Linux on the eMachines M5305

09.15.03 

http://home.nc.rr.com/mitchel/Linux-on-the-eMachines-M5305.html

FAT32 faster than NTFS

07.27.03

I formatted the HD with FAT 32 and installed a fresh copy of win xp pro.
The interesting thing to note here is that my score on the PC Pitstop benchmark went soaring from 735 to 941! HD speed benchmarks were up significantly from the factory setup!

hardballpete

M5305/ partial M5310* disassembly instructions (use at your own risk)

First, remove the battery.
Remove all the screws (11ea.) on the underside of computer (it’s not necessary to remove the hard drive or the two small SO-DIMM and miniPCI access panels).
Gently lift up the hotkey panel from the center (above the F7/F8 keys) and slide your lifting tool to the ends.
Remove the short silver keyboard screws (3ea.) and connector (there is a "lift lock" on the ribbon cable connector).
Remove the plastic LCD hinge end caps (note: the screws (2ea.) are slightly shorter than the underside screws). The connectors for the LCD just pull up, no locks, remove the black ground wire black screw (1ea.), and the long silver screws (2ea.) that were exposed when the end caps were removed. Lift up and away carefully.
To remove the top case, remove the short silver screw (1ea.) securing the hotkey circuit board and pop it straight up and out (there is a direct connector on the underside near the retainer screw). Then remove ALL the visible black screws (6ea.) holding down the case on the topside.
The touchpad ribbon cable has a “lift lock” on it’s connector and it must be disconnected also.
There is a snap fit towards the rear over the USB ports, other than that the top case should lift off easily. The SO-DIMM, CMOS battery, or CD-RW can then be replaced.

*The M5310 has an integrated 802.11g wireless card and internal antenna and may require additional steps!

edorfox

Test of MD40072 bios (720ME001.ROM) on M5310 Notebook

11.01.03 

My original M5310 bios is the E-bios dated 2003 07 30. This evening, I updated my M5310 bios using the bios file bioram2000.exe from the French Medion website for the Medion MF or MD 40072 "Speedmaster" notebook. The MD 40072 is apparently identical to the emachines M5310 which is actually an Arima W720K7.

Bios update procedure:
I downloaded and ran the bioram2000.exe file to extract the included files to a directory, the default directory is C:\Medion. The extracted files are: AUTOEXEC.BAT, 720ME001.ROM, PHLASH.EXE. and PLATFORM.BIN The autoexec.bat is specifically setup to run phlash.exe and find and install the bios file 720ME001.ROM and PLATFORM.BIN. Note that this would need to be edited to restore the original bios.

Before updating the bios, I used Uniflash to save the original bios to a file naming it M5310E.ROM so that I could restore it later if necessary. I then rebooted the machine to a real DOS session (freedos dual boot) and changed to the C:\medion directory and I ran the autoexec.bat file. The new bios, platform data and bootblock were automatically installed.

I rebooted the machine. A new notificaton was displayed indicating that shadowing is enabled and identifying ram usage and peripherals etc and suggesting pressing F2 to setup the CMOS. I pressed F2 and explored the CMOS setup. I noticed that the bios is identified as ME01. Flash KBC (rather than H8) was enabled for next boot. Wireless power setting was set to restore as default. Boot options were changed to Removable, Optical and HDD in that order. I do not yet know if removable will allow USB boot devices.

I rebooted the machine to XP with out apparent problems or differences. I then ran an old benchmarking program WinTune 97. After several runs of wintune, the following differences became apparent:

Clock speed reduced from 1879 mhz to 1851 mhz

Drystone 4420mips, Whetstone 1156mflops and Video Performance 146 mp/s @ 32bpp & 1280x800, all pretty much as before.

Hard-drive (cached) performance increased from 340mb/s to avg 690mb/s.

Ram read decreased from 2100mb/s to 1515mb/s.

The ME01 Bios gives an option to select 128mb of shared video ram. The ATI Radeon settings show the increase to 128mb. But, I experience no performance boost in 2D video throughput.

I can not explain the hard drive performance increase, but the ram read decrease would probably result from adding a ram read wait state in the memory timing. If so, it should be visible in SiS Sandra benchmarking.

Since installing the ME01 bios, I have run the machine for about 8 hours and I have had no problems or apparent changes to performance.

I do not advise updating the bios with ME01. It has some features, but it slows down ram read very significantly. I explored it to see whether the notebook had more potential features and performance than were provided in our current E bios. It does, but.... I found that it has 128mb video capacity and much faster hard drive timing, but the slower ram read timing may compromise these benefits. These ram timings were probably set to avoid conflicts with the use of slower DDR ram in the 40072 machine.

Morgi

Preventing emachine laptop M5310 from overheating

http://coronam.myftp.org/heatfix/

coronax

[The above site has apparently gone down. Here is a reprint:]

Preventing emachine laptop M5310 from overheating.
Many people have been having trouble with emachine laptops (model m53xx) they seem to be overheating. For anyone who owns this laptop the hardware itself is quite amazing for the price. After opening the box a few times to see what might be causing the laptop to overheat I discovered that although the fan on it is pretty strong, the intake for the fan to work properly is not sufficient.

There vents are very tiny and too far from the actual fan to be very efficient. I decided that I needed to make my own vent on the case somewhere in hopes to prevent the laptop from overheating. I have successfully done this and hopefully it will help solve this problem for a few other people.

Before you start looking for that philips screwdriver that you can never seem to find, I would like to throw a few words of caution to anyone who is thinking of doing what I did.

THIS WILL VOID YOUR WARRANTY! first and most important. I didn't buy any extended warranties with my laptop and when I called emachine for help they advised me to buy all sorts of extra hardware at my own expense. This of course made me a little angry, My 2400mhz rated laptop should be able to run at 2400mhz and emachine is solely to blame for it not being able to run at such speeds. Why should I have to pay a dime to get it to run? Thus my warranty from emachine is gone (doesn't seem like much of a loss to me) If you bought some sort of warranty from the place of purchase I would recommend for talking to them about maybe getting a different laptop unless you like wasting money.

Modifying where the intake to the laptop is coming from could potentially reduce airflow from the area emachine had intended such air should be coming in from. there is a slight chance that you may be preventing airflow on the chipset and video card. I see this as only a slight problem but I think it is only fair to warn everyone that this is a concern.

You may do everything perfectly as I have explained and your overheating problem may not be fixed. This particular method worked for me. To anyone queasy about modifying their beautiful laptop casing I would suggest some of the other fixes people have come up with (most include clocking down cpu). Modifying the case may be an issue later (if you plan to re-sell your laptop).

2.4Ghz Celeron to P4 2.2Ghz in M5105

01.14.04

This week I replaced the Mobile Celery 2.4 with a Mobile Pentium 4-M 2.2
(Side-note: There was no Thermal Tape attached to the CPU, 'twas clean, just a Thermal Pad attached to the heat sink, weird).

I believed the mobo was P4 ready because:
1. It recognized the CPU and ran, instead of blowing up on me, BOOM.
2. A motherboard ID utility sited it as a (here we go) NEC motherboard running an AMI bios, manufactured by Arima, named W720P4 (Notice the P4, instead of the AMD-K7 AthlonXP Arima W720K7), and other info like bios version/date installed. Also before upgrading I looked for a whole lot more stuff when comparing this Celeron with the P4-M, it's core type, stepping, voltage, etc, etc...

Except for one problem, everything seems to work [so be sure to] reset the bios configuration, actually hit "Load optimal defaults". It seems that the board's auto-config must have been disabled, so the board's settings for the old cpu must've still been in place, but hitting that setting to restore "factory defaults", forced it configure itself to the new cpu.
BIOS recognized it as a Mobile Intel Pentium 4-M 2.20, so did Windows XP, and no instabilities.

I have DEFINITELY noticed a increase in game performance (Knight Rider, Max Payne 2, Call of Duty, HALO), which I am very happy about. Everything's running stable and smooth.

Rdigidual

Successfully flashed the BIOS using Norton Ghost Virtual Partition

02.15.04

I just successfully flashed the BIOS by creating a "virtual partition" using Norton Ghost. It was too easy. At boot, enter the BIOS and select "disable" for the "H8 Flash" in the "advanced menu, save and exit. When Windows starts just go to Ghost Advanced, "Create Virtual Partition" (using PC-DOS); add the two Medion folders, KBC...and W720...to the partition that Norton will create. Next, click OK and next (default) to all the USB questions, then "Run Now". When it reboots, change to the KBC directory containing the k.bat file and run it (type k.bat...enter). The thing will reboot (or maybe you have to press the power button, I forgot) right back into PC-DOS where you will again change directory to the W720 directory, type the f.bat, enter. Now it runs a longer and scarier updating program and at the end says, "hit any key to restart". Do that when PC-DOS pops up, select boot to windows and if it works like mine did you will see new stuff flashing past at post.
WOW! That was easy but SCARY!

edorfox

1.0GB RAM M5312

I bought 2 512MB PC2700 DIMMss at Circuit City for $109 each plus $30 rebates each. You must take apart the entire laptop. This is not easy. you MUST be super careful. The second slot is located under the trackpad.

1. You must remove the battery and any PCMCIA cards first.

2. Remove the Hard Drive

3. Then remove all screws from the bottom.

4. Remove the screws from the back of the panel there the LCD hinge is on each side.

5. lift the hinge covers on each side.

6. Open the LCD all the way as far back as it can go.

7. The center plastic there the buttons and eMachine logo are then can be lifted off the unit.

8. There are two screws where the LCD hinge covers were. Remove them and slowly and carefully lift the LCD panel out. You must place the LCD directly behind the laptop as if it were open and still attached. You should have something under the LCD to act as a table so you don't stretch the LCD cable and wire.

9. Remove the 3 screws on the top of the keyboard. Slowly lift the keyboard and carefully lift the plastic tab holding the keyboard wire cable in place.

10. Lift the plastic slowly holding the trackpad cable in place.

AlbertSiegel

Add me to the list of people who have upgraded their RAM to 1 GB. After about 30 minutes of unscrewing things I was able to reach the internal RAM slot and replace the default 256 MB stick with a 512 MB stick of memory. After that, I replaced the outside memory (easy) stick with a 512 MB stick.  bought my memory from Crucial.com - it was expensive (about $280 for 1 GB but it is a high quality product - Crucial). I didn't have to remove the hard drive in the process. Now I am heading out to eBay to sell the two 256 MB sticks that came with the laptop.

Asterix

Processor Upgrade

03.09.04

For anyone interested...I just installed a 2.0 Ghz XP-M 2600+ processor (AXMG2600FQQ4C). It works great! It does however, run a little hotter. The fan now runs on low all the time whereas before it would run only now and then. It doesn't shut down (overheat) when I put it into "always on" power setting...running at full speed, so I believe the Powernow! feature will let this setup work just fine. The new speed along with the upgrade to 1GB ram and the Hitachi 7200 rpm HD have transformed my little M5305 into a real desktop replacement! Well, except for the graphics...sigh.

edorfox

DVD Burner Upgrades

03.16.04

The Toshiba SD-R6112 DVD burner arrived. I popped out the CD burner, swapped the faceplates and installed the DVD-R/RW. It Works! I just finished decoding one of my DVD's using DVDShrink, re-authored it for just the main movie...took about 17 minutes! Wrote it to a DVD-R (TDK) in about 22 minutes, and it will play in all my home DVD players! Before, my +R's that I was burning with the Iomega SuperDVD wouldn't be recognized in the Apex player...now, the -R is recognized and plays fine...Yea! ...On a side note, I couldn't get DVDXCopy Express to load the Patin-Couffin VSO files no matter what I tried, so I had to resort to the backup DVDShrink program and I had to get a copy of Nero to burn with...not a bad way to go anyway!

edorfox

05.21.04

This new internal dvd burner works great with my M-5305. It was easy to install and the faceplates were interchangeable since it is a Toshiba drive. Ultradrive.com is the only place I have found this burner on the net.

TOSHIBA SD-R6372 4x Slim DVD±RW Drive (sdr6372) = $169.00
Faceplate Standard

brycesteiner