K53TA.. The best deal ever... could be!

I still use this laptop every day. Last year I had to transplant it into a new case (ordered from China), and the replacement keyboard is a little flaky, but I have no reason to replace it yet. Hopefully nothing major fails now that I've said that. Running latest Windows 10, and other than having to disable ULPS to fix boot times, its been quite good. Using patched BIOS, so only problem there is USB3 port doesn't work.

I have noticed that with new Ubuntu installs it has a VERY long boot time. Have you found this also. I'm pretty sure it's dual graphics related, but haven't found a solution.

 

My USB3 port works great with patched BIOS
Linux is my on HDD so I understand boot time correlates to HDD speed but haven't tried it on main SDD yet. And haven't had any special patches despite described in ARCHLINUX DOCs concerning RADEON and kernel:
add line below without quotes to grep at boot or in /etc/modprobe.d/radeon.conf

"options radeon modeset=1"

 

Hmmm. It was a BIOS file that I got pages ago from this thread. I might look into it more if the port becomes more of a necessity. Thanks for the Linux boot pointer.

 

Hello my friends. After a long time I found my k53ta, with problems, but now I can recover. I have an EPROM recorder. I am looking for a dump of the k53ta BIOS but I can not find it.

 

Hello fellas, Its still alive and running alike but the sign of wear is there, the Dedicated GPU 6650M (Whistler XT) is EOL. It showed artifacts few months back and freezes the system, I just switched everything to iGpu 6520G. That worked until a Windows 7 Update failed to update and crashed, After which it randomly BSOD during startup. I just keep hibernated this thing now a days.

There is a possibility of powering down the 6650M Physically severing the circuit but A modified bios with 6650M disabled would save a lot of hassle.