aussie's 8890 review - Page 2

Day 2 - get over initial shock and TV tuner fix

Well after getting over the initial shock, I actually managed to do some real work (well real play then) with the system.

The first item was the TV Tuner as a few people have problems with it, particularly non-US owners.

My system came with WinXP Pro preloaded so all the drivers and TV studio software were already present. If you live outside the US and want to use the TV Tuner on a different video standard (PAL for example) you MUST reinstall the TV Studio software. The drivers can stay but the TV software has to be removed then resinstalled before it will work.

Why? Ok - the TV module in the 8890 can accept video from two sources:
- external coax cable (ie. your normal TV cable)
- S-video in
When Sager install the software for you, they test against the US TV standard NTSC. If you live outside the US your TV video standard will be different.

To find out if your setup is incorrect do this:
Run the TV Studio software.
Open the control panel (click on the left bottom button).
Click on the "spanner" icon (setup) and you will get a configuration popup.
Click on Video Standard, you will get another popup.
You will notice there are two inputs available.
The top one labelled Ext. should be greyed out.
The bottom one is labelled S-Video and can be changed.
If the top one does not match your country's standard you will need to follow the fix below. (Mine was set to NTSC).

To fix it, do this:
Firstly make sure you exit the TV Studio software.
Select Start menu -> All Programs -> TV Studio -> Uninstaller
Click yes to uninstall.
Let the program complete.
Find the TV Studio CD and insert it in the DVD/CD drive.
It should autostart and bring up a menu.
Select TV Utility Software. This will bring up an installation wizard.
Select yes to all the questions then you will be presented with a list of countries to select from.
If your country is listed, click on it and the installation wizard will do the rest.

If your country is not listed go here and find out which video standard your country uses.
Once you have that go back to the installation wizard and select any country that uses the same standard. You will find that the TV module will set its channel frequencies properly for you.

Once you have reinstalled check the "spanner" -> video standards panel again and your particular video standard should now be showing up in the "Ext." box.

All you need now is a *good* aerial. If I plug into my house connection I get a really good signal. Using one of those rabbit ears units does not work for me. Your mileage will vary as they say. I am in a poor reception area so I have to use a roof mounted aerial.

More on the TV Studio software

After scanning a couple of the other threads on the forum it now appears that the new TV studio software is being shipped (mine shipped 19th Sept with Version 4.20.0.5 the new version is 4.24) which works with HyperThreading.

Another cute feature that seems to be different from ayasin's original review is that you can resize the TV screen to any size you like.

To enable this feature:
Run the TV Studio software
Open the control panel
Click on the "spanner" icon (setup)
Click on "Display Surface Mode"
Select "Overlay" and exit.
You can then resize the TV view like any standard window.

Edit: I discovered the TV Studio sw disk shipped with the system is labelled 4.22. The above version number is what is reported from the "about" button on the control panel.

Hi Sektor,
From what I remember you are in Denmark - correct?
They use PAL B/G, the same as Australia (B = VHF, G = UHF frequencies).
If you follow my instructions and remove then reinstall you should be able to select Australia as your country. This should then show up as PAL-B/G in the "video standard" popup.

If it doesn't, you may have been shipped the wrong tuner.

Just installed the new TV Studio software (v4.24) from Sager's web site. No obvious change in functionality.

One thing though is the reinstallation will forget all your configured channels and you have to do a rescan.

Sektor, I noticed when I reinstalled the new version of the software that Denmark is listed. It would appear you were shipped an incorrect TV module. You will need to contact Adam and have the correct module sent to you.

This confirms Adam's comment that the TV tuner modules are *very* specific as to the video standard they support. When you install the TV Studio software check that the video standards listed match your country's standards. If they don't you have been shipped or ordered the wrong type of TV tuner module.

Re: I normally have ZoneAlarm and AVG for my personal use.

Its called VisualZone and does really cool tricks like allow you to backtrace morons who try and hack your system. I caught one guy on Telstra's BigPond (one of our cable suppliers) and he was taken down big time - I think he is cooling his heels inside with big bad Bubba right now .

Another cute program is La Brea. It traps wannabe hackers in a sticky slooooooow mess of web uselessness, effectively capturing them just like the tar pits of La Brea, until you reverse trace them and have them taken down too .

Same with Spam Cop. It has proved very successful in bringing down spammers. I actually look forward to getting spam emails - I get a chance to hammer their asses to the wall .

The power adaptor

For those of you who have an 8890, a recommendation about plugging in the power adaptor to the back of the laptop.

When you connect your 8890 to AC power, do it in this order:[list=1][*]Firstly make sure the power adaptor is NOT connected to the AC outlet[*]Plug the DC plug (4 prongs) into the back of the laptop[*]plug the AC power cord into the power adaptor[*]Plug the AC power cord into the wall socket[/list=1] Why you ask?
Good question. The 8890 sucks a bit of current thru the DC power lead. The particular connector that Sager has chosen to use does not provide really good insertion insulation. What that means is if
you happen to accidently misalign or short out the connectors when you insert the DC power lead into the back of the laptop, with the AC power adaptor on, you will zap the laptop (possibly causing damage) and zap the power adaptor (either blowing a fuse or shortening its life).

This is the likely result.

Also why do I recommend plugging in the power cord to the wall outlet last? There is a thing called in-rush current (you elec-eng guys will know this - if you don't look it up, sheesh what do they teach at Uni these days). Your power adaptors are switching power supplies which use a specially designed circuit to chop up the incomming AC power and convert it to DC. When you plug AC into these bricks there is a large initial current flow which can arc the AC power connectors at the power adaptor end. By plugging in the AC cord to the power adaptor first then the wall socket the arcing effect does not occur inside the power adaptor. You will find if you follow the order I first listed your power adaptors last much longer and will not short out.

Day 3 - getting down to the BIOS

antonov (the system's hostname) has now been running continuously for 3 days. I like to burn my systems in for at least a week and check everything works correctly. I do this because when I set my systems up they become reference systems for my clients. I have to trust my system explicitly and know it intimately so I can advise others on how to operate their equipment. So here goes...

Performed two battery conditioning cycles. Firstly I turned off the automatic hibernate on low battery (control_panel -> power_management), fully charged the batteries (middle LED at bottom of screen showing green) then disconnected the power adaptor.

First battery discharge cycle with moderate use (no gaming just looking thru folders etc) gave 1 hour 50 mins.
The second power cycle gave just over 2 hours.
The manual recommends a complete battery discharge cycle once a month or after 20 partial discharges.

Now onto the BIOS.
I am very thorough when it comes to documenting the systems I support.
It comes from years of looking after mainframes. I make it a habit of documenting every single setting, adjustment and nuance so that we can get these systems back online as quickly as possible.

Before I began documentation, I decided to do the BIOS upgrade that Adam posted.
Worked like a charm - all you need is a blank write enabled floppy.

So what did I learn?
To get to the BIOS you only need to press the F2 button once whilst the Ultra100 BIOS screen is doing its detection thing. The initial BIOS/POST screen disappears rather quickly, however...

In the BIOS->Advanced settings there is a setting for "Boot logo screen". If you enable it, you get an "Intel Inside" logo come up rather quickly after power on. What I found was that if you enable the boot logo, the power on self test (POST) information either does not show up or disappears super fast.
Disabling the "Boot logo screen" allows a bit more time for the POST screen to display. With the extra delay you can then press the PAUSE/BREAK key to freeze the screen so you can read it.
To continue just press "ENTER".

For anyone who does not already know, if you change the setting for Hyperthreading you will need to reinstall the operating system.

In the BIOS->Security settings, I initially had both the supervisor and user passwords clear. If the supervisor password is clear you cannot scroll down and set the user password field.
If you do set either password, you can clear them again by entering the current password and then, when prompted for a new password, just hit enter. If you do set a supervisor password and forget it - you are stuffed. The laptop has to go back to sager to get the CMOS reloaded .
I also noticed that if you do press F2 and have both a user and supervisor password set, the BIOS determines who you are (user or supervisor) only by your password.

In the BIOS->Boot screen you can change the order in which the laptop searches for boot disks. Handy if you have extra disks in the laptop and want to boot a different OS without having to install a multi-boot loader such as GRUB (a Linux loader).

I normally run my laptops with a password on boot. I just adds a bit more security to the system as well as making the laptop totally useless to anyone that might think it would look good in their hands rather than mine.

Edit: After flashing the firmware my BIOS details are:
Phoenix BIOS version 1.00.03-T2
KBC/EC Firmware 1.00.02
Edit edit: Due to a problem with random GPU memory artifacts showing up as small black triangles, I updated the BIOS to 1.00.03-T7 which fixes the problem.

with the disk/RAID controller firmware from Promise Technology Ultra100 BIOS still at version 2.01.0 (build 39)

Setting up RAID arrays

Well time to try out the RAID controller.

/EDIT: 2005-03-25 Major Bug Fixed: RAID arrays sometimes disappearing.
You MUST MUST MUST set both disks to MASTER not cable select not slave.
This will solve the problem of the RAID array randomly losing its configuration and saying it is not functional at startup. What shows up is one of the disks (normally disk 0 under the battery) will disassociate itself from the RAID array and shows up as "free" when you look at the Drive Assignments in the RAID configurator.
/END EDIT

I had ordered the 8890 with 2 disks, but with RAID disabled.
The primary disk was a 60 Gbyte 7200 RPM drive.
The secondary a 60 Gbyte 4200 RPM drive.

Why that config? Well rather than using tape to backup my system, I decided to use external disks as my backup media.
Since it was cheaper to buy a 60 Gbyte disk thru PC Torque than any of the local Australian suppliers, I included it in my order. The other benefit of doing it that way was I would get the second disk mounting bracket for when I did eventually buy a second 7200 RPM disk for setting up RAID 0 when they drop in price.

Because RAID was disabled, Sager on installing XP Pro, loaded it on the primary drive and only formatted the secondary drive.
By removing the primary drive from the 8890 I was able to play around with the RAID controller, practice rebuilding the OS and not lose my original disk.

Most people are not aware that if you are using RAID 0 or RAID 1 you only require one drive to get you started (RAID 3 or 5 requires a minimum of 3 drives).

/EDIT: DO NOT DO THIS FOR RAID. Both disks must be set to MASTER.
NOTE: The primary drive in the 8890 must be set to be drive 0 with the other two drives (if present) to be set to "CABLE SELECT" mode.
(The following instructions are applicable to most 2.5" notebook disks but please double check the configuration jumpers of your particular disk).

-----------------------------------
To set the primary disk to drive 0:
On each of the Hitachi and Toshiba disks there are four pins located on the immediate right of the main connector (hold the drive so the connector is facing you and the 4 pins are on the right).
Remove any jumpers that are present across the four pins.
(I will see if I can arrange some pictures)

To set the secondary disk to "cable select":
Hold the disk as before and put a jumper horizontally across the bottom two pins.

Do not set the secondary disk to drive 1, it will not work in the 8890 particularly if you decide later on to add a third disk (which also must be set to cable select mode).
For reference, you set a disk to drive 1 by placing a vertical jumper across the right two pins.

-----------------------------------
The neat thing about the 8890's is that you can order them without RAID being enabled and then at a later stage just flick the switches, run the RAID setup program and reload your OS.
As I had ordered my system without RAID enabled I had to turn both the switches under the keyboard on. See Adams pictures on how to do this. Also remember when you change the RAID switches you need to reset the BIOS.

Before rebooting, I removed my primary drive and kept it and the small mounting screws in a safe place.
When you boot for the first time with the RAID switches enabled you will go thru the normal POST screen showing you BIOS version and so on, then you will see a screen for the "FasttTrak 100 Lite BIOS".
This is the software that supports the Promise RAID controller built into every 8890. First the BIOS checks for IDE disks then if this is the first time you have enabled RAID it will issue a warning about not having any RAID arrays being setup. It will then initialise itself, reboot and then come back to its search screen.
At that point you can type <Ctrl-F> to enter the RAID configuration program (for those of you who know anything about mainframes and RAID arrays we normally have to boot from a floppy to get to this point. Hence why I wanted to buy a system that supported floppies).

By default, the automatic RAID configuration will setup two disks for RAID 0 (stripe). If you want to change this to RAID 1 (mirror) you will need to delete the RAID 0 array before you can create the RAID 1 array. Use option 5 to delete the array and option 1 to create a new one.
The new array can be created as well as initialised as a boot disk. Select the create and initialize option. Once the RAID array is initialized the system will then reboot.
At this point the Win XP recovery disk was needed, so I could rebuild the OS.

For those interested, the default stripe width is set to 64 KB (this cannot be changed in the RAID config utility).

For more information on this check out page 7-23 of the user manual and the detailed manuals referenced at the bottom of that page. If you go thru and read those manuals you will be impressed with the capabilities of the RAID chip Sager put into your 8890 laptop. It is up there with the best RAID controllers in the business.

RAID controller specs

I have extracted from the manuals the key features of the RAID controller to give you an idea of what it is capable of:
------------------ Specs ------
Disk Array Features
·Supports RAID 0 (striping) or RAID 1 (mirroring), RAID 0 & RAID 1 non-coexist.
·Offers double sustained data transfer rate of attached drive(RAID 0)
·Supports Ultra ATA/100 drives and backward compatible with Ultra ATA/66/33 & EIDE drives (identical drives recommended)
·Supports "hot" swap of failed drive
(RAID 1)
·Data handling optimizations include tagged command queuing, elevator seek and load balancing
·Offers transparent data recovery and rebuilds drive in background
·Arrays are bootable with built-in BIOS
·RAID 0 or RAID 1 function is supported
by the Master channel of PROMISE ATA RAID.
The HDD connects to the Slave channel of PROMISE ATA RAID are to be as ATA HDD.

Host Bus Interface
·32-bit PCI interface compliant to PCI V2.2, up to 33MHz bus speed and 133MB/sec burst data transfer rate.
·PCI bus mastering DMA with hardware scatter-gather engine for maximum performance
·PCI Plug n’ Play support
·Supports multiple, concurrent data requests from OS
·Interrupt Channel used: PCI INTA#
·Co-exists with built-in IDE channels or other SCSI controllers

·Ultra ATA/100 Interface
·Supports Ultra ATA/100 specification of 100MB/sec transfers with CRC error-checking
·Two independent IDE channels support up to four UDMA/100/66/33 or EIDE drives
·Onboard LBA BIOS auto-identifies and optimizes drives speed
·Supports UDMA 5/4/3/2/1/0, DMA 2/1/0, PIO 4/3/2/1/0 modes
·Intelligent DMA Engine supports DMA disk drives with bus mastering

Compatibility & Utilities
·FastCheck GUI monitors status of array
-On screen and audible alarm in event of failed drive
-Identifies failed drive for replacement
-Adjustable array rebuild rate
·Built-in FastBuild BIOS utility for configuration and maintenance
-Auto configuration and optimization
-View/Create/Delete array
-Rebuilds data on replacement disks

------------------ General ----
3.Bus mastering design takes full advantage of multi-tasking, multi-threading operating systems and greatly improves performance.
4.Provides scatter/gather DMA mechanism that complies with Revision 1.0 of the Programming Interface for Bus Master IDE Controller.
5.Scatter/Gather mechanism supports both DMA and PIO IDE drives and ATAPI devices. Allows byte-boundary memory region during Bus Master DMA transfers which benefits operating systems or applications, which has odd byte boundary memory transfers.
6.Dual independent data paths with read ahead and write posting for each channel supported for dual IDE channels to balanced bus loading and optimal performance.

------------------ IDE interface ----
4.Supports four individual access timings and protocols for four drives attached to IDE bus.
5.Programmable active pulse and recovery time of the read/write command for data access timing.
6.Independent access timing for command block register and data register.
7.Supports enable/disable of the primary or secondary channel via hardware strap or software programming.
8.Hot plugging supported.
9.Supports Read/Write DMA queued command.
--------------------

Installing Win XP Pro and the original drivers

It was at this stage I realised what those two floppies that came with the system were for.

They are copies of the software on the Drivers CD which also comes with the system.
Without the floppies it could get really nasty because if you are at the point of restoring the OS, you probably can't even access the Drivers CD in order to make a copy of the RAID drivers to floppy (you need a working system to do this don't you). So make sure that you keep those floppys in a REALLY safe place along with your product recovery CD.

In goes the XP Pro disk and boot the system.
One thing that is disconcerting is when the installation screen asks you to press F6 to specify a driver, it keeps on going loading all sorts of other things before it stops at a menu. At first I thought it had missed my F6 keypress, so I rebooted again. Later I discovered that it will eventually stop, so press F6 once and just wait.

If you are setting up a RAID system (as I was even though I only had one disk installed, you will need the RAID Driver floppy. The ATA Driver floppy is used for non RAID (ie. single disk) configurations. You will know which one your system has installed by the second boot screen you see after a reset or power up. If you get a message "Ultra100 BIOS Version xxx Promise Technology" then you have the ATA driver installed. If instead you get the "FastTrak Lite" message, then the RAID drivers are installed.

Once Windows loads its drivers, you then have to decide how to partition your disk.
Because I wanted to play around with Linux, I decided to partition my disk into 3 partitions:
20 Gbytes for XP formatted using FAT32 (So Linux can read it - Linux has problems reading NTFS).
20 Gbytes formatted under NTFS for playing with video (this should be on a seperate 7200 RPM drive)
17 Gbytes for Red Hat 9 Linux

(You only get 57 Gbytes of effective disk space on a 60 Gbyte disk ).

Now the boring bit of entering details into the installation process.
I must admit on the 8890 the speed at which it completes tasks is really excellent.
The basic installation takes about 30 minutes.

Now for the drivers. I changed the XP Pro CD for the Driver CD and started installing in the sequence in the manual (Page 4-9). I realise that as of the 28th Sept there are new drivers on Sager's web site, but I thought I would do this reinstall purely from the CD's supplied. I will do another clean install using the new drivers later on.
There is an error in the users manual wrt installing the LAN drivers. The Driver CD does not have a SETUP.EXE file. You have to install the LAN drivers by going to Control Panel -> Add new hardware.
I did take note of Adam's initial comments about installing the non-WHQL ATI drivers (the non-WHQL version on my CD was 7.93 - this of course has changed with the release of the newer WHQL 7.93 version).

The drivers took about an hour to install - mainly because I was surfing the forum at the same time . At this point I now have a pristine XP Pro installation. Other software like TV Studio is next along with all the Nero applications.

Hanko, I am formulating a theory about the blotchyness and its likely cause. I believe I can make it appear and disappear in both cases (those that have it and those that don't). I will post once I have some more data.

How to reset the fan speed

I noticed on one of the other threads, Dayrl had a suggestion for anyone experiencing constantly "on" fans.

Reset the BIOS settings.
(Make sure you write down what they were before you do this of course).

Luckily I have not experienced this effect but it manifests itself as the fans coming on straight after power up, even if the system is cold. Given the fans are controlled by very low level thermal sensors and BIOS software, it makes a lot of sense.

AverTV Driver updates - success at last

After having a nightmare with the TV tuner drivers I finally uploaded the new 4.24 version from Sager's web site.

Before doing anything run the Uninstaller in the TV Studio software. This will remove just the application software, not the drivers. The drivers are handled later.

Once you download the package and run the executable, it will expand out into a set of subdirectories which contain both drivers and the application programs like TV Studio.

Because of XP's auto restore/checkpointing facility you can't delete a driver then install another one. XP will recover the old driver before you get a chance to install the new one. What you have to do is to use the driver update process in Control Panel -> System -> Hardware -> Device Manager.

Expand the "Sound Video and Game Controllers"
Then double click on each of the AverTV components.
This will bring up the driver management popup.
Click on the Driver tab and then Update Driver.

When the update wizard prompts for the location of a driver, specify that you will supply the location and then browse the directory tree where you originally unpacked the new version. The driver directory should be easy to find.

I found it was pretty tedious doing each AverTV module in the Device Manger. Once all the drivers are installed, a quick reboot then run the setup program in the unpacked directory tree to install the TV Studio software.

The main thing to check is that you get audio and video signals and then check you can record using the VCR function. The drivers on the supplied CD (version 4.22) crash when you try to record. The new (version 4.24) software works as advertised as long as you follow the driver update process described above.

It should also be noted that the old 8887 TV software is version 4.23. It does also work but again make sure you updated the drivers as descibed above.

Edit: one final note here. If you are doing a clean install of XP which means the old TV drivers will not be installed in the first place you can load the newer TV Studio software and drivers (v4.24) without having to worry about the manual upgrade. In other words the above procedure only applies if and only if you are upgrading the TV Studio software and drivers.

Noise in the audio

Just picked up some info from shoeman22 on a solution to funny beeping sounds in the audio output.

It turns out that the IR port interferes with the audio card. Turn off the IR port and the beeps go away.

Good one shoeman22. 8890 owners salute you .