[Debian-eeepc-devel] Bug#559578: Bug#559578: eeepc-acpi-scripts: EeePC 701 freezes with garbled screen while booting

[Axel Beckert]

Hi,

On Sat, Dec 05, 2009 at 07:24:04PM +0000, Darren Salt wrote:
> > It does happen:
> [snip kernel-independent]
> > * as soon as I plug in the power supply (in case I had it unplugged on
> >   startup) the system freezes and garbles the screen, also if running
> >   under X.
> 
> Interesting. That'd be when it switches, or tries to switch, to high-speed
> mode.

AFAIK there is (officially) _no_ high-speed mode on the 701.

It's a 900 MHz Celeron _permanently_ underclocked to 630 MHz. I
remember there were some kernel module hacks to run it at 900 MHz
nevertheless, but this was IIRC quite unreliable so I stopped using it
after some tests. Can't remember the details what was bad about them,
but I still know it caused far less problems (especially not reliably
reproducable problems) than this one.

> I wonder if this could be BIOS-related; listing both known-good and
> known-bad BIOS revisions may be useful since we can then blacklist (or
> whitelist?) and encourage upgrades, or possibly downgrades, where
> appropriate.

dmidecode says:

[...]
BIOS Information
        Vendor: American Megatrends Inc.
        Version: 0910   
        Release Date: 03/03/2008
[...]

> ftp://ftp.asus.com.tw/pub/asus/EeePC/EeePC4G%28701%29/ should be right for
> what you have. I see five BIOS versions there: 0401, 0703, 0801, 0910 (all
> EeePC4G*.zip), and 1302 (701-ASUS-1302.zip).

So I have at least the latest of those EeePC4G*.zip BIOSes. I'll check
later if 701-ASUS-1302.zip also applies.

		Regards, Axel
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