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Excellent you made the upgrade...In fact, I was hoping to get such a battery life with the MT models, but, according to what you say, I may be getting just over 4 hours with such an upgrade ????

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't this be the next best thing second to having a reliable NP4750 ?

Darn right my friend.

So far my 4750 has been a good and reliable unit. I expect it to be even better with this CPU upgrade as I still believe nothing kills a laptop faster than high temperatures and physical abuse. I can safely say that my unit now is low risk for premature failure.

Regards;

MS

Congratulations msantos, and many thanks! This is fabulous for all of us.

Sager gets no thanks for this. I am disgusted with them , but that will be another thread...

I have a 4750 with a 3400+. I just installed the 2.02 bios and it went fine. My machine had been hanging, particularly when using the wireless. I think this will fix it. I also ordered an ML-44 today (from Monarchcomputer.com), so I am following in your footsteps just as fast as I can.

About the overclocking. I didn't seen anything in the 2.02 bios that allowed any overclocking. The 2.02 screens actually look identical to the 1.01 that I had before. Are you doing the overclocking in the bios, or some other utility?

I have a database of genetic data on this machine (not much time for gaming). I will post some benchmarks with the software I use: Blast, zlib, and Visual FoxPro.

Thanks again. I am all smiles today.

Steve

Yes, I strongly recommend purchasers of Sager branded machines to think carefully. The 9750 comes to mind. The 939 socket is soon becoming obsolete and buying a Sager 9750 is not an investment in the future if our 4750 is to serve as a support example.

Too bad, because my company just bougth 8 D900K's (9750) from another vendor who povides better support and answers emails more promply (9 more to come in the next 10 months).


Nah, I use clockgen utility for Via KT800 series. The Bios is still too neutered to allow tweaking.


Regards;

MS

What a pity I have to spit a mere 650$US for a mobo replacement after just more than a year....
I could have saved that for a MT Turion

Second thing, I have 2 batteries for the NP4750. Is anyone familiar with Li-Ion technology so I can link them together without harming any of the components ? Contrary to certain 'smart batteries' manufacturers, the NP4750 ones do deliver current even if the controller is not powered. However it may play a role while charging the battery. Not having any further information, I tought about some strategies:
First, just link the positive and negative leads in parallel, and, for recharging, a circuit that just flips the controller on on the "slave" battery
Second, let a more sophisticated circuit "sense" "master" battery level, then connects the second one to the motherboard whenever it reaches a predefined low level. The level could be sensed by detecting wether the battery LED starts flashing.
If this one seems the best solution to me as the function of the batteries are not altered, I don't have enough electronics knowledge to design a flip-flop circuit that would be able to let pass the numerous amperes from the batt. The kind of circuit I'm searching for is a kind of bi-stable relay that would draw only a negligible amount of energy to keep its state, different from a normal relay that needs to be fed electricity to keep on of its states.

Does someone here have enough knowledge to help me out, or is a specialized circuit available for this purpose ?

The bottom line is getting a longer battery life, even if that means added bulk.

Most LiIon batteries nowadays are manufactured with built-in circuitry that regulates the charging (maintenance) profile and offer the host components (mainboards, ect) a good level of instrumentation. I believe the ones on the D470K follow this pattern. According to most manucturers, you must deliver a steady and proper power feed to the battery in order to ensure proper operation and long life cycle.

Unfortunately... and from my experience, what you propose may involve alot more than just a collection of flip flops and op amps. All in all, it would perhaps be a good exercise from an academic perspective

Regards;


MS

MS,

A new question came up in the Bios thread about hard disk speed after moving to 2.x bios. Can you check your Device manager -> IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers -> Primary IDE channel properties -> Advanced settings to see what your Current Transfer Mode is? Mine is UDMA mode 2 with 2.02 bios.

Others have reported that theirs was mode 5 before upgrading the bios, and they used to have much higher burst transfer rates.

I am wondering if your 2.04 bios is giving you mode 2 or 5, and can you run HDTach and report your transfer speeds? You do have one other variable - the processor upgrade. But we can look into that later. Please reply in the bios thread if you can.

Thanks.

Steve

I haven't been using HDTach lately to measure disk throughput because it does not measure external volumes very well.

Instead I use HDTune. Since last summer HDTune has not been reporting any significant changes in peak and average rates with the different BIOS upgrades. I upgraded from 1.04 -> 1.05-> 2.02 -> 2.04.

My primary IDE controller is also set to UDMA mode 2. In fact, because I barely use the internal drive that much I probably do not notice any changes in throughput when under normal operation. Hummm....

Maybe there's something fishy in here ?!?


MS

MS,

Thanks for checking. So we see that your 2.04 does not fix the UDMA mode 2 problem that 2.02 has.
I don't know how significant this is in real life, such as how quickly a program launches, or how long a file copy takes. I just rechecked the benchmarks you posted. It doesn't look like any of them access the disk much.

I think I will have to leave this to others that want to try 1.0x vs 2.0x bios. My ML-44 will be here Wednesday, so I will be putting that in regardless. I assume I should have 2.02 or 2.04 for that. Too bad we don't have a vendor that cares. I was thinking of checking around for Eurocom forums and posting something there.

I too use external drives quite a bit. I have 3 USB and 3 Firewire drives. I have had most of them plugged in at the same time when reorganizing things. I have also seen problems with the system hanging or other drive failures when accessing chained firewire drives. I am looking forward to trying it again.

-Steve

You are right. Actually, this is pretty significant because UDMA 2 means a maximum of 33Mb/s as opposed to UDMA 5 which entitles us to 100mb/s. This would mean that the advantages of having a 7200 rpm drive are somewhat negated when compared to the slower drives.

I tried applying the registry hack to manually set the UDMA mode to 5 and 4 and after a reboot the system would always start on UDMA 2.

I even tried updating to the latest 4in1 from VIA - no go.
I tried removing the device and rebooting - no go.
I even reset the machine configuration - no go.

Typically manufacturers will force a lower UDMA in order to prevent instabilities and lock-ups.

Windows XP will also choose a lower UDMA if it finds a problem with the maximum supported mode. But in this case we're emplying that it must be the BIOS upgrade that did it. Perhaps, Clevo chose to force the setting to apease the vendors and to lower the reported incidents of instabilities and lockups. Clevo is the one that presumably produces and releases the BIOS updates. The vendors simply offer the updates at their own discretion.
In this case there must be an easier way to override this setting- at least for those of us who were not experiencing problems.

Regards;

MS

First of all, I assume the setting were changed to get the HD cooler when running at DMA 2.

The Medion BIOS 105 is the BIOS with the huge AMD64 screen at start up. Eurocom's 1.05 might be different, but I haven't tested it yet re. DMA modi.
Please note that my Keyboard BIOS hasn't been changed with the BIOS, so I'm running an older one (1.00.01) as others have reported here:
http://www.notebookforums.com/showth...=105448&page=2

Is there a Win prog. that reads the used DMA state correctly under all circumstances, e.g. by accessing the HD directly - SiSoft Sandra ?

In any case, the "105" BIOS seems to have disappeared from Medion's support side for CAD2000 = MD95074 model.

For further readings, here are some links re. hardware:
http://tebl.homelinux.com/laptop/
http://pantagruelon.free.fr/md42284.html

and here is the MS article mentioning the problem switching from a higher DMA mode to a lower one:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/817472/EN-US/
for Windows XP they mention a Hotfix only available on request. Anybody out there who has it and can test?
-- update -- I had success and found it - look here: http://rapidshare.de/files/14108117/KB842520.exe.html
it's for US / english version of XP only, so I can't test it on my German language system.

I've found more help here, but haven't tested yet:
http://dvdxcopy.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/276642
and
http://erpman1.tripod.com/current/atapi-xp.html

BTW, my atapi.sys (from windows\system32\drivers) is version 5.1.2600.2180
No change in DMA mode when changing to atapi.sys v5.1.2600.1106 from SP1, but keeping the same viaide.sys, v1.00.01.01.
FYI, my storprop.dll is v5.1.2600.2180, my pciidex.sys is also v5.1.2600.2180.

I have the same 1.01

It looks to me that the hotfix is included in windows XP but requires the registry fix to activate it. I tried the registry fix and it didn't help. I then uninstalled the primary IDE and (after 3 reboots to reinstall it), it also didn't help.

Haven't found any way to change it yet.
Just a minor update for now.
The Eurobooks BIOS v1.05 seems to be similar to the Medion BIOS, it also set IDE to DMA 5 and show again a burst speed with HDTach of ~90 MB/s.

By now we all tried roughly similar approaches with no results, I've decided to try the "direct route" by contacting the vendors. Stay tuned, maybe we'll get a good answer on this and perhaps even a solution.

regards;

MS

Any word on the 25 watt turions? I'm thinking of grabbing the MT-40 (2.2GHz/1MB) to replace my 3400+

Thanks!