HARDWARE Asus W7S

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[edit] General

Whilst the Asus W7S shares a near-identical body shell with the W7J model, the two machines are quite significantly different internally. The W7S features the Intel PM965 chipset and an 800MHz front side bus driving a nVidia GeForce 8400M G graphics card. The machine ships with 512Mb of DDR2-667 RAM on-board and has a single slot that will take up to an additional 2Gb of memory. Processor options are Core 2 Duo T7100, T7300 and T7500 with an 800MHz front side bus.

[edit] Specification

[edit] Wired Network Interface Problem

A W7S-3P100E variant of the W7S displayed an issue with the wired network interface when booting Gentoo 2006.1 and 2007.0 (and also Debian 4.0 and FreeBSD 7.0RC1) install CDs. In all cases the RTL8168B gigabit ethernet interface was detected and an appropriate driver loaded, but the interface failed to bring the link up and so would not operate (by way of comparison, the same machine functioned normally insofar as networking was concerned when WinXP was installed).

The failure occurs with BIOS versions 302 and 305. A reversion to BIOS version 205 caused the RTL8186B network interface to function normally with Linux and FreeBSD.