**Official eMachines M68xx Thread**

[mudboy]

It looks to me like the hinge crack really IS cosmetic. If it bothers you, try a little superglue. Personally, I'll live with the crack for another year and then take it back to BestBuy for an "upgrade".

Pete

 

[ChuaChua]

Originally posted by: TeejayV
If i were to put electrical tape to hold the cracks on the hinges, i wonder if that would keep it from falling apart. (j/k) I live in Canada, and it might be a bit expensive to have my notebook sent in to be repaired by E-machines). Is there any other alternative i can take, or any self repair method that one of you guys might be able to point out to me?

Thanks in Advance

Teej

The Best Buy dude in Portland, OR told me that Futureshop obeys Best Buy's extended warranty service. I haven't tried it out yet, but I might in a couple of months to get a battery as a backup.

 

[chief72]

Everyone, I saw a shader tweak (via HardOCP) that boosts Doom 3 framerates on ATI cards around 15% or so: http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14874
It has a howto to mod the pk4 yourself, or if you scroll down there's a file you can download and put in your base folder. Looks like a win-win situation - boosts frames on ATI cards with no apparent change in quality.

My timedemo run (m6809)-
640x480 med w/o tweak: 30 fps
640x480 med w/ new shader: 35 fps

As far as general performance, (video o/c to 400, 215) it's playable at 800x600 mid, relatively smooth at 640x480 mid. I wish overall framerates were a little higher, but the only big problem I have is stuttering, presumably from texture swapping. I would kill for a gig of RAM right now. But in the meantime, anybody figure out any tweaks that work particularly well with these laptops?

 

[epi117]

well thiis was ny watch baseball games weekend and using wireless 54 .0 mbps , games from mlb.com ran sweet, didnt have one disconnect.

 

[AVSpec]

I am not able to overclock my M6805 as it only lets me go up to 9.0?

 

[ThunderPC]

You don't overclock using the multiplier. Use the FSB (HTT).

 

[AVSpec]

Were do you do that at? I thought you had to use ClockGen which I downloaded but it only lets you change the voltage and the Multiplier. If I move the HTT slider and then set it nothing changes.

 

[ThunderPC]

Under the "clocks" section of ClockGen. It is listed as HTT. You must hit "Get Values" first.

 

[AVSpec]

Tried that, it shows 1804.09 and I can move the slider and then hit set values but then when I get the values again they are back to what there were?

 

[stevenmh]

I discovered something odd this weekend. Zone Alarm's newest build, 5.1, hosed my M6805 and I had to restore. I got my software reinstalled then went to redo clockgen. I clicked on CPU-Z first to verify I was running at full speed, and found it was already running at 220x9 = 2.0GHz, which is what my OC settings are. So apparently it changes this at the BIOS level somehow, and there's no need to have an .ini file run at each startup.

Since ZA just hosed my laptop AGAIN, I'll have an opportunity to confirm that the OC settings will survive a system restore and don't require Clockgen to be reinstalled.

 

[ThunderPC]

I noticed that a while back also steve. It does eventually reset to the default though (after a few restarts or maybe it was after a complete power down). I thought it was odd to even last through one restart. My first though was also that it was changing the BIOS instead of just "software overclocking". But since it does eventually reset to default, I doubt it actually "hard changing" anything at the BIOS level. The fact the it made it through a full system restore is intriguing though.

 

[rx7ey325]

I was updated drivers on my m6805 to play Doom3 and was running the new omega video drivers. I manually overclocked the video to 300, 200. Doom3 was working great until I started playing around with the control panel and updating new sound card drivers. Now, not only does Doom3 not work, but NONE of my games work. A screen of random colors comes up and my machine freezes up. I thought I fried my video card, but all my other applications that are video card intensive work fine. My system would not restore to a previous date, I reinstalled all the default controllers, reinstalled directX, but to no avail!! This is really frustrating me....please help!

 

[Connoisseur]

Originally posted by: rx7ey325
I was updated drivers on my m6805 to play Doom3 and was running the new omega video drivers. I manually overclocked the video to 300, 200. Doom3 was working great until I started playing around with the control panel and updating new sound card drivers. Now, not only does Doom3 not work, but NONE of my games work. A screen of random colors comes up and my machine freezes up. I thought I fried my video card, but all my other applications that are video card intensive work fine. My system would not restore to a previous date, I reinstalled all the default controllers, reinstalled directX, but to no avail!! This is really frustrating me....please help!

errr...dude 300/200 is default clock speed for the 9600 in the m680x series.

 

[Aratharn]

Anyone else installed SP2 and having problems? My M6805 no longer powers off correctly at shutdown. The event log says that the APCI embedded controller is not responding and that I might need a new BIOS.

Also, the little internet and e-mail buttons do not work after installing SP2. Bummer.

 

[AVSpec]

So what OC speed is most of you with the M6805 running at?

I finally got mine to OC by running MSCONFIG and turning some of the crap off that these things come with. Cant wait till XP 64 bit comes out so I can nuke and pave and get rid of this junk.

Running at 2.0GHz now with no problems what so ever... should I take her up higher?

 

[justshawnf]

Originally posted by: Aratharn
Anyone else installed SP2 and having problems? My M6805 no longer powers off correctly at shutdown. The event log says that the APCI embedded controller is not responding and that I might need a new BIOS.

Also, the little internet and e-mail buttons do not work after installing SP2. Bummer.

I loaded SP2 on mine ealier today and noticed the same thing. I also experienced lockups (which I didn't have pre-SP2). I noticed after I loaded the HP wireless drivers mentioned earlier in this thread that my boot time increased a lot while the network drives loaded and thought the problem I was having earlier might be related to that, but I didn't check the event log like you did. Guess it might be time to load the BIOS upgrades also referred to earlier in this thread.

I knew I should have set a restore point before installing SP2. What the hell was I thinking?!? heh

 

[Irish80122]

Is SP2 out now, or is it still the release candidate 2? I have SP2 RC2 and am waiting until SP2 comes out for good to reformat my drive. Can you tell me if the final is out, and if so, where to find it?

 

[Aratharn]

Yes, SP2 is definitely out now. You can download the full install directly from Microsoft (they discourage single machine downloads, but really, you probably want the full SP2 install rather than the piecemeal download from windows update). I found it at:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?amp;displaylang=en&familyid=049c9dbe-3b8e-4f30-8245-9e368d3cdb5a&displaylang=en

Also, you can find the same file at http://sp2torrent.com if you want to use BitTorrent; I did verify the MD5 reported on that site was the same as the MD5 for the file I downloaded from Microsoft.

Yeah, I have noticed not so much "lockups" but it seems there are certainly "delays" from time to time during operation as well as the shutdown bug. The shortcut buttons are annoying but the shutdown failure is a showstopper for me...I have uninstalled SP2 for now.

Fortunately, I made a full backup last night before installing SP2, because I had a feeling it wouldn't go smoothly.

 

[justshawnf]

Well, I found out a couple of things that were useful in my upgrade to SP2 (and otherwise).

Upgrading the BIOS of my M6805 to the M6811 BIOS posted here eliminated my lockups/long delays. I made a backup of my current BIOS (in case), but all is well so far. I panicked for a sec when it said is was updating the BIOS again on the first reboot, but I remembered that the site said that happened with another version, so I just let it go. I booted much quicker after that(no long delay).

While I was googling Broadcom drivers, I found someone that said the Dell drivers worked fine for him. I got them from Dell's Site.
Loaded up just fine and restored the function of my wireless status light (which the HP drivers had disabled).
Well, the HP driver didn't really 'disable' the light, it just made the light flash on for activity instead of stay on
when the wireless NIC was enabled.

To load the Dell driver, I had to 'Updated' the driver and point to the 'AR' folder in the extracted drivers. The setup program didn't see a device that it recognized. Of course, my wireless card is now named 'Dell Truemobile 1300 WLAN Mini-PCI Card' but what do I care. I haven't rebooted yet to see if the network drivers still take a long time to load.

Sorry if this was mentioned before. I don't remember seeing it in this thread. The Broadcom driver is 3.40.69.0 dated 4/9/2004.

 

[Connoisseur]

Hey guys, if anyone was looking for it here are a few more Doom 3 benchmarks on my trusty M6805. All the tests were done with the following settings:
Athlon 64 3000+ @ 2.0Ghz
Radeon 9600 64mb @425.25/222.75
the Doom 3 Shader Tweak
Zone Alarm 4.5 and Mcafee VirusScan running in the background
I used the "timedemo demo1" command to run the benchies:

800x600 Medium Shadows On
Run 1: 28.0
Run 2: 28.1

800x600 Medium Shadows Off
Run 1: 42.6
Run 2: 44.6

1024x768 Medium Shadows On
Run 1: 20.0
Run 2: 20.0

1024x768 Medium Shadows Off
Run 1: 30.9
Run 2: 32.8

:shocked: I was amazed that the game ran on my 6805 at 1024x768 and medium. Looks sweet and runs pretty smooth even with 2 or 3 monsters on the screen at the same time. My question to others is... were your benchies run with shadows on or off? I see that shadows really hoses the system and makes the game almost completely graphics card dependent even at low res. Frankly, they look really cool but I don't mind turning them off for smoother gameplay and crisper textures (higher res).

Also, I noticed that, with the shader tweak, when you have to wander to the surface to get to the comm center airlock in the beginning of the game, the graphics are corrupt in that everything is black and you can't see a foot in front of you. This only seems to occur when I wander outside and indoors it's perfectly fine.

Gonna try the texture cache tweak to see if I can get even more smoothness to the game. I'm also gonna disable everything in the background to see if this really affects performance too much.

 

[brain29]

I tried to install SP2 on my 6809 and I kept getting a BSOD. The first time it was after I restarted and occureed before the login screen. The second time iit happed after I logged in. Luckily I made a restore point , so I just went back. Anyone have and ideas?

 

[AVSpec]

So what OC speed is most of you with the M6805 running at?


Also can the Wireless card be upgraded? I have the Netgear Super G 108Mbps router and would like and try to increase the wireless spead up from 54G.

 

[Aratharn]

Originally posted by: justshawnf
Upgrading the BIOS of my M6805 to the M6811 BIOS posted here eliminated my lockups/long delays.

Cool, thanks for the pointer. I have updated my machine to the M6811 BIOS from that site now and it's running OK. Still haven't re-installed SP2. Does your M6805 properly power down at shutdown with SP2 and this new BIOS? Also, do your shortcut buttons work?

While I was googling Broadcom drivers, ...

Were you looking for drivers for Linux? I'm running Windows XP Pro SP1 with the eMachines supplied Broadcom drivers without any real problems, other than stale TKIP/WPA keys after a reboot; turning off the antenna and then turning it back on fixes the problem till the next reboot.

 

[justshawnf]

Originally posted by: Aratharn
Cool, thanks for the pointer. I have updated my machine to the M6811 BIOS from that site now and it's running OK. Still haven't re-installed SP2. Does your M6805 properly power down at shutdown with SP2 and this new BIOS? Also, do your shortcut buttons work?

Shutdown is back to normal. It doesn't hang any more and I don't need to hold the power button to get it to shut down. I never use the shortcut keys and I forgot to check them. I'll try to remember to check tomorrow.

Were you looking for drivers for Linux? I'm running Windows XP Pro SP1 with the eMachines supplied Broadcom drivers without any real problems, other than stale TKIP/WPA keys after a reboot; turning off the antenna and then turning it back on fixes the problem till the next reboot.

I was looking for WinXP drivers. I don't remember what originally sent me looking for new ones. I remember having trouble with WPA, but I thought it was that I couldn't set the key. Had a heck of a time trying to get my Linksys WRT54GS working with WPA, and WEP kept dropping connection. Those problems went away when I loaded the HP wireless drivers, but then the function of the wireless status light changed. Mildly annoying, but WPA worked correctly. I thought the original drivers for the Broadcom NIC were dated before WPA was finalized, but I may be mistaken about that too. The Dell drivers work well, execpt for taking a while to load on initial bootup. Haven't figured that out yet, but maybe I just need to run the boot visualization tool (bootvis). I've been pretty busy and haven't been able to fully investigate that problem.

Originally posted by: brain29
I tried to install SP2 on my 6809 and I kept getting a BSOD. The first time it was after I restarted and occureed before the login screen. The second time iit happed after I logged in. Luckily I made a restore point , so I just went back. Anyone have and ideas?

I'd try loading the BIOS for the 6811 on your 6809. I'd be willing to bet that would solve your problems. Just remember to have a full charge on you battery and back up your current BIOS so you can revert. You may want to have an alternate boot method prepared just in case. I have a working BartPE disk, so I was pretty confident I could restore the old BIOS on mine if I had trouble.

 

[ydgmms]

I *think* it can. I mean it says its on a Mini-PCI port. SO maybe if you hack her open, disconnect and connect another mini-pci card?

If not, then just pickup a PCMCIA or USB nic.