asus n61jq windows 10 upgrade display fail

if you are here reading this post, most likely you have tried upgrading your good 5-year old asus N61 to windows 10, and was treated with a BLACK DARK BLANK screen? the problem is we are now treated with a generic AMD-ATI driver, instead of an ASUS customised one.

the generic driver is indeed working. the “trick” is to up your display brightness (Fn+F6), and you should find your LCD suddenly comes on!

2015-08-06 15.54.24

took me 2 roll back to Windows 7 and reinstallation of Windows 10 in one day to confirm the above. happy windows 10-ing (:

n61 battery flat rescue operation

my asus n61jq refused to power up for good yesterday. a symptom prior to this was the laptop was unable to remember the date/time and CMOS settings. based on my experience, i know the cmos battery is getting weak, but it continued to work for a while, and an ntp sync was able to fix the time/date out-of-sync problem. and yesterday, it refused to power up totally. this confirms some notes in the forums that an asus laptop will not power up if the cmos battery is flat.

thanks to youtube, i was able to preview the taking apart of the inner parts, especially locations of the screws and cables. this is the most useful video (though it’s in Russian):

the cmos battery is located next to the touchpad at the lower left corner. so one has to remove almost every screw you can find (counted a total of 4 different types), remove the heat sink, the hard disk, the optical drive, the keyboard, 4 ribbon cables before you can access it.

about 30 mins or so, the dismantling, replacement, and reassembling were completed. the CR2032 cmos battery lithium cell was replaced. and the laptop is now working again! *BIG SMILE*

131012-ASUS N61 rescue

padfone 2 station touch insensitive problem

lately my padfone 2 station appears insensitive to touch on the screen. it doesnt accept functions like “hold” which is needed to activate alternate character on the touch keyboard for example, and pinch to resize is also non-responsive. a search on the internet finally landed me on the solution shared in the padfone club. but the solution isnt available quickly through a search. perhaps not many pple have this problem, yet.

the solution to the problem is quite simple. it’s a software issue. a recalibration of the padfone 2 station is required. this can be done by downloading the software from asus support website. look for:

padfone 2 –> OS: Android –> Utilities –> Padfone2 Station Calibration Tool

you may need to download an RAR archive extractor to extract the apk file. plug in your padfone 2 to the station, run the apk (you’ll need to enable “Unknown Sources” software to run option found in Settings –> Security).

and it worked for me, and i hope it works for you too (: