of this forum, still there was this irritating issue with no brightness control. Having read other posts I realise I need to install old graphics driver. I did this via SW Update by manually inserting my model number and choosing Windows 8 (NOT 8.1!) as operating system. Then I was able to download old graphics card driver and install it, that fixed the issue with brightness.

BUT! A few days ago SW Update prompted me a whole list of updates available. I decided that Samsung finally made some fixes. But I was careful enough to update one by one. And everything went smoothly apart from Graphics driver. Samsung offer to install graphics driver ver. 10.18.10.33. After installation I got black screen issue. Had to reboot and make system restore! So be careful with graphics driver!

Annoyingly enough, this morning, while I was working, it started to install this driver again without even bothering to ask me if I don't mind! I was lucky enough to kill this installation via task manager before I got black screen again!

 

ah yes I saw those posts but unlike him, my keyboard doesnt seem to respond when my laptops starts. Not sure why though.

 

I had the same thing pop up on my X4C and had the same annoyance about no easy way to get rid of it. So I clicked on the banner and then managed to escape at the next screen.

I had an interesting telecon with a Samsung support person today: They seemed to think that it is Microsoft's job to make sure everything works with 8.1!

Unless there's a must-have feature in 8.1 that you can't wait for then I recommend you wait until this thread goes quiet and the title gets changed. Samsung are evidently working on various issues and I wouldn't be surprised if these compatibility issues are delaying their Haswell models.

John

 

Thank you guys for all the hard work that has gone into resolving the problems. I'm down to 1 (that is obvious to me) thanks to you! Greatly appreciated.

Anyhow, the last problem is a high volume warning that I get each time I increase the volume above 40%, when having external speakers jacked in. I've got a 730U3E. I've not found anything when googling, and I'm usually quite good at it. Anyone has any experience of this annoyance?

 

The recent update with SW Update has caused my pc to be on constant high memory usage.

Here is a screenshot:


The high memory is not being caused by Google Chrome because before this update the memory usage would stay around 40-50%
The PC that I have is a NP550P7C-S05UK.

I hope Samsung or Microsoft can fix this and many other bugs.

 

Updated an ativ book 8 np880 (Australian model) last night but only after finding 8.1 drivers in the "find model" section of SW update. Did what Samsung suggests, that is, SW updates and Windows update before and after the install. I noticed in the SW updates after I loaded 8.1 there was a patch called "brightness" and a graphics driver upgrade. Maybe Samsung has read this thread. All works perfectly except the screen was blurry and was obviously not the right scaling. I remember another post that mentions this but I couldn't find it. I googled "blurry screen after windows 8.1 update" and got the fix I needed. Right click the desktop, screen resolution, change text size to fixed scaling. I chose 125%

 

So here my take on the update Windows 8.1 with the Ativ Book 8. Since I bought a new Ativ Book 8 to replace my 2012 Series 7 Chronos, I decided to throw in an SSD and then installed fresh Windows 8.1 on to it without upgrade from 8. I don't know if I was lucky or not, but everything is working right now. What I did were installed SW Update, and instead of using that program to install drivers, I downloaded each driver, then install them from the download. This way is much safer. You will have complete set of driver, compare to download and install at the same time using SW Update. Some small drivers can be done through that program, but for most of them, try to download and install each of them.
There is actually a fix for brightness as someone pointed out early. For Setting program, you need to download from other model, then SW Update will provide an update to it.

And here is the thing about the graphic. Without the driver, either from AMD or Samsung, the screen will behave like crashing after awhile, but completely usable as Windows recognizes both cards, but we don't have switching mechanism with that set of drivers. Then I tried to use AMD 13.11 Beta 7. Surprising, that driver was failed. Maybe it is brand new so that the Intel driver does not support or vice versa. Then I completely removed everything, download the one from Samsung and install it. Now I have both are working good. I have not tested the gaming capability yet, but seem like the switchable is working. One thing that I noticed is that the Intel driver from Samsung is not the latest that Windows provided, but it works.

Just some of my opinion in my case. I hope Samsung will release more latest driver, especially the graphic. I might try to use some of those drivers to install for the old 2012 Chronos and see what will happen. The only thing that I am not sure is that the Ativ 8 does not turn on from sleep when I open the lid as I have to press the power to turn it back on. The other thing is the BIOS update that SW Update tells me. Try to find the link to download the BIOS file but no hope. If I went with SW Update, it would take forever and nothing would happened. Also I tried to use the firmware tool from the old Chronos, but it said it could not download.

 

On my 730U3E, my computer doesn't work very well each time I close the lid.
It is supposed to shut down but it doesn't.
Moreover, I also lose my trackpad settings when I'm coming back from sleep mode.

 

This is a pretty huge blunder IMO for 8.1 One that I noticed immediately after I installed 8.1 on my AB9 FHD. Changing the scaling to fixed is the only solution. Even popular apps like skype did not scale well. That is truly embarrassing for MS being they own skype. :\

 

Had the same problem, memory usage was at 90%, only 1,2 GB of ~10GB were free shortly after launch with only chrome running.

It's caused by Samsung's "IntelliMemory" Software. You have to disable the service in the service section of the systems control panel.

Uninstall and reinstall the trackpad driver, it will keep the settings after that. Also check up a few pages before, the new driver probably has some settings missing, you have to manually start an alternate config tool from the install folder of the driver. I also have a 730U3E, but I performed a recovery 2 days ago because there were too many strange bugs and problems with 8.1 and I couldn't fix the CPU so that it would clock faster than 800mhz.

 

It's tidier to uninstall IntelliMemory via Programs and Features in Control Panel. It is available in SW Update if you want to reinstall it.

John

 

Could that be causing my problems with battery draining? Would uninstall IntelliMemory solve that?

 

I think it's unlikely that IntelliMemory will significantly increase the power drain but, if you have an SSD, then IntelliMemory gives little benefit.

I suspect the increased battery drain with 8.1 is caused by the absence of an 8.1 version of Settings. Did you reinstall the Win 8 version of Settings after doing the 8.1 upgrade. This is probably better than nothing.

John

 

Reporting from the front. I've decided to upgrade again to Windows 8.1 and test the drivers that have appeared on SW Update. My model is NP670Z5E-XD1BR (aka the Brazilian variant of the Ativ Book 6). So far had no issues. At first the brightness wasn't working, but after installing the drivers from SW Update and rebooting, everything is working fine. The system feels a little bit quicker and the battery, so far, is the same. Tought I noticed a lot of weird proccesses in the Task Manager, maybe I never noticed them in Windows 8?

 

That blurriness happened to me too and it was incredibly unsettling, but it fixed itself after two reboots I think, I don't remember if I changed anything else to fix it, but I think I didn't.

 

Hate to say this, but today it again decided to update my graphics driver without any warning. Just left my laptop running and left for few minutes. When I came back - I had black screen. Had to reboot in safe mode and perform system restore... OH dear!

Does anyone know how to stop this automatic update??????

 

Chatted with S Service consultant regarding the new drivers and Win 8.1 (Transcript above). He said that the updates aren't ready for 8.1 and that they anticipate new updates in 1-2 weeks. Also told me to wait 3-6 months to upgrade to 8.1 (which I was planning on doing anyway).

I'm never 100% confident on what these guys say (simply with regard to English). The guy says "around end of this month in 1~2 weeks". For the record this conversation took place earlier today (Nov 1) - night time of Nov 1st latest in Korea. 1~2 weeks would bring us to the middle of the month latest.

 

I've successlly rolled by laptop back to Windows 8, but now I would like to upgrade the ATI driver to a later version (but still stable, certainly not the one that came with Windows 8.1).

I uninstalled the Catalyst program and rebooted which meant that the graphics card disappeared from Device Manager. But when I tried to install a new version of the drivers, the install program failed because it couldn't see any hardware to use. My only option was to grab the older drivers again from the Samsung SW update which at least restored the graphics card, but of course I still don't have access to the improvements from an updated driver.

It seems to me that the only way to get an update to the drivers is through Samsung.

 

I've been having trouble upgrading to newer drivers on Win 8 as well. chronicled in this post and this post.

Let me know if you were able to get Switchable Graphics to work properly and can give guidance. Others have supposedly gotten the newer non-samsung AMD released drivers to work using these instructions:

How to upgrade to non-samsung drivers:
1. Update your intel HD4000 drivers through SW update if they are not up-to-date.
2. Go to programs and features and run AMD Catalyst install manager. Check "Express Uninstall all AMD software" and run it. Reboot after it's done.
3. Download the AMD drivers from the links above
4. Install them.
5. Reboot.

but I've had limited success.

Like you implied, the drivers from Samsung definitely works best. May be worth holding out for the newer drivers (sometime this month) if you've restored everything and it's stable.

 

Hey guys, I think I can bring my 2 cents to the discussion. Right so I have a Samsung notebook NP350V5C.

Some background here, it had originaly a Windows 7, which I upgraded (not without problems) to Windows 8. Yesterday I upgraded to windows 8.1.
All worked well until I noticed my dedicated graphics card was not working. After the update to 8.1, the intel graphics card control panel changed and became more ... fancy, but Catalyst Control Center did not work at all. I tried to uninstall the AMD drivers (which also reverted the new intel control panel to the old one for some reason), and install new ones from SW Update. Needless to say, SW Update doesn't have any new drives for AMD so I was stuck there, unable to use my graphic card.

Moreover, I could not install AMD drivers from their own site, since their verification tool didn't recognize my card. But I did menage to fix this problem so if you happen to be in the same or similar situation, you can do just as nosauce above me said.

I did uninstall again all AMD drivers and software, rebooted, and downloaded the latest beta drivers not from their site, but some other site. Installed, rebooted, and the card and all AMD software is now working. Thanks nosauce!

 

From what I have been gathering, Samsung is only working on drivers for 8.1 on systems that shipped with W8. Sounds like you are in uncharted waters without proper 8.1 drivers. Until Samsung gets around to writing the code for your system, you are doomed. No easy way to roll back to 8. Probably have to do a refresh/recovery at this point. 8.1 is no little service patch that's for sure.

 

"Doomed" is perhaps an exaggeration. I would simply say that you will be lucky to get everything working properly.

I suspect that Samsung (and probably a lot of other notebook manufacturers) aren't happy that Windows 8.1 is somewhat more than a service pack which has created a lot of unwanted software development work (and, I suspect, fixing the support for the existing models could well have diverted resources from getting the Haswell models onto the shelves).

John

 

Yeah, sorry I just like using the word "doomed" once in awhile. But honestly, it really sounds like the user has what I call a "show stopper" problem which IMO belongs in the "doomed" category. Anytime one has to do a refresh/recovery/or clean install because issues with an application, that's really a bad as it gets in windows. 8.1 is a application of sorts.. a rather large one that changes a ton of code. It can be very unforgiving.

 

Thanks for the help, I hope Samsung can fix this so that everything is working properly again.

 

Is it not strange that Samsung do not have an official way of communicating with their (supposedly) loyal following to say DON'T upgrade to 8.1 yet?

 

is it safe now to update to windows 8.1? , should i update my drivers one by one from the setup files from SW update first? or should i update my windows first?

 

So far, I have been running 8.1 on an NP700Z5C very well by doing the following: Install windows 8.1, reinstall all major drivers from software update (You will have to manually enter your model number). I had a small issue with my microphone not working, so I have been borrowing new drivers from the AtivBook 8 (NP880-something) and that is working like a charm. Grabbed the newest version of Settings from there as well.

 

Sorry, weekend away so no time to wrangle with my laptop (to my wife's great relief).

I've tried those steps to try to get a newer driver installed but whenever I uninstall the current drivers through the AMD uninstall manager, the laptop simply fails to recognise that the ATI card exists even when I proceed to install new drivers. The only version that ever gets recognised is the driver installed through the Samsung SW Update.

I spend more time monitoring the Samsung SW Update tool for new drivers than I do on Facebook and Twitter combined!

 

I have an NP700Z3C as well, just recently I can no longer control my brightness! can you?

 

For those with brightness issues, make sure you've disabled Adaptive Brightness in all the usual places (as many as FIVE places, depending on model), as mentioned back here. It may fix it for some of you, even if not all.

 

Help! My power plans have disappeared now!

I've checked those places, but now I can't check in power

What's happening?

 

Yes, clearly this is an issue on some machines, it's been reported several times.

I found a non-answer from Microsoft to the same issue (linked below). A Toshiba user posted there yesterday how the problem seems to be that the ASPM device (Active-State Power Management) has been disabled due to a driver incompatibility.

Windows 8.1 Upgrade: Power Plans gone - Microsoft Community

That would make a lot of sense, since backward driver compatibility is the big issue with 8.1. Maybe the power plans are still there, just waiting for that device to be properly supported and re-enabled. You can check Device Manager ( View-Show hidden devices, and View-Devices by connection) if you see any disabled devices there.

The only solution I can think of, is to uninstall Settings and re-install the latest version (reboots after each). John and others have already suggested that solution, so maybe you already tried it

Oh, one other solution: AFTER re-installing Settings, if you DO see a disabled ASPM device in Device Manager, you could try and delete it, then reboot. This will force Windows to re-detect it. Note that there could be a risk that this will break the Windows installation, I don't know. Only to be done on test installations.

 

I don't see any ASPM devices, and I've uninstalled and reinstalled various settings to no avail.

It's probably my own fault, I was installing drivers from different models to see if I could fix my brightness, then I tried a system restore that failed, so I guess I'll have to just restore the image I made a few weeks ago see if that works.

thanks for your help though

 

That's good information, thank you. I was just throwing the idea out there, it's probably something else then.

And you are in good shape, having an image you can restore. Good planning, which pays off!

As I posted back here, I still think there is more to this whole debacle than just Samsung being late with their drivers; and maybe we'll see updates at some point to address the backwards compatibility (from Microsoft) as well as the needed driver updates (from Samsung).

Until then, Win 8.1 is (in my opinion) only for those who have the time and inclination to experiment, and know how to do so in a way that doesn't hurt their working environment. Unfortunately I don't have the time myself at the moment, otherwise I would have put 8.1 on my test partition immediately after RTM, and tested every new driver in SW Update as they came out.

 

I don't know if it is related, but did you get a BIOS update as part of the 8.1 upgrade? Someone has just pointed out that the Series 9 BIOS P09ABK (released last week) messes up the lid close action (etc) for sleep / hibernation. I've checked and it's broken on my computer as well. I don't think it is the same problem as yours but it could be related (I'm still on Windows 8).

John

 

So yesterday I received an update to the settings app from SW Update for my NP780 that got my screen brightness and keyboard back light working with 8.1. The only thing I have left is finding a set of trackpad drivers that allows me to fix the scrolling. The option for revering the scroll direction isn't showing for some reason and I've tried several different driver versions.

 

Try cinchocaines useful advice found at http://forum.notebookreview.com/sam...msung-has-updated-drivers-24.html#post9422181

Worked for me, I don't like the Macintosh way of (opposite) scrolling.

Per

 

Today SW Update offered me a new version (2.2.0.5) of Settings. It introduces a few changes and has some quirks as discussed here (producing one software package that works across a range of notebooks and Windows versions must be a little challenging).

However, one side-effect of the new Settings installation is that it reset my power plans and, now I have put the Lid Close action back to hibernate, it works again. So it may also fix various issues with the Win 8.1 behaviour.

I would also add that Settings includes an adaptive brightness control which I hadn't seen previously. However, be forewarned that you need to turn it off in each power plan that you might use. Initially I did an Fn+F11 and the display went dim because adaptive brightness was still enabled in the power saver power plan.

John

 

I haven't updated the bios, but I had noticed that the lid function to put in hybrid sleep no longer works, that was even before I updated to windows 8.1 though.