I enjoy using small and light laptops because I believe this type of machine properly fits the purpose of a laptop. Anything larger than 14 inches diagonal screen size and the corresponding laptop body will no longer fit on the average lap. The term ‘desktop replacements’ seems like an oxymoron to me; what’s the point of a laptop that lives 90% of its life on a desk, tethered to power because the battery only lasts two hours?

Anyway, enough proselytizing. This post is about my new laptop which I have become enamored with, to say the least.

As you can see the shape of the system bears a striking resemblance to that of the MacBook Air. However, the main difference is that the Apple offering is less industrial-looking. The Air has a matte finish to its brushed aluminium lid whereas the Zenbook has a more polished look.

Inside the colour is more ‘gunmetal grey’ (one of my favorite colours) than the more silver-looking aluminium of Apple products.

The laptop weighs just over a kilogram and measures just 18 millimetres at its thickest point. Connectivity consists of a USB2, a USB3, SD/MMC card slot, headphone/microphone in/out, micro-HDMI and mini-VGA. The top of the range version sports an Intel Core i7 2677M, 4Gb DDR3, 256Gb SSD, 802.11a/b/g/n and Bluetooth 3.0. Battery life as tested by Engadget is approximately 8 hours with WiFi enabled.

I have installed Windows 7 Home Premium on mine and it is very nice to use. I intend upon replacing my Lenovo T410 work-provided laptop with my Zenbook. Fortunately my employer is very big on the current trend of ‘Bring Your Own Device’ whereby most of the corporate software stack can be accessed through Citrix XenApp. In terms of functionality it’s basically X window forwarding except it works on all operating systems (sidenote: checking my e-mail in Microsoft Outlook on my Google Android handset is probably one of the most ‘haha, this is so dumb but cool’ technology exercises I have recently undertaken).

At first I tried to use Ubuntu 11.10 on this system. It worked OK but wasn’t suitable for use as a full-time work laptop replacement because of the various issues leading me to doubt the reliability of the system as a whole. As mentioned there are a few issues with Ubuntu 11.10 currently:

• Can’t easily suspend/hibernate: requires tweaking with a custom powerdown script which I can’t get working, although reportedly it does work fine.
• Bluetooth support not available until kernel 3.2.
• Some models have a ‘Sentelic’ touchpad, which is not supported by any drivers at present for multi-touch etc. Other models have an ‘Elantech’ touchpad which is fully supported. You can’t tell which you’re buying until you open it up. I have a ‘Sentelic’ model.
• Currently power consumption on all Sandy Bridge CPUs is poor with kernel 3.0.x and 3.1.x; reportedly fixed in 3.2.x though currently there are workarounds which make the system somewhat unstable.

Unfortunately the lack of Bluetooth and poor touchpad support is a killer. In the office it’s not such a big deal but while I am out on site and needing to connect a USB-to-serial adapter to access the console of networking devices, I can choose to either have a mouse plugged in or my phone or the provided USB-to-Ethernet adapter. When working away from the office on unfamiliar network equipment, it’s typically essential to have at least a console and ethernet or console and mouse.

The performance of the system is very good. This is the first computer I have owned with a solid state drive and I am impressed. I have seen other computers with them but never really used them for an extended period of time to really appreciate how fast an SSD can do things. Now whenever I am using any other computer it seems like I am waiting for far too long for anything to happen.

With Windows the battery life is pretty good. Windows usually reports about 7 hours of life from a full charge, though I have never used the laptop continuously for that long on battery, I have seen a solid five hours out of it with two overnights periods of sleep. This may not be optimal, because I have installed Windows from scratch I can’t install most of the Asus utilities, including the “Instant-On” utility which I presume provides some power saving mechanism.

As compared to my last laptop; well, this one doesn’t compare. It is simply better in every way. Even the integrated graphics are better than the old nVidia graphics chip in my Dell. I experimented by playing Grand Theft Auto III on this laptop and it ran quite well.

The price I paid worked out to be around $1760 from a local retailer. They included a free Bluetooth mouse for some reason which I was quite happy with. Unfortunately for me and my insistence on buying the best version of this laptop I possibly could, paying that price meant I missed on on buying the next model down for around $660 cheaper – an i5 / 128Gb SSD model, which can be had on special at JB HiFi. It’s worth it though. With 256Gb I don’t really have to think about what I put on my system. I just know it’ll all fit.

All you have to do is go into the Advanced Multiplayer options and tick the box next to “disable HTML MOTDs”; apparently a combination of the awesomeness of Vista 64-bit and IE7/8 causes the game to occasionally crash when trying to load IE in the background to display a HTML MOTD.

Well, I’ll tell you: I’m someone who detests time wasting. Reinstalling my operating system was a waste of time. Whose fault was it? Well, I can’t be certain, but I’m pretty sure it’s a combination of the following three parties: Asus, Microsoft, Valve.

1. Asus, because their shitty driver package can’t uninstall itself properly. I originally made use of the onboard sound on my Asus motherboard, and I uninstalled it to make way for my new Asus soundcard. Unbeknownst to me, the uninstall feature of the drivers was for diddlysquat. It uninstalled the annoying configuration application, and that’s about it. There were registry entires and dll files strewn all through my system and I had no idea where or how many.
2. Microsoft, because obviously their driver management is too hard for some companies (Asus, but I’m sure there are others: why do so many driver cleaner apps exist?). Really, it’s not very hard. In Linux, many device drivers are a single binary blob, or in the case of open-source drivers, a binary blob with source attached. You load it with one command, and you unload it with one command. When you want to uninstall it (ie, remove it completely), you just delete the file. Bingo! All gone. Upgrade to your hearts content. Not with Windows.
3. Valve, because their software’s configuration options could not be more limiting or vague. Sure, I selected the correct mic input in Steam, but did that have any effect on the games themselves? No. Know why? Because they were ignoring settings from Steam. They tried to be too smart and they messed up, because whatever configuration I tried, the games themselves insisted on trying to grab input from a device which no longer existed (my old onboard sound).

But hey, who am I to criticize? Oh that’s right, I’m a paying customer. Fuck your shitty drivers, Asus. Fuck your shitty driver management, Microsoft. And fuck you, to a lesser extent, Valve, for making your software so damn vague.

Now that my rant’s over, I can talk about the problem I was having: uninstalling my old onboard soundcard software didn’t completely remove all of the hooks it left, well, everywhere. So there were dll files and registry settings and who knows what else ruining a lot of things. This lead to my Source-based games (Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead) not being able to initialise the microphone, with the following printed to the console when trying to configure audio options:

Unable to initialize DirectSoundCapture. You won’t be able to speak to other players.

It also left Unreal Tournament 3 completely unplayable, as it would lock up before even entering the main menu, presumably due to the game trying to make use of an OpenAL audio device which no longer existed. There is a file located in the Windows system directory which you can delete to resolve this issue, but the forum post describing this procedure escapes my Google-fu at this time. I do recall it was related to solving issues with Creative X-Fi audio cards and OpenAL.

So, in the end I finally have a fully working Vista gaming system. And people say Windows is “user friendly”, ha!

Sometimes Windows, for reasons unknown, gets confused about printers. This is a problem in an office environment where people are printing almost non-stop. At my work we have about thirty employees, and in approximately six months, they’ve printed over 100 000 pages. I know this because one of the ink cartridges in the printer was recently replaced, and the printer keeps tabs on these kind of stats.

Anyway, an issue we sometimes encounter is that peoples printers simply don’t work. When they’re selected in the print dialogue of whatever application, the application locks up while the operating system tries to remember where the printer really is. I have no idea what causes this; if you do, please drop me a comment. In an effort to avoid this kind of behaviour, I’ve made an addition to our login script that removes and re-installs all the printers on the system. Hopefully by keeping the printers “fresh” in this way, I can avoid having peoples’ time wasted by silly, preventable printer problems.

The Script

Essentially, what the code does is grab the existing printer connections, delete them, and then re-add them. The in-code comments are enough to satisfy anyone with a web browser capable of looking up Microsoft’s VBScript references. What may not be immediately obvious is the last part — the script will re-add them in the order they existed, but without further input, will make the last added printer the default printer. This isn’t what we’re after at my workplace, therefore we need to fix that. However, I’ve just figured that in my particular instance I could re-add the printers in reverse — problem solved!

Of course, if Microsoft included that option, they might find their market share dented somewhat. Which is exactly why they don’t include it. I’m going to format and put XP on it anyway, but that’s not the point. Non-technical users should be given a choice. 99% of the time they’ll hit “yes” without a second thought (without any thought at all for some), but that other one percent, maybe they’ll wise up…

Frankly, I think they can go and get fucked, but you should read the above article, which is written in a more user-friendly language. ^_^

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