Battery / Power Related problem w/ WinXP

[Mike]

I have an eMachines M6807 laptop w/ an Athlon64 processor. Upon updating to
XP/SP2, I'm getting all sorts of weird battery/power related issues. For
instance, the control panel applet is very sluggish to swap tabs and I can
no longer hibernate when I close the lid, it will just sit there and do
nothing. If I manually choose hibernate from the shutdown menu, it will
start writing to disk and the statusbar will fill all the way up, but it
will never shut off, I have to power it down manually.

I ended up uninstalling SP2 and the problems ceased. However before I
removed the SP2, I started disabling / removing devices to see if I could
narrow it down. I got to the APCI battery stuff and I removed it, let it
reboot and things seems better, though the battery no longer showed in the
systray, etc., so I had to turn it back on and problems happened again.

Is this a known problem with AMD notebooks & SP2 by chance? FYI, I have the
RTM version of WinXP/64 and I installed it on a free partition and it has
the same battery / power related problems, it will not hibernate and the
control panel applet is very sluggish on swapping tabs.

Anybody have any advice on what I could try with this? I was hoping to try
out XP/64, but with the power problems, that's going to be a pain to
actually use on a regular basis and the SP2 stuff seems integrated in the
64-bit version, so I can't just removed it.

Thanks,
mike

 

[Galen]

In Mike <[email protected]> had this to say:

My reply is at the bottom of your sent message:

I have an eMachines M6807 laptop w/ an Athlon64 processor.

<snip>

Well... For starters, it IS an eMachine... But, that being said... Try their
site for an updated APCI (something newer than SP2) pack and that will
probably cure your problem.

Galen

 

[Mike]

Well... For starters, it IS an eMachine... But, that being said... Try

their site for an updated APCI (something newer than SP2) pack and that
will probably cure your problem.

True, but I considered them a lot better before they were bought by Gateway.

From what I can tell, the problem appears to be BIOS related. Based on this
conversation:

http://notebookforums.com/archive/index.php/t-38565.html

I found and downloaded the BIOS release 0F07.P00 (ARMIA BIOS) (OEM for EM)
and flashed it and now things are much better. Previously I had also had
problems w/ my USB mouse not being seen on startup, I'd have to
unplug/replug and that is also working now.

I got the BIOS here that I flashed on my M6807 and its said to also work w/
M6805's too.

http://www.rmecc.com/~v2/em/

I used this BIOS file:

Arima* W730-K8 DTR* 0F07.P00 05/20/04 0F07P00A.ZIP

This also seems to fix my problem w/ WinXP/64.

thanks,
mike

 

[Galen]

In Mike <[email protected]> had this to say:

My reply is at the bottom of your sent message:

From what I can tell, the problem appears to be BIOS related. Based
on this conversation:

Excellent and I'm glad that you found it. I strive to avoid starting
troubleshooting in the BIOS unless it's glaringly obvious that that's where
the problem lies. I find that there's a great deal of risk in flashing the
BIOS and unless there's a specific need (such as in your case it seems) to
do so that I never actually recommend it. I guess it's my not wanting to
give advice that might result in irreparable damage to the computer unless
it's the last possible solution. I don't want someone to come back to the
thread when they've bought a new computer and really really hate me. <g> I
think that I've been doing this since the latter half of 2002 in the chat
initially and then in the NGs and I've only actually once recommended
someone flash their BIOS. Even then I only did so because they were using a
laptop which has battery power built right into it.

Galen