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.

 

Hello guys I'm new to this thread. I would need some help with the bios flash to enable SATA3 speed.

When checking the current bios installed I can see version 216 but that was never released by ASUS.... and I cannot flash it to the modded bios 214. It will always freeze on the Force to update BIOS?

I certainly have the k53ta version. Is there someone who is able to explain what is wrong with my laptot?

CPUZ: https://imgur.com/a/qYU06RY
Bios Freeze: https://imgur.com/a/aexOTcS

 

I got tell you one thing,
do not update the BIOS File, if you dont face any prbl. like the slogan: Never touch a running system.

But yes, I got the ASUS X53SV and must say, it´s running in dual boot mode with WIn7 and Win10 for years, stable like hell.

 

I actually went ahead and managed to install the Sata3 speed bios afterall. The problem was that the flash drive I was booting the new bios from was not FAT32 formatted. After I formatted it, it updated with no problem.

The result is that the read and write speeds literally doubled and now Win10 boots in 8seconds.

Incredible speed for such old machine

 

If you can't flash it then that probably means something's wrong with that modded BIOS, or the flasher can recognize that the digital signature mismatch its checksum after the binary had been altered.

 

Wow. This thread is still going and that's pretty awesome. I last checked-in about a year ago (10 posts back).

My K53TA is still running under its new owner (my brother). Keyboard and mouse are pretty shot and due to the age of the case I am too afraid to open it up to even attempt to fix it anymore ... just because it may end up breaking loose the little metal pieces that are glued in place that you unscrew/screw things to. Its main use now is for FFXIV (an mmorpg) when traveling and occasional other things.

That laptop is actually right next to me at the moment, as I was having some issues getting Win 10 updated to 1903 on it, but success! I am doing an SSD upgrade on my newer (2014) laptop, and after the upgrade will be using the existing SSD for the K53TA. The old K53TA is actually not a bad performer at all with an SSD in it for general stuff. For such an old laptop, it was way ahead of the curve for its time.

For shiz and giggles we tried using K10STAT to OC it this week (K10STAT hadn't really been used after the laptop left me around 2014). It worked for a short while then BSOD, lol. The performance was pretty awesome though with the OC though but couldn't run stable with FFXIV.

If anyone was ever successful in overriding the fan speed to manually control it via software, please chime in (not with recommendations of things to try, because I have tried software... but please respond to the thread if you've actually successfully controlled or forced the fan to be max speed, and what you specifically did... it'd be much appreciated!). On my newer laptop I can override the auto fan speed by just taping a special switch on the laptop and it goes into loud turbine mode to keep the laptop really cool.

Cheers!