Help needed for a laptop driver

  • Thread starter Thread starter Gabriel Knight
  • Start date Start date
G

Gabriel Knight

Hi, I have done a clean install of the OS Win XP Home, on a laptop I only
had to install one driver for the video and it worked fine but now I need
help to find the driver or application that controlls the keyboard like the
"Fn" key as it dosnt work at the moment - ide like to be able to operate the
brightness and others on the keyboard. What I have is a Toshiba Satellite
A20 Laptop.

Regards
GK
 
Hi, I have done a clean install of the OS Win XP Home, on a laptop I only
had to install one driver for the video and it worked fine but now I need
help to find the driver or application that controlls the keyboard like the
"Fn" key as it dosnt work at the moment - ide like to be able to operate the
brightness and others on the keyboard. What I have is a Toshiba Satellite
A20 Laptop.

Regards
GK
Click to expand...


Go here and search for your model under Product Support

http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/tais/support/jsp/home.jsp
 
It depends a LOT on what you are looking to do. To improve a laptop or
netbook, probably a good idea to install a SSD. To improve a desktop,
not so good. I thought I'd greatly improve my boot time by switching
to a SSD. Well, it takes me 90 sec to boot from a cold start to Win
Vista on my computer (using a 500 GB SATA 7200 RPM drive)....
installing the SSD lowered that time to 60 sec. I had foolishly
expected something like an improvement to 10 to 15 sec total boot
time!

So I ran some performance tests, on a single (relatively cheap 7200
RPM SATA) drive, a pair of 500 GB 7200 RPM SATA Seagates configured
RAID 0, and the SSD. As you would expect, performance of the SSD was
better than the others..... but not "that" much better, considering
the SSD price is nearly $200 for 120 GB and you can buy a pair of 500
GB Seagates for < $100 and have a 1 TB effective drive..

To see the charts of the tests, go here:

http://www.photoshop.com/users/crhoffpauir/albums/ea39ff4a42f24a369082d205a0081057
 
Great analysis by Charlie. I too installed SSDs in a netbook and desktop
and was underwhelmed by the performance increase. For a desktop, much
better to install a 2- or 3-disk RAID0 setup...you will see a real
performance boost then.
 
It depends a LOT on what you are looking to do. To improve a laptop or
netbook, probably a good idea to install a SSD. To improve a desktop,
not so good. I thought I'd greatly improve my boot time by switching
to a SSD. Well, it takes me 90 sec to boot from a cold start to Win
Vista on my computer (using a 500 GB SATA 7200 RPM drive)....
installing the SSD lowered that time to 60 sec. I had foolishly
expected something like an improvement to 10 to 15 sec total boot
time!

So I ran some performance tests, on a single (relatively cheap 7200
RPM SATA) drive, a pair of 500 GB 7200 RPM SATA Seagates configured
RAID 0, and the SSD. As you would expect, performance of the SSD was
better than the others..... but not "that" much better, considering
the SSD price is nearly $200 for 120 GB and you can buy a pair of 500
GB Seagates for < $100 and have a 1 TB effective drive..

To see the charts of the tests, go here:

http://www.photoshop.com/users/crhoffpauir/albums/ea39ff4a42f24a369082d205a0081057
Click to expand...

I built this box with a SSD. The responsiveness is incredible.
 
I built this box with a SSD. The responsiveness is incredible.
Click to expand...

Incredible is a nice term. Can you give us something more specific? As
compared to....?

My old SWTPC with a Motorola 6800 processor was incredible too.
 
In message <[email protected]> someone claiming
to be Charlie Hoffpauir said:
Incredible is a nice term. Can you give us something more specific? As
compared to....?
Click to expand...

In general, moving from a rotational drive to a new SSD is almost like
the old days where buying a new computer was actually significantly
faster than your old one (or at least when clock speeds regularly
doubled)

Even on modern computers you still spend a lot of time in a "click and
wait..." state, especially starting large applications or similar that
your computer can't predict (and therefore caching can't help you)

The different really is incredible, responsiveness is often far more
significant to the user experience than raw speed.
 
Incredible is a nice term. Can you give us something more specific? As
compared to....?
Click to expand...

The machine it replaced. The lack of seek time really makes a
difference when pulling a bunch of small things off the disk--and a
bunch of small things is the normal structure of anything that uses
plugins.
 
Even on modern computers you still spend a lot of time in a "click and
wait..." state, especially starting large applications or similar that
your computer can't predict (and therefore caching can't help you)

The different really is incredible, responsiveness is often far more
significant to the user experience than raw speed.
Click to expand...

The thing is for most purposes that raw speed does little for us--the
CPU finishes whatever it was doing and is waiting on something. While
the user is waiting for something to happen the CPU is generally
waiting on the disk to deliver the data needed to accomplish the
requested task.

As I write this I have 3 virtual machines open and I'm transcoding a
movie, as well as some other tasks that won't use any CPU power if I
don't interact with them. The CPU load is running in the 20-25%
range--obviously the transcode has one core pegged and otherwise it's
not really doing all that much. More cores wouldn't do any good,
speeding up the CPU would speed up the transcode but that's going to
take a long time anyway. Raw speed thus would gain me little.

The faster loading of stuff off the system drive, though, is another
matter. I have an ASP.NET project I'm working on on another screen,
if I hit F5 it has to compile, transfer the stuff to the local ASP.NET
server and then launch a browser instance. Nothing of any substantial
size gets loaded but lots of files are involved. I would say this is
at least 5x as fast as it was on my old machine.
 
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