2013 Series 7 chronos / Ativ Book 8 15" owner's lounge (NP770Z5E / NP780Z5E / NP870Z5E / NP880Z5E)

Hoping someone has a cure for what ails me. After installing my SSD (thanks again for all the help I recvieved on these boards), and running SW update, everything has been runnign fast and smooth except Civ V. Every so often I will tap the next turn button and it will crash to the desktop. If I repeat the moves that led up to the crash exactly it will crash again. If I change a previous move I seem to be able to go forward till it happens again. I have changed the auto save feature to be every turn rather than every 10 and now do not worry about having to replay a significant number of turns. But it is a pain to get back into the game as much as every 15 or 20 minutes (sometimes can go hours till a crash) and there have been a couple of times when I have had to make less then ideal changes to strategy to avaid the crash.

I have completely unistalled Civ V and Stream (twice) from the computer and reistalled it, which has not helped. This has led me to believe that it is not a software issue, but rather something going on with the way my computer is running the software (could be wrong)

I also late last night after reading some of this board, set the Civ V in catalyst to high performance, but have not played enough since to determine if this helped.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be much appreciated.

Phil

 

Based on suggestions made to me - I believe cloneing the drive will result in not being able to use the f4 recovery function. I used a USB to had the samsung recovery software make an image of the disk to then USB drive and then used that to recover the original install to the new SSD. It was pretty straight forward and took me about an hour and a half from start to finish. If you search on my name on teh discussion board for this laptop 90% of my questions and responses deal with this question.

 

Got the new Series 7 Chronos and sometimes notice erratic performance of the touchpad - has anyone else had this, it seems to happen when the machine comes out of sleep. A reboot or resetting the touchpad settings usually fixes it, but its very annoying. All the newer Samsung Touchpad update haven't cured it permanently.

 

@boiboii

Yeah, like padler said, it's better to make a factory image on the usb stick (which should be about 16 GB), install the SSD and then recover the image on the disk. Took half an hour to me too, with no issues at all.

Just check the tutorial in the first page of the thread to be sure that you do the BIOS configuration as well, in order to allow the drive to boot properly for the restore.

mine seems to be working fine!

 

What if I wish to retain the recovery f4 feature in bios? Is the even possible?

 

I believe the f4 function is bios. You use it before the system boots while showing the initial bios imiage. To retain that functionality, you need to burn the imiage using the samsung recovery program to a USB (need a 32GB one, 16 will be to small). Here are teh steps I followed:

Thansk for the reply - if I understand you correctly the steps I would follow would be

1. Recover to the factory settings using f4 and follow prompts.
2. make an image onto a 32GB USB stick runing from the Samsung recovery program.
3. Swap out the drive
4. Upon reboot go into f2 bios and set it to boot from the USB stick. (see other posts on how to do this)
5 Boot from the USB stick.
6. Use the Samsung Recovery Program to make and image on the new SSD
7. Reboot and f2 to bios to reset the boot priority back to the SSD
8 reload Civ V and Lightroom4 (optional)

 

F4 actually relies on a proprietary link stored in the partition table in order to boot the software on the Recovery Partition (SRS=Samsung Recovery Solution). That is why using 3rd party imaging and cloning programs normally causes F4 to be lost: These programs only clone/restore the physical partitions, but not that F4 link.

Using Samsung's own Recovery Software itself is the only known way to preserve the F4 link. EITHER by creating a bootable backup on a USB stick (as described by several posters in this thread, including the OP); OR by using a so-called USB Admin Tool, which must be created in Recovery Management Mode, as described in this post (that procedure is based on SRS5 but has been verified to work with SRS6 as well).

 

When I first received mine I notice how good the touchpad worked out of the box: very responsive, very fluid, and consistent. Then SW Update updated the driver. Since then I have also found it to be erratic and much less responsive. I haven't been able to solve this issue yet, but fiddling with the touchpad settings made it much more usable.

 

I am no gamer, so I am probably the last person who should answer this...

1) For temps, HWiNFO and HWmonitor -- as John described.

2) For framerates, I remember using FRAPS back in the days when I tested gaming performance on my old HP HDX18.

None of these will display in the taskbar tray. But FRAPS is (was) able to display an FPS overlay inside the game.

And that's probably as far as I should venture into this topic

 

I use msi afterburner, you can display gpu temps in the taskbar and in-game. You can also use it to show fps in game and other numbers.