Asus M51Ta Owners' Lounge

There is no place for fan boys in this market anymore, but I agree with you. I have always bought AMD. They run fine, and somebody has to keep them in the market. Otherwise Intel is going to have a monopoly and that isn't good for anyone. Sure it isn't the fastest, latest, greatest, but it works and its good for the market.

On another note, I used the clean install method on this forum to install vista 64 and its running smooth. I can now access all my ram, and even though the driver cd said vista 32 bit only all the drivers work except the VGA drivers.

I downloaded the latest 64bit catalyst from ATI, and it works fine.. but even though both my gpu's are showing up in device manager. Catalyst is only recognizing one. If anyone has any ideas for me, I am listening. I want to get it worked out so I can still have the nice battery life.

 

hey tshroom, i too have got vista x64 loaded on my m51ta. I cannot get my onboard nic to work. What driver did you use specifically? The drivers on the asus website arnt working for me.

 

nevermind. got it. It was actually installed but didnt show in device managaer or network adapters. Strange.

Tshroom is right this lapper works fine with x64 vista. Hopefully it will get better and better with catalyst updates from ATI

 

When you install vista x64, what license key do you use, the same one that's on the sticker used for the 32-bit version?

 

Yes using the method on this forum your original license key will work.

Now if I can just get both GPUs to work again.. They are all okay in device manager but catalyst is saying my 3200 is disabled. Arrgh.

 

Tshroom, uninstall 8.8 and load the vga drivers on the CD that came with it. Mine is working fine.

 

Ok I will give it a try and report back later.

 

Yes. Please keep me posted. I have just run into another problem. I set my power profile to allow my laptop to stay on and not sleep when i close the lid to my m51ta. Last night i was doing some torrenting and closed my lid to shut off my lcd while i slept. When i woke up, i opened my lid and the screen wouldnt come up.

I tried using the function LCD button, closing re-opening the lid and even going into sleep and out again but alas, i had to cold boot to get my lcd to come up again.

Anyone having this issue?

 

Sorry again for the repeated posts but I found the problem. I uninstalled the drivers from the Asus Cd and downloaded the ones from the asus site and tried them. Seems to have fixed the problem.

 

If you get it again, try putting the laptop into standby and bringing it back again. Usually it brings the screen back on.

One or two of my machines also had this problem with older drivers.

 

My M51 has arrived. I was wondering, vista says at the bottom right that I don't have a genuine copy, but the product key page says it's been activated. This is my first experience with vista so I'm not really sure what the deal is with that.

My first order of business is to download an installer and make a clean install. I was wondering if you used the technique outlined in this thread http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=120228 so as not to re-activate your license? It's for a Dell but i'm not sure if the same applies to Asus.

 

I would recommend a Windows recovery in this case (use F9 during boot, or the recovery DVD). If you still get the problem after that, contact ASUS.

 

Well, it seems to have gone after a couple of restarts. Probably needed to call home first. I'm planning on installing vista 64. Is it possible to make an image of that to be put into the asus recovery partition? In other words update the recovery with my own backup image free of bloatware and other useless baggage.

 

I think it's too complicated to be worth it.

 

I see. I might as well wipe it then considering I have no plans of using the default asus install. what's a good program for creating/restoring backup images for vista? I use ghost 2003 in dos for my winxp machines, but I understand it doesn't work for vista.

 

I think Acronis True Image will do. Make sure you don't restore from larger partitions onto smaller ones, I hear it has problems with that.

 

ok thanks.

 

Does anyone have the battery life comparison for the 6-cell and 9-cell batteries using the hd3200?

 

I installed the vga drivers from the cd then updated to 8.8 catalyst and everything is smooth now.

I didn't know Asus had M51ta drivers on their site yet. Links?

 

I just left the original restore partition, so if I do have any problems I can restore to 32 bit quickly then do the clean install of 64bit over again. I think its a solid plan.

 

I did a bit more research last night. Apparently, you can use ghost2003 to backup and restore vista. You just have to run the following lines in the command prompt before creating the image:

Code:

bcdedit /set {bootmgr} device boot
bcdedit /set {default} device boot
bcdedit /set {default} osdevice boot

I haven't tested it yet though. I'm still waiting for my download to finish. MS's transfer manager doesn't seem to auto-resume when it gets cut. I woke up this morning expecting it to be done. Well, it seems sometime during the night my connection dropped and I had to resume the download manually. What a waste of time.

I'm not sure I should keep the recovery partition. Doing so would mean I'll be setting aside 20gb for the asus recovery and my ghosted image.

EDIT: Ok, I chickened out and kept the factory recovery partition, and ghosting works.

I tried updating the catalyst drivers and encountered the same problem as tshroom. It only installed the drivers on the 3200. I couldn't even manually install the drivers for the 3650 as vista claims that it already has the best drivers installed, the generic VGA drivers. I had no choice but to revert back to the ones on the Asus dvd.

Last thing: Power4gear doesn't seem to be working properly. I can't remember how it worked in the factory installation, but in my wife's laptop, it automatically changes power options when I unplug the charger. It isn't doing that. It only switches GPU.

 

I too have bought this notebook, and am disappointed at the performance of windows vista.
i have installed xp successfully, al except for the video drivers. mobility modder doesnt work, vista drivers dont work, beta xp drivers from ASUS dont work, omega drivers dont work.

has anyone else installed windows XP?

 

That was my original plan, to install XP. But I was surprisingly pleased with Vista so I stayed with it. Also, I couldn't be bothered to hunt down the drivers one by one. Of course, I did a clean install to get rid of the bloatware.

As for the ATI drivers, I;m not so sure how to install them either. I tried upgrading my catalyst drivers with the latest ones but for some reason, the 3650 card wasn't being detected properly. I had to revert to the drivers that came with the CD. Since the hybrid graphics is relatively new technology, at least the ones that don't require a reboot, there is a possibility we're not installing it the right way. Or Asus did some things that require specially tweaked installers from them. Hopefully when ATI's hybrid graphics gains popularity, we'll have modders doing the job for us.

 

I had similar problems installing the latest ATI drivers for the HD3450 in my dv5z. I forced it by adding the PCI device IDs to the driver .INF file and manually selecting the driver from the "Update driver" dialog. There's really no risk here since a single ATI driver actually supports all of their hardware...

 

would you be able to expand on this a little more? i'm not at my computer right now, but i know nothing about .INF files (or how drivers work in general) and the best i would be able to do is open it up and look for something obvious. with the chance that it's not obvious, would you be able to give a step by step?

 

Well, the new 8.9 catalyst drivers are out. This one works fine with the GPU switching thing unlike the 8.8s. You guys might want to give it a spin.

You will need to run Mobility Modder first, though.

 

Can someone do a full review? I have been looking at this lappy for some time now and would love to see some real-life pictures, in game screenshots w/fps, and full benchmarks! Thanks a bunch!

~Josh

 

I installed Asus factory CD drivers then upgraded to 8.8 and that worked for me. I am about to upgrade to 8.9 and see if it all runs smoothly. I will let everyone know.

I haven't been on in a while because of Hurricane Ike, but things are starting to get back to normal around here.

 

We don't have any super dedicated owners yet, but I have posted a few benchmarks, and I ran cpuz. It is a solid machine. My only complaints would be the weight/size, but I knew it was a desktop replacement when I bought it. I guess I will have to snag an Asus N10 for my portable needs. I have lugged it around quite a bit and it still looks new so that is a testament to its durability.

 

I still don't have power at my house all food went bad and only got ice into a cooler yesterday...I'm at my university in Dayton, OH doing school work now. The N10 looks good, but I do work in Excel a lot so that would be horrible! Thanks for the info.

 

Why use mobility modder? Catalyst has built in support for the 3200 and 3650 mobile chipsets.

 

Anyone tried installing Linux (or running it from a liveCD) on this laptop?

I'd like to buy one, but I need to use Linux and I've read there are some problems with ACPI (see http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=899327 for details).

Has anyone experienced these problems (or better, not experienced these proplems)? With what linux distribution (and/or kernel version)? With what BIOS version (as ACPI-related problems are often related to bios bugs)?

Thanks

 

Seems like Asus has a 205 BIOS version out on their website. Im about to try it as im running 204 (the one that came on the laptop)

I am having some intermittent fan and LCD issues.

Ive noticed that if i go into standby on battery, when i power up, the fan runs @ 100%. Even if i reboot the machine. I have to power it off and then on again to get the fan to operate normally.

Also, sometimes when i come out of standby, my LCD wont turn on. Ive tried to go in and out of standby, open and close the screen and even fn + f7 (LCD hotkey). No Luck. Again to fix this i have to power off and on again. Kind of a pain.

Ill report back if the new bios fixes these issues. Im thinking they are ACPI related and a quick bios fix.

 

Updated bios and I am still seeng the fan issue.

Can anyone else report on this? I am running Vista X64 Ulitimate

 

I haven't updated my bios, but i have the same problem with the fan revving up coming from sleep mode. It doesn't happen all the time, but it happens. It seems to slow down after a while but I'm not 100% sure on that.

I also have the issue of the LCD not turning on coming from sleep mode. This only happens when I have the lid down when it goes to sleep. If the machine goes to sleep with the lid up, it wakes up with no problems.

I'm using Home Premium x64.

 

i have the same problem with the lcd not turning on from sleepmode, does someone has a solution to this? or what am i doing wrong

 

banana and imanol are you guys using legit versions of vista or bios modulated ones?

Moreover, have you reported this issue to ASUS? If enough of us do, perhaps they will get a fix going.

 

I'm using the license key that came with the laptop on a reinstall of the 64-bit version. I'm not sure what you mean by "bios modulated."

I haven't reported these issues yet though. The LCD not turning on is the major issue for me as sometimes I have opened files that I am unable to save. The fan speeding up is no biggie since it seems to slow down after a few minutes. Can either of you confirm that? Besides it doesn't seem to happen often.

EDIT: Do you think we can rename this thread to m51ta users lounge?

 

i use vista home premium 32bit (preinstalled) and the standard bios version, not the recently released new version.
at the offical asus forum there is already a thread about this topic but there is no reaction yet of asus on this issue.
i'll try to update my bios tomorrow, maybe it's fixed then.
but i am glad that my fan is working properly, that would truly annoy me...

edit: oh i see bacon612 you started those threads

 

Ya i did. I actually had an A8JS before this M51 and the same issue with my fan. Asus never responded to a thread i created about that one either.

As it turned out, a genuine copy of vista fixed my A8JS issue. But it seems like there are a few m51 users that are having the same issue regarless of Vista versions. Hopefull a fix will come soon as the fan and lcd thing are really irritating. Standby is wonderful and i cant use it.

 

i hope so, too.
its a great and solid notebook and fixing these issues cant be that big deal.
well lets see what those asus wise guys do or dont and till then i have to change my automatic energy saving settings : /

edit: bios update doesnt fix it because i already have version 2.05 installed, my fault.
but i think i will write them an email on that lcd issue and in case of they dont ignore me i might get some more or less useful information

 

Hey there everyone.
I'm planning to order my M51TA laptop during the weekend.
I would be glad if You could tell me, is it worth buying it, 'cause unfortunately i don't have another 1000$ to buy another one in 2 years
Is its cooling system proper? I' ve heard some words about the bad cooling system in asus laptops. Tell me it is not right
Thank You in advance
I'll be back with some more questions soon

 

i havent noticed any cooling problems while playing crysis for a few hours.
so you dont have to be scared that you laptop would burn itself, but i wouldnt recommend you to touch the area around the fanexit : )

 

alright.. many thanks for the instant reply..

best regards
C U later

 

I've turned this thread into the Owners' Lounge for the M51Ta -- since that's what it has become, anyway.

Will be moving it to the Owners' Lounges forum in a second.

 

i've heard many people reviewing this notebook saying that it does great with games, but i have had nothing but horrible performance. i've realized that my graphics card only runs at 315mhz (just over half of what it should).
has anyone else had this problem? or any ideas on how to fix it?

 

Have you tried a reinstall and updating to the latest catalyst drivers? Is it possible that you might be running your games using the 3200 IGP and not the 3650?

The only games I've installed are The Witcher and the Sacred 2 demo. They run fine at 1280x800 mostly medium, some high, settings, 16x AF, but no AA.

 

yea you should check your settings and update your graphicdriver.
i played crysis and crysis warhead on 1024*768 and medium settings without any problems

 

i've updated everything, reinstalled a half dozen times, tried omega drivers and all.
i still get 40-50 fps average in portal. and thats with medium settings.
should i attempt to RMA and ask them to replace the GPU, or what?