TR Forums

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this, but here goes.

I just bought an Asus EeeBox PC EB1012P barebones nettop to use as an HTPC. I installed 2GB of 800MHz DDR2 RAM and a 250GB hard drive I had from an old laptop, and tried to boot it up. It took about two minutes to even display anything on the screen, but eventually it did boot up and I was able to go to the BIOS setup. Once I was there, though, the system was so unresponsive that I couldn't really do anything. It took between 30-60 seconds to register every keystroke. I finally got out of there and put in the USB drive to install Ubuntu, and it didn't do anything, just hung on the screen that says "EeeBox PC". I know Atom is not a speed demon, but am I right in assuming it should at least have enough horsepower to navigate a BIOS smoothly? I've tried reseating the memory and hard drive, but it still gives the same result. Any insight on what might be happening here? I've never heard of this specific problem before.

Oh, and I've emailed Asus support twice now and haven't heard anything from them in nearly a week.

Is it running the latest BIOS? If you're not on 0502 I'd give that a go, as the single release note "Firmware change" hints to me that maybe they had something totally bugged out previously?

http://support.asus.com/Download.aspx?S ... P&p=20&s=2

Try turning off quick boot in the bios and rebooting. I've heard that works for some EEEPC's after a ram upgrade. Worth I shot I guess.

Did you try clearing the CMOS?

Also try powering it up without the hard drive, just in case the hard drive is doing something that is messing things up.

Thanks, I'll give those suggestions a try, although I probably won't have a chance until sometime tomorrow.

As for clearing the CMOS, I'm not sure if I can access it. Once you open up the case the only thing you can really get at is the memory slots (the hard drive has a separate caddy). Everything else is underneath a metal shell, and there doesn't seem to be any easy way to remove that.

Anyway, I'll let you guys know what happens after I try that stuff. Thanks!

So I tried removing the hard drive and turning off quick boot, and there was no change in the performance. I downloaded that BIOS update, but I've never tried to update the BIOS without first booting to the OS, and the instructions for updating the BIOS on this machine don't seem to include an option for that http://support.asus.com/Troubleshooting/detail.aspx?SLanguage=en&p=20&m=EB1012P&s=2&hashedid=3qRH01yHQFgo84hY&os=&no=1000. Does anyone know how to do that without an OS?