asus-ul30 team mailing list archive

[matteo malvezzi <randomas@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hallo everyone, I was just browsing the nvidia driver forums to see if there was any news and came across the following:

"If someone from NVIDIA could please help improve support for the
GeForce G210M on the ASUS UL series of computers, it would be greatly
appreciated.



I can confirm that changing the BIOS configuration on an ASUS UL30VT
makes the G210M graphics card usable, though at the same time it
seriously degrades the I/O performance of the hard drive. More to the
point, I upgraded to a SSD drive with which Linux will typically boot
in less than 4 seconds, but with this BIOS configuration the boot phase
increases to a whopping 27 seconds. A similar degradation occurs when
awaking from standby.



Again, could someone from NVIDIA provide some input into the matter? At
the moment, I have absolutely no idea what causes the problem with the
driver when SATA operation is not worsened.



Specific instructions on how to change the BIOS configuration:

Start the computer and press F2 to enter the BIOS Setup UtilitySelect Advanced > IDE Configuration > SATA Operation ModeChange the configuration from Enhanced to Compatible

This is applicable to version 210 (2010/03/11) of the BIOS. The
description for this configuration provided by the BIOS Setup Utility
is:

Select "Compatible" to set serial ATA channel at IDE
mode for OS not supporting NATIVE SATA controller like Windows XP &
2000 or it will run into BSOD when installing WIndows.All problems are applicable to the nvidia-current Debian package version 195.36.15-0ubuntu2 and 195.36.24-0ubuntu0sarvatt2.



Finally, this was tested on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, kernel version 2.6.32-22-generic."

Links:
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=2248270
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/archive/index.php/t-150768.html

I haven't tested these solutions yet, I use my machine for work and can't afford to risk a stable system (still running 9.10) at the moment. 

I would be grateful if someone could confirm this news. I'd also like to know what it entails with the rest of the machine, I already know that disk I/O takes a big hit and results in slowdown booting and resuming from suspend, I'd also like to know how it impacts battery life, how can we decide to boot back to the intel card (so we can use the nvidia switch-off module and powertop to get ~10hrs battery life). 


I'm sorry I'm not able to help directly at the moment, but real life is kind of getting in the way. 

thanks in advance

Matt 





 		 	   		  
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