N56VZ-DH71/RH71 Owners Lounge - N56VZ w/Windows 8

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Originally Posted by ashwinpkd

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Does anyone know whether this laptop support more than 8 GB. The processor surely does i guess.

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It does. It's just that Asus locked the frequency to 1333, locked the bus:dram ratio, and set specific latency timings in the bios. Instead of making it automatic, using the dynamic bus-speed option, and having spd determined timing.

So what happened was that someone bought a pair of ram-chips with higher latency timing, put them in, the computer doesn't boot. And they call asus and say "I bought 16 Gb ram, and the computer doesn't boot". And Asus says: "AAAAAHHHH! What's going on, what is this "RAM" you speak of!". And they panic and say on the specification page now that max 8 Gb ram is supported. And say, to everyone who want support for add-ons and upgrades, that you get no support if you don't use the stock setup.

The thing is that if you bought a new ram-chip with 8Gb, And that had incompatible timing, then the laptop won't boot either. Just don't tell Asus, or they'll have a crisis and say their laptop is incompatible with ram in general or something.

So yes, it supports 16Gb. But on the standard bios settings, you need ram with the same or better latency timing supported for 1333Mhz. There's a thread in the asus subforum where the helpful guy from gentechpc helped test a few types that work. The problem so far is that you won't have better timing than what is there already.

(I was going to make a custom bios setup to get around this. But I haven't found a way to reset the cmos, so I'm not going to risk bricking my laptop over this. I can't afford to send it in for two weeks every time I make a mistake and the thing doesn't boot. Same thing with anyone who install it - if the ram-timing suddenly fails, we need a way to reset the cmos anyway. So .. difficult.)

This is interesting. Computer Upgrade King on Amazon has listed a TON of different spec'ed machines. I would imagine they are the ones who are upgrading them, but is the CPU upgradable? They saying they have 2.4 - 2.8gz chips available on a multitude of configurations.. 16GB Ram, 8 GB ram, 128GB SSD, 750GB HDD, 256 SSD, 512 SSD.. Again, I assume they are doing it, which is interesting given these machines dropped off the market about a week ago.

Amazon.com: asus n56vz-rh71: Electronics

Looks like the design uses a socket which would make it upgradable, but it looks like a complete disassembly is required.

Hi all, thanks for all the great posts - it has been interesting reading this thread.

I've rejoined the laptop world after a years absence (well apart from my work win7 laptop, but that doesn't count). I purchased the N56VZ-S4242 15.6" Laptop in the UK which has arrived pre-installed with Windows 8. Now as much as I like new OSs I'd very much like to have the system as a dual boot with linux being the other OS on the system.

In my day this would involve burning an ISO onto a CD and booting from the CD (after tweaking BIOS if necessary to boot primary from the CD drive). Then GRUB would do the rest for the boot load and I could pick from Windows or Linux to boot from upon powering up the laptop.

No more! I've been doing some reading up and I think that my system is using UEFI and secure boot. Although this appears to secure windows installations the cynic in me doesn't half think that Microsoft / suppliers are making it hard to install other OSs intentionally.

So I am pretty new to this so bear with me. Firstly, the system won't boot from CD by default so my natural thought is to try and get into BIOS to change this. There is no information on boot-up that tells me what button to press to get into BIOS. The manual says F2, ASUS support say F2 and some dude on the internet says 'DEL' - none of these work. I've tried all sorts of keys/combinations but every time it just boots to Win8. Should there even be a BIOS even with UEFI?

When I try to install Ubuntu from windows - via Wubi - this installs OK but on boot up it reports some MBR error and I can only get to Windows 8 via what I assume is the UEFI interface. (It has ubuntu as an option but this fails to load with the same MBR error).

So I think secure boot is enabled and the disk is GUID so my linux install can't cope with it (how's that for a simplistic view!)

Does anyone know how I beat this - i.e. get linux on my system as a dual boot option alongside windows 8? Any help appreciated or general pointers in the right direction. I thought putting in a SSD drive would be my biggest challenge with this purchase - never thought it would turn out to be getting linux on it....!

Cheers
Rob

Classically it is "del" to enter the bios, this is true for many desktops, however for some reason it's F2 for many notebooks including asus.

However with UEFI enabled you have to tell windows to let you into the bios:

Access the BIOS/CMOS in Windows 8 -Tutorial- - YouTube

Just a quick question. How do I get drivers to install in windows 8? I have downloaded a couple from the asus website, but can't tell if they are installing. I get the zip file, open, go into the exe file to start it, it start through the process, then bam, it says it's done. Also, do you have to uninstall the old drivers first, or can you install over what is there?

Lastly, do you have to update each version of bios one at a time, or will the last version have all the info from the previous versions??

One more question. How do I know if which drivers need updated? Doesn't windows have a utility for that?

Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk 2

You only really need to update a driver if you are having issues. The exception is graphics drivers which you can get straight from AMD or Nvidia which can give performance increases.

You can tell devices that don't have drivers installed in device manager.

You tend to install drivers over the old set, and it if it says it is done then it likely is, not all drivers are as complicated as graphics drivers :)

Just got the n56vj. Wondering about dvd recovery disks....how do I make them. I don't see theA1 Recovery Program in windows 8.

I haven't tried to boot into the recovery partition....I think I read you can make disks there but some have had poor luck in creating a good image backup.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Meaker

Classically it is "del" to enter the bios, this is true for many desktops, however for some reason it's F2 for many notebooks including asus.

However with UEFI enabled you have to tell windows to let you into the bios:

Access the BIOS/CMOS in Windows 8 -Tutorial- - YouTube

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Thanks Meaker, you're a star.

Finally got there in the end - I've got Windows 8 and Ubuntu as boot options under GRUB 2. It wasn't half a struggle though. Even after I managed to disable 'Secure Boot' ("PC Settings", "General", "Advanced Settings", restart, "Troubleshoot" "Restart to UEFI Firmaware") the 'BIOS' bootup options didn't not let me select the DVD-ROM until a few reboots letter; eventually I was able to kick off the Ubuntu installer.

And then once Ubuntu was installed I tried to boot via GRUB2 boot loader into Windows 8. This would only work after running this application from apt-get in linux:
grub2 - Windows 8 wont boot after installation of 12.10 - Ask Ubuntu

I've always thought Microsoft to be OK but I think they've gone a step to far on this one - it's something Apple would be proud of. It feels like they are trying to prevent other OSs being installed on hardware that I've purchased. Who are they to dictate what I run on my new laptop? i've read that on ARM hardware you can't even disable Secure Boot, how much further will they go?

https://www.linux.com/learn/tutorial...onable-benefit