Today I got ASUS M6N laptop for repair. It did not want to turn on and also it does not give any sign that it’s charging the battery.

Laptop was previously sent by it's owner to ASUS repair center and paid 70 EUR only for diagnostics. ASUS came up with 600 EUR bill for repair so owner did not accepted the offer. They suggested motherboard and HDD replacement (?!). I did not understand why HDD because HDD works just great.

Anyway, laptop finished at my place and after 1.5h work laptop is working again! It needed some dust cleaning and bit soldering...

First I had to find disassembly or service manual. Bit of Googling and visiting some favorite sites I found the manual here
http://1toppc.com/Merchant2/images/Notebook/Assembly/M6A_V-Chapter%2003-v1.1.pdf

After laptop is taken apart I made these pictures (click on image for high resolution):

CPU and surrounding covered with dust.


Loose broken power plug and very dirty fan


Again broken plug after I have "shaked" the laptop a bit. Now you can also see the rest of the power connector.


Bigger picture of the open case and power connector location

Here is the "guilty" part



Which came out from here... Good luck that motherbord and othr parts are not affected with accident


After operation it looks like this. Metal part is soldered properly to the motherboard.
I have melted together top part of the connector case to assure better joint.


As you can see everything is clean and neat again.

If you have Nintendo DS and using R4DS SDHC (clone of popular R4DS but with SDHC cards support) you might face some problems in case you are using SD card bigger than 2GB.

You might face following simpoms:
* you can't start-up the moonshell or it freezes on load.
* If you have more than 25 files in one folder and you select the folder in the file browser you DS will freeze
* If you have more than 70-100 files on the SD(HC) card some games are not listed or folders are showed as chineze writting
* If card (I had problem with 8GB) is almost full (more than 150 games) you might "loose" the theme icons

New firmware upload and "plain" SD card format in Windows will NOT help.

In order to fix the problem you have to do following:

* Make backup of your SD card
* Download the SD Memory card formatting software from this link http://panasonic.jp/support/global/cs/sd/download/sd_formatter.html
* Follow the instructions as described here http://panasonic.jp/support/global/cs/sd/download/ftp/SDF_manual.pdf and format the SD card. Be sure you have selected FULL (ERASE ON) and Format size Adjustment is ON
* When format is done. First copy the R4 firmware (files in root, _system_ and moonshl folders) and then create one folder called Games. Create several subfolders and place up to 20 games per subfolder.
Here is sample folder structure.

Trick is in special software for SD memory formatting. This cloned version of R4 is sensitive to "dirty sectors" on SDHC card bigger than 2GB.

Hope this will help you out as it did help me.

Usefull links:

SD Memory Card Formatting Software
http://panasonic.jp/support/global/cs/sd/download/sd_formatter.html

Cannot get all R4DS Games to show...
http://www.r4ds-forums.com/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=2571

Alternative R4DS Firmware: YSMenu (with automated builders)
http://www.r4ds-forums.com/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=1957

Using YSMenu on an R4 Clone
http://www.r4ds-forums.com/viewtopic.php?f=54&t=2377

AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) is present on newer Intel chipsets such as 975X (ICH7), P965 (ICH8), and P35 (ICH9). AHCI mode is enabled in the BIOS and 3 settings are commonly available: IDE, AHCI, and RAID. The last two (AHCI and RAID) require a driver floppy and the F6 method when installing Windows XP otherwise the hard disks won't be detected.

AHCI mode brings 3 main advantages:
Supports NCQ (Native Command Queuing) allowing SATA drives to accept more than one command at a time and dynamically reorder the commands for maximum efficiency.
Supports hot plugging of devices
Supports staggered spin ups of multiple hard drives at boot time

However, in the real world the performance difference isn't huge.

The problem is that if you installed Windows in IDE mode (i.e. you didn't use F6 and supply a driver disk), then simply changing the BIOS setting to AHCI mode and rebooting will cause Windows to fail and will require a repair install. Most people have been advising to reinstall Windows if you want AHCI enabled.

Here you will find the sollution :

http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=444831

Copy of the article is here (5.07 kb)

Intel controller algorithms that deliver terrific write I/O performance on its X25-M solid state drives actually contributes to them slowing down over time. The issue is fragmentation. The Intel controller combines many small file writes, smaller than the X25-M's block size, into a single larger one thus avoiding unnecessary block erase/write cycles. To avoid the flash wearing out through repeated writes, its wear-leveling algorithm avoids concentrating writes on particular cells by re-mapping the physical cells into logical ones and progressively moving around the flash cells, such that logical flash cell zero isn't necessarily physical flash cell zero.

Check complete analysis:

Long-term performance analysis of Intel Mainstream SSDs
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=669&type=expert&pid=1

Conclusion:
If you have money to spend on SSD go for 10 or 15k SAS. On Long term it will give you better performance and reliability.