M51Sn: Review & Owners' Lounge

Would you lot like to be jealous?

I picked up my M51SN-A003G on Tues and it came with the remote! Apparently what had happened was that it was buried in the storeroom and they found it on Sunday. Monday morning they put it on display and i saw it on Monday arvo. By Tues morning - after reading all these reviews - i decided that this is the notebook for me. Tues afternoon it was paid for and in my possesion...

First impressions were i was amazed what little bloatware it came with. My last one was a Vaio which was almost choked under the pressure of it's bloatware! So, pretty much, all i did was uninstall Symantec and off i went. As to be expected battery life is a bit on the short side but that's only a matter of getting a 9 cell which is going to hgave to be done fairly shortly as it wont even last the length of shortest plane trip currently.

EDIT: The most annoying thing is my accouting software isn't compatible with Vista - now obviuosly not a M51SN issue but annoying all the same which means that if i went to a version that is, they wont talk to each other and i've got 5 years of records that i can't look at. Thank goodness for VMware!

Overall i love this thing, of course it came with 2gig of memory which is going to upgraded to at least 3. I have read that unless im going to go to 64 bit (not an option) that there isnt much point in putting in more. To that end I'll put in 1 X 2gig stick and keep one of the 1 gig's in unless its worth putting in the other one - i can get it fairly cheap so maybe it might be worth it.

Like i said because of the number pad this thing is the best thing since sliced bread since 50% of my work is numbers! The short-list was a Dell Vostro 1200, a XPS 1330, a Vaio TX and a hp 2133. This one won out because of the num pad and i'm glad...

 

I couldn't help but notice this unanswered (or I probably didn't check). Anyway after looking around a short while I found that the problem (or at least mine) was the graphics driver. I'd suggest to update your driver to 174.xx or 175.xx, as they come with the least problems, and most beneficial to your performance. Before I updated, the temp was maxing at about 94C, while average about 90 (playing CS:Source, maxed video settings, HD off). After the update, I got as low as 73, and as high as 82. Pretty amazing difference. So hope that helps, unless someone already answered.

PS. Amazing laptop, for what it's worth, price was amazing too. xD

Also to above, I got my remote too, although took me like a week to see that the receiver was seperate, not in-built LOL.

 

Yay! I got XP again. Looks like it's all working as normal as well with all the right drivers installed. Thanks again Ken for your help!

 

I've been thinking of getting a new laptop sometime in the next couple of months. I've owned a Dell Latitude D620 for the last two years, but I've had nothing but trouble with the blasted thing (the wireless won't work for more than two consecutive minutes, the motherboard once burned out and it STILL won't get power from its own battery even after "fixing" it, and there was a charming little phase when my framerate in World of Warcraft had to be measured in "seconds per frame" unless I flipped the computer upside down), and now I'm starting to find that it won't run newer games anymore. I can't get Bioshock or Mass Effect going above 9-12 FPS even at the lowest settings. It's got a duo core 2.00 GHz CPU and 2 gig of RAM, but I'm now pretty sure the nVidia Quadro NVS 110M graphics card is a piece of junk.

In my initial research, I've heard that the Asus line has a really good performance-to-cost ratio, so the M51Sn seems like it could be a good choice, but I've never been terribly savvy in regards to computer hardware (in case the bit about trying to run games with a Quadro didn't tip you off), so I wanted to ask a couple of questions first. I'm sure most or all of them are really stupid and obvious, but I don't know about this stuff and I want to be careful this time.

First of all, how does the M51 compare with, say, the M50 or G1s? A reference to the G1s was what tipped me off to Asus to begin with, but they all seem practically identical to me. In particular, what are the consequences of going from 2 GHz to the 1.83? Even my current Latitude has the 2 GHz processors, so I'm a little concerned about feeling like I'm downgrading something. Would there be any kind of a performance loss? The prospect of saving three or four hundred dollars is appealing (I'm kind of irate about having to get a new computer so soon after my last one, so I'm trying to keep the cost down), but I'm worried that it might be the sort of thing that might come back to bite me a year and a half from now (like the graphics card problem I'm having right now).

Second, I assume this'll be fine, but just to be safe, what kind of FPS can I expect for games in the calibur of Bioshock or Mass Effect on 1024x768 on mid-to-high settings? I certainly don't need to be running Crysis at maximum settings or anything like that (I don't actually have any interest in Crysis at all), but I'd like to be able to get a nice, solid framerate out of new games and have a few years before I need to start worrying about things being unplayably slow again. (The videos in the first post won't work for me for some reason.)

Third, I plan on using Windows XP (I don't trust Vista in the slightest). Will the XP Professional SP2 disc from my old Latitude still work, or will I need to order one with the laptop?

And lastly, is it possible to use an external monitor with the M51? I always use my D620 with a docking station and an external monitor (I prefer them for a bunch of reasons), but in the pictures of the M51, I don't see a port that looks analogous to the one on the bottom of my Dell that plugs into the station.

I don't have much experience with this sort of thing (especially with laptops in particular...I'd never owned one before the Latitude), so I'd really appreciate any answers or advice people have. From what I know, the M51 seems like a pretty good choice, but after hearing a bunch of people talking about DDR2 and GDDR3 and a bunch of other meaningless gibberish, I want to make sure it has some longevity as a gaming PC.

 

The new BIOS 305 is out.

"Change VBIOS to support DVI dual-link function"

download link:
http://dlsvr01.asus.com/pub/ASUS/nb/M51Sn/M51Sn305AS.zip

 

hi! does anyone know how to install the SATA drivers after XP instalation with HDD in compatible mode? I tried to change it back to fast and my hdd made an ugly sound and windows crashed into a blue death.
thanks

 

Sorry for the late reply, didn't check here again.
Undervolting is basicly lowering the voltage for your cpu. At default your processor runs at a voltage that is safe and stable, but most processors are able to run at a lower voltage. And a lower voltage means less power consuption. This is easy to do and no risk at all because you cannot damage your cpu. If the voltage is to low it just crashes and you have to increase the voltage. By using lower voltages and such I was able to get another 20 minutes battery life. And the temperature dropped about 15 degrees celcius because less power also means less heat. And you don't lose performance because you just lower the voltage, the mhz and multiplier stay the same and they decide your performance.

Use this guide: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=235824
It works great and is really helpfull. It's risk free because you cannot damage your hardware at all, it just crashes, reboots and you increase the voltage a bit. Lowerd my voltage from 1,2v to just 0,95v on the 12x multiplier.

Question I wanted to ask, anyone got any luck with tuning the memory? By default it runs at 5-5-5-15 and 332.5mhz, a bit slow to my taste.



@ Dragonrider: I would get a faster processor, under 2ghz is just a bit to slow, especcialy with a 9500m and 3GB of ram. And yes, mass effect will run at medium with 40fps or more. You can use your own XP SP2 disc. And you can use an external monitor, just connect it to the dvi port.

 

I got my ASUS M51Sn-AS049C yesterday.

The specs:
Core 2 Duo T8300 2.4 GHz
3 GB DDR II SDRAM 667 MHz
9500M GS - 512 MB
250 GB - 5400 rpm
15.4" (WXGA+)
Vista Premium

The cons:
- Battery life is barely two hours
- Slow hard drive (particularly noticeable when dumping files from DVD data back-ups
- I don't think that fingerprint thingie works too well
- Maybe more USB ports would be nice

The pros:
- Looks great, black finish and all
- Nice screen, if a bit too bright on default settings
- Geforce 9500 runs games well. Awesome.
- Truly multitasking computer
- Had little problem adapting to cramped keyboard and touch pad (my first laptop!)
- So far, I have no real problem with Windows Vista

 

See my post above about undervolting, mine does about 20 minutes extra on battery life. Or buy a 9cell replacement.

 

Hello, I see noone bothered to answer your message so I'll try to do my best.

They are not identical. G1S is bigger, heavier, and also flashier-looking since it's intended for gaming. I vaguely remember someone mentioning that the M50 is designed from the ground up, whereas the M51 is based on an F or A series chassis, which is a budget notebook ( Please someone correct me if this is incorrect or I got them the other way around). That doesn't mean that M50 has better build quality than M51, that remains to be seen.

2GHz is not significantly worse than 1.83, you won't notice the diff in real life. Also, older-generation 2GHz will be performing worse than current-gen 1.83, due to architecture differences and cache size differences.

Don't know.

That disk may not work, since it's probably an OEM disk. Even if it does, you're on shaky legal grounds at best, I recommend a new disk.

Docking ports are usually proprietary, so you won't be able to use the Dell docking station. (I don't even think the M5XX have docking ports).

But sure, you can use an external monitor off VGA or HDMI (please check if the M51 has the latter, I'm not sure but I think it does)

 

Hi all.
I've been thinking about buying this model of Asus (but B1 instead of A1). I'm planning to play two games on it: WoW and Starcraft 2. As for WoW I have no doubts of good performance, but, probably to be realesed in the next year (March 31?), S2 is sth completely different.

So far no official requirements have been realesed except for some hipothetical ones:

Minumum Requirements
GFX: GeForce 7/8 Series or Radeon 1000/2000 with 256 MB RAM
CPU: Pentium 4
RAM: 1 GB
Internet: ADSL 1 Mbit

Recommended Requirements
GFX: GeForce 8000 or Radeon 2000 series with 512 MB RAM
CPU: Core 2 Duo or Athlon X2.
RAM: 2 GB
Internet: ADSL 3 Mbit

Optimal Requirements
GFX: Geforce 9000er or Radeon 3000er Series
CPU: Core 2 Duo 3 GHz or Athlon X2
RAM: 2GB with DualChannel mode

http://www.starcraft-source.com/news/Starcraft_2_System_Requirements...._or_not.htm

Knowing the Blizzard policy this may be lowered (assuming its accurate).

So now my question is-how do you think-whether or not this laptop will run this particular game?

Answer much appreciated as this is 50% of my future gaming.

 

Run S2 on medium settings with decent framerates, probably. Run on high settings across the board, not necessarily - most notebooks with mainstream gpus can't run newly released games with all high settings enabled... that's why developers like desktop components .

 

Bad News for M51Sn Owners!

I've noticed since I got my M50Sv, which I believe ships with the same hard drive as the M51Sn, that the hard drive frequently makes a sound like a ping pong ball dropping on a soft covered table or something. Well I was concerned about it and did a little research, and here's what I found out.

It turns out that the sound is caused by what is being considered a flaw in the firmware on the Seagate ST9250827AS drive itself. This "flaw" causes the drive to park the head too often and repeatedly. The drive is engineered to withstand up to 600,000 head parks. Some anticipate that under constant usage this drive may fail in as soon as 8 months of usage.

I've contacted Asus support, and the only thing they said that they could do about it is replace it with the exact same model, which of course will have this same issue.

I like this notebook so much however, that I'm not willing to return it over this issue. So I have purchased an even better and bigger hard drive to replace the current one, and will use the currant one in an external eSATA case just for playing around with.

Here's a link to what Linux users are doing about this problem.
http://seethisnowreadthis.com/2008/05/19/how-to-install-ubuntu-804-hardy-heron-on-the-asus-m50sv-a1/

 

Hi all, I've been reading this forum for a while, but have never really needed to post anything until now. I'm pretty concerned over the head parking of my hard drive as scooberdoober reported. I have a favor to ask of other users if at all possible.

To view my load cycle count on my HD, I downloaded smartmonotools http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/download.html and ran: smartctl -a /dev/sda in the program's command line, at #193, my load cycle count was about 8458 and at #9, 273 power on hours; a load cycle about every 2 mins.

I chatted with seagate technical support, here is the conversation:

Terrance M.: Hi, my name is Terrance M.. How may I help you?
*: i have some concerns with my seagate hard drive
Terrance M.: What seems to be the problem?
*: i believe that the load cycles are increasing too rapidly and this may affect the life of my drive
*: already there have been over 8400 load cycles on my drive after just over 200 hours of operation
*: that the head is parking too often than is necessary
*: should i be concerned?
Terrance M.: Have you tried disabling the advanced power management in the BIOS?
*: no i have not
Terrance M.: That is one thing you can try that is suppose to help with this issue.
*: ok, but will it cause my drive to heat up?
*: or would any heat be managable?
Terrance M.: If you disable to advanced power management?
*: yes
Terrance M.: It shouldn't make the drive heat up anymore.
*: i will try your suggestion, thank you
Terrance M.: Your welcome
Terrance M.: Have a good night
*: you to


I have not tried this yet, but I will and will report back.


EDIT: you know, after looking through the vista power management options and looking around a bit online, the tech support advice doesn't really help. However, a little math did ease my mind. If drives begin to fail at around 600,000 load cycles, and I've had my laptop for about a month, it will be over 5 years of normal use before I reach 600,000 cycles....

 

What a pathetic attempt at customer service that was! He acknowledged the problem, but wasn't willing to really do anything about it. We should be getting free replacement drives now. I just dropped well over $100 to replace this faulty Seagate hard drive. I will never ever buy another one of their products as long as I live, and if at lest given the choice, I will never buy a notebook that ships with one. This company is pathetic. I'm done with them.

 

Nope, you've got the wrong thread.

You want to fill out the FAQ and post it here.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/forumdisplay.php?f=16

 

hi everyone... does anyone know if there's any xp drivers so that i can use the function key on the keyboard? it's really clumsy having to go to volume control everytime if i wanna adjust my volume

 

You should be able to use the same drivers from your driver CD. Install the ATK Hotkeys and ATKOSD2.

 

just got this notebeook. so far so good. still deleting all the added extra programs that was put on. But im just wondering. it came in 2 hard drives split almost 50/50....is there anyway to make one larger than the other? im guessing ill use C: for programs and D: for my personal documents

 

Yes. in the start menu, right click computer>manage>disk management

Shrink the size of D. Extend the size of C. If the Extend option is greyed out, you have to "delete" the Free space volume such that the space is then "unallocated." Then you can extend C.

 

ok, im just wondering, what do you think would be a good size to shrink D: to? (in MB)

 

I expanded to about 200GB for C, leaving about 25GB for D, but I may get rid if D entirely at some point. I don't use D at all...

 

yeah, what would do you use D for? im so use to having everything saved to C:

but it would be nice to keep it organized having programs in one and documents/multimedia in the other.... i just dont know how much I need.. guess its really up to me..but im assuming i need way more for programs.

if i already have programs installed on C: , its still ok to expand it right? nothing will get screwed up?

 

It should be fine. I've had no problems with the vista utility, that's really what it was designed for.

 

alright cool.

also, when you press the internet button at the top, how do you change it to open Firefox instead of IE?

 

I strongly advise to keep at least 2 partitions:

C: for Windows and applications
D: for personal data

There are many reasons to do so, the foremost being that if your Windows dies, you don't need to worry about data backups, USB enclosures etc., you can just kill the old Windows and install over the partition, while your data sits nice and safe on the D: partition.

Other, less important, reasons include less data fragmentation on both partitions, the fact that the partition itself could die on catastrophic OS failures, and make the data unrecoverable, and simply that it's easier to organize things if they are kept separated.

See my Vista guide for a suggested partition setup (roughly C: on the order of 50GB, and the rest for data, D:, and possibly E

 

ok ill check ur vista guide out. thanks for your input.

but my other question still hasnt been answered, how do you make it so Firefox is launched instead of IE when you click the internet button on the laptops quick buttons? also does anyone know how to make firefox be the default for msn messenger?

 

You simply need to make firefox your default browser (there should be an option in firefox itself, I believe).

 

i have made it my default browser, i also went into Default Programs in start menu and selected all extensions for Firefox, although when i look in IE there are 3 extensions selected for it which are greyed out so i cant uncheck them,

these are the 3 extensions

.mht
.mhtml
.url

 

Click start, type "Default Programs" (without quotes) then press enter.

Then open "Set Default Programs". Select Firefox in the box on the left, then select "Set this program as default" on the lower right.

 

i did that already xifer

 

Weird. That has always worked for me.

There is also the alternative of using ASUS Notebook Keys (developed by a user, linked from the Info Booth under Miscellaneous), which offers you more control over what the hotkeys do. I'm not sure it works in Vista.

 

for some reason now when i click my internet button on the top of my keyboard i get an ERROR message saying : Error: cant get environment Variable. and in the box it say 1"

 

Try reinstalling the ATK Hotkey utility?

 

could you expand on telling me how to do that?

btw what exactly is the ATK HotKey utility?

yeah i know, i dont know alot haha

 

ATK hotkey takes care of intercepting the hotbuttons (like the touchpad on/off) and the Fn+F* key combinations, and launching the appropriate actions.

You can uninstall it from Add/Remove Software.

Then, you can go to support.asus.com and see if an updated version has been released for your model. If so, download that, otherwise, use the CD version.

Reinstall whichever version is newer.

That hopefully takes care of the problem.

PS: Not knowing a lot and asking questions is perfectly OK. That's one of the reasons why this forum is here.

 

ok ill do that

+rep!


EDIT: isnt there some sort of program included with ASUS laptops so that you dont have to go to their site looking for new drivers to install? cuz i honestly dont know which ones to choose, i just chose the one at the very top with the latest date and installed it and it asked me to uninstall something...now i dont know what to do =/

EDIT: also is there any programs out there where you can control your fan speed on the ASUS M51sn?

 

There is ASUS Live Update but you're better off downloading stuff manually. Live Update is very buggy, sometimes has memory leaks, and usually updates nothing at all.

About fan, not to my knowledge...

 

Hi all,

I have followed the instructions above and still can't get the audio to work.
I have downloaded the hot fix, as I am new to this, how do I install the hot fix?

 

Look for an EXE or MSI file, maybe the hotfix has separate folders for various languages, then go to en-us or us or en to install, and search for the EXE or MSI there. There also may be OS-specific EXEs, make sure you use the one for your OS.

 

i went to the ASUS DRIVERS download page for the m51sn, i went to latest column and got the latest BIOS download, and inside was a .305 file? what do i do with that?

i also download a Camera_Chicony driver which i dont really know what it does but i clicked on 2ksetup and i got some error saying reading hardware from INI file failed or something along those terms.

any help please

 

BIOS, see link in my signature. Driver seems to be the wrong version. 2K means windows 2000/and possibly XP. If you're using Vista, that's no good.

 

Okay, since you guys all sound like experts, I am going to ask you a couple of questions.

1) Is it safe to overclock my graphics card to 525/1050/451
temps are running at 38C for Temp1 using speedfan and Cores at 68C while assasin's creed paint and a few other programs are running?

2) When playing video games, this stupid little box sometimes pops up and starts displaying chinese or japanese characters as I hit keys on the keyboard. Here is a screenie:

How do I get rid of this thing, it's super annoying.

Thanks for your input!

 

1. As long as your game is runs stable and without any artifacts, then your overclock should be fine. 68C is also a good temp when gaming.

2. You activated the language bar by pressing crtl + space. You can disable it in your "text services and input languages" in your control control panel.

 

Thanks Emporium! Much gratitude.

 

Im looking to get a laptop cooler as im using this laptop as my desktop in college next year so i want to make sure nothing goes wrong. what laptop cooler out there is the best made for the ASUS M51sn? i know some are better depending on the location of the fans and i wanted to get opinions from people who probably already have one for their laptop..

 

How do I apply the hot fix Ken?
I have downloaded the hot fix and it gave me 20 folders with differernt languages. I chose the english one. What do I do next?

 

Try download it form file front:

http://files.filefront.com/KB835221exe/;6068840;/fileinfo.html

 

Or there should be an EXE or MSI file in the US folder, start that one and it should install the hotfix.

 

Great thread! My M51Sn arrives from NewEgg tomorrow with the T8300 CPU and 4 Gigs RAM. A few quick questions if I may...

1) How much longer do you get with the 9 cell vs the standard 6 cell battery?
2) I'm considering going up to Windows Vista Ultimate.
-a) Are there any big issues upgrading?
-b) Is the performance any better?
-c) Are all the drivers available?
-d) Is there a guide showing where to get Vista 64 bit drivers drivers?

Thanks