Saturday, May 28, 2011

Updating the BIOS using EZ-Flash on the Asus 1215N

The stock BIOS that ships with the Asus 1215N is a fine BIOS... for a stock system.  Unfortunately, it doesn't allow access to more than 2.8GB worth of RAM.  As most people upgrade their systems, this is a bit of a downer - adding another 2GB for only 800MB more usable is no good.

Fortunately, updating the BIOS is easy - once you know the trick.  Remember all that "Create a DOS boot CD, run the flasher" rubbish?  No more!  The Asus EZ-Flash system lets you flash directly from a USB stick (or, possibly, other media - but as the 1215N only has a USB port, it's the one we're using). 

The trick is that if you try it, it probably won't work.

Why?  EZ-Flash seems to require a hideous FAT16 filesystem to function.  It also seems to require that the ROM be named "1215N.ROM" (for unknown reasons possibly related to old junk on my USB key).  If this is enough for you to succeed, awesome, otherwise read on...


Sunday, May 22, 2011

Asus 1215N, CUDA, and setup notes

First and foremost:  The Asus 1215N works PERFECTLY for CUDA in both Windows and Linux!  There have been several posts about the internet either complaining about CUDA not working, or wondering if it works.

I would like to report that, in fact, it does work perfectly.  I would further like to expand on how it works, what needs to be done to set things up, and document other gotchas in the setup process.  If this is helpful, please let me know!