windows – The Third Half

Lenovo G530 Suspend Problem

It seems that my most popular posts here deal with fixing some common issues with the Lenovo G530 laptop, namely with the screen hinges, as well as the screen flickering. Well, judging by the comments it seems that these have helped people (even though you will probably have to repeat the screen flickering one, as the cable can come lose repeatedly). I am glad they are of use to people; the G530 isn’t the fanciest laptop, but if you can deal with some of these things it certainly gets the job done.

I am having a particular problem with this machine, though, that I have not been able to sort out. It deals with suspending to RAM, or I should say, the inability to do so. What is supposed to happen is that I activate suspend, and the machine almost completely shuts off save for a blinking, blue LED. Opening the lid then resumes the machine almost instantly, bringing me back to where I was. (Yes, I’m sure most of you know what suspending to RAM is, but I’m just trying to be complete.) However, when I actually try to do this, the machine shuts off, instantly. No flashing light, no shutdown sequence, it just turns off as if I removed power and/or battery. Turning it on again makes it boot up as if I had opted to reboot. After a while I got used to just turning the machine off when I didn’t need it, but this is kind of annoying, and I would like to fix it.

Now, first things first. As you can probably tell from this site I am a GNU/Linux user, and do in fact run Ubuntu on this laptop. In fact, overall it runs well. I bring this up because of many suspend issues which have plagued many of the distros, however for about the first year of having this laptop suspend to RAM worked beautifully. (Hibernate did and still does, but suspend is more convenient.) But to verify this I tried installing Windows XP (along with the hardware-specific drivers supplied by Lenovo on their site), but encountered the same behavior. Same with other distributions.

Next, I figured on a lark that maybe this would have something to do with the battery, which when I first noticed this behavior was on its last leg (ie, 20 minutes of power). I replaced the battery, but this did not help anything. I tired looking in the BIOS, but couldn’t find anything that suggested a problem. I tried updating the BIOS, but this didn’t work either. I even tried alternating the RAM sticks, as well as using only one at a time. (It is suspend to RAM, so I figured there might be something there.)

So, how about it, anyone else seen this sort of thing before, shutting down cold instead of suspending? Maybe not even with this particular laptop? Any ideas, thoughts, something I may have overlooked? I will try to make something of an effort to look into this again myself, probably starting with running memtest86 on the machine (something which I did not do, and may reveal something more about the memory). But, I would appreciate any input. And if I come to a solution, I will of course do my best to report it here, with a nice pictorial guide if applicable.

Gentoo Not Detecting CD

Alright, so in case I didn’t mention it before, I am running Gentoo again on my desktop. Things are good, compiling is fun, etc. However, every once in a while there is a little snag. Just recently (yes, around 1:30 AM, it’s a night off and I got sidetracked), I had reason to burn a CD (which I don’t do very often). Well, I stuck the CD in, and Gnome didn’t pick it up. IE, I installed Brasero to burn it, and it wouldn’t detect the CD in the drive. That sucks.

As I also run Ubuntu, I’ve gotten used to having things picked up and configured for me, from CD drives and USB hotplugging, to things I never knew existed. Well, I knew I’d had this CD problem before and had fixed it. Turns out all I had to do with edit /etc/fstab and comment out a line I had for mounting /dev/cdrom. (If you run Gentoo, you most likely know what I am referring to here, if not go browse their documentation.) After that I just took the CD out and a few seconds later put it back in again. Brasero picked it up and I was off.

In case you’re curious, this CD is a Windows live CD. Yes, you read that correctly, apparently it can be done. It’s for my laptop, a Lenovo G530. I want to update the BIOS, and while I think there are hacks for sticking the BIOS image on a bootable DOS USB drive, I wasn’t entirely confident in that. (Their site gives you a Windows-only BIOS flashing program. You can extract the BIOS file itself, though.) So I looked up how to do the live CD, and set it up in a VM I had on my laptop and transferred it to my desktop, with its faster CD drive. I used BartPE to do it.

Why would one update the BIOS, you ask? Well, my laptop, a Lenovo G530 has this nasty habit of beeping whenever I plug the power cord in. Or take it out. Or when the battery gets low. The sound is loud and annoying, and while muting the sound stops it, this a) only works when the system boots up and b) means that if I want to have any sound I have to put up with it. I usually just mute temporarily, or plug the cord in when it’s off. But sometimes I’ll be on battery and listening to music through earbuds, when the battery will be nearing the end of its charge and all of a sudden a deafening beep will resonate through my skull. Well, my laptop runs version 1.08 of the BIOS, while the new version, 1.10 supposedly fixes this.

Also, I removed the the hard drive from my machine first, just so the booted Windows didn’t mess with it. I also took out the battery, not sure if that makes a difference. (Someone recommended it when updating BIOS.) So after this hopefully I won’t have to touch Windows on bare hardware for a while.

New Laptop

Well, I mentioned before that my trusty old Toshiba laptop finally kicked it. Well, I am now on a shiny new Lenovo G530 laptop, and so far it’s going good! I’m running Ubuntu 9.04, and am impressed with how well things seem to be supported on it. So far I’m pretty happy.

I wanted to get a refund for the Windows Vista Home license I’m obviously not using, but Lenovo was giving me the run around about not being able to do that when it’s bundled in with the machine. I’m still going to try, though, so we’ll see what happens. Anyway, now for some pics, mouseover for comments:

I didn’t, of course, accept the Windows license. I probably won’t get anything for it, but whatever. For fun I threw a FreeBSD CD in, but decided not to do the install. Ubuntu is running happily, and that’a s good thing.

Decent Toshiba CPU Speed!

I have a Toshiba Tecra M2 laptop that normally runs Ubuntu. It used to run Windows a while back, and after that Gentoo. One thing I noticed while running Linux on it was that I could never get the CPU speed to go above 598 Mhz, or if was lucky 600 Mhz. I thought for the longest time that this was a software issue, with the operating system itself. And then I tried Windows again.

I have the original hard disk, with Windows, just in case. (I used a new disk for my Linux install, rather than dual-booting.) So, I stuck it in, and took a look at the speed reported in My Computer. I was surprised to see that it too reported the speed as 598 Mhz. Shocked, I hunted around on the Web.

It turns out that if you replace the processor or motherboard on a Tecra or similar laptop, it can mess up the CPU speed table. The speed getting stuck at 598 Mhz is a common problem. There is a fix for this, however. Basically, you need a Toshiba utility which creates a boot floppy. You boot the computer to the floppy, which runs a simple program that updates the BIOS.

You can find some details here. Now, the link to the utility doesn’t work, so there is a mirror here. If that mirror is down, I have it mirrored on my own server: pom200t1-v15. Note that if you don’t have a floppy drive on my laptop (mine didn’t), you’ll need a USB floppy drive — I was able to use one with no trouble. Note also that though this worked for me, I am not responsible for any damage to your system if it does not work. You have been warned.

Well, I still use CPU speed scaling on Ubuntu, but now the speed does go up to 1.4 Ghz. Note that this will probably reduce your battery life. But, it’s still nice having this power. Hopefully, this will help some of you struggling with this.