ASUS UL30 Owner's Lounge

Props to UL30A

Battle of the Thin and Lights

 

Here is the assessment/review I posted on amazon.com for anyone who is curious:

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I also have only had it for a day, but thus far these are my impressions:

Middle of the Road:

1. Lack of an Optical drive - either internal or external. While this may be an issue for some people, it is plenty easy to hook up an external optical drive to it. However buyers should keep a sharp eye out for which external drive they get. The cpu in this machine is an ultra low voltage processor, and some of the external optical drives out there that only run on the power of usb ports (1 or 2) will find that the UL30A-A2 does not crank sufficient power through the usb ports for many of the drives available. I fortunately had an external drive powered by only usb ports and one with an external power supply. The usb powered external drive I owned (a nu-esw860, which worked with an HP 8710w laptop) did not work, whereas the external power source usb drive (an dvd writer/cd burner from Iomega) worked fine.
2. The Touchpad and Mouse Buttons. While the touchpad is fine for me the mouse buttons actually consist of a single button that rocks back and forth. I find it a little awkward, but not unusable. In general I try to use an external mouse with laptops anyway.
3. DDR3 memory limitation. While the inclusion of DDR3 RAM is excellent in of itself purchasers should be aware that this model maxes out at 4gb of RAM - that is, the amount it sells with. No upgrades in this area of the machine. And since the machine sells with a 64 bit OS, which is not subject to the 3.5 gb RAM cap of 32 bit OS's, it kinda makes one wonder what Asus was thinking, especially with the video card potentially borrowing so much memory. That being said, other UL models DO come with an 8gb max and ship with 4gb of RAM, although usually those models use DDR2.
4. Keyboard. While I very much like the chicklet design of laptop keyboards my unit has noticeable (but not terrible) flex across the keyboard proper. For those of you who are used to the standard of the old IBM laptops this is a bit of a disappointment. But even though I thought it should be mentioned it is very easy to live with nonetheless.
5. Tiny power adapter. A very small adapter comes with the unit, and although I too have seen reviews (admittedly of the UL30A-A1 model) where the adapter got downright hot thus far my use of it has not achieved that. At worse it has been noticeably warm. Maybe a determining factor for the size of the adapter was to shave a few extra ounces off of the overall weight of carrying the machine and its accessories around?
6. Intel x4500 graphics card. Not the greatest of cards, but sufficient to the the job on a basic daily level. Likely chosen in part for purposes of battery life.

Negative:

1. No bluetooth. This was a disappointment for me, but there are models in the UL series that do come with bluetooth capability. In the end I opted for battery life over the bluetooth - a person could always get a usb bluetooth adapter if need be. Still - it would have been very convenient to have this.
2. Usually Asus's laptops come with a bag and a mouse, as the previous reviewer has mentioned. No such extra accessories came with my machine.

Positive:

1. Sturdy build, light weight. I am very impressed by the general external build of so thin and light a laptop as this one. Kudos to Asus on this front!
2. Screen. It is a lovely and vibrant screen indeed - although potential buyers should be aware that it is the reflective screen.
3. Aesthetic Design. I personally think it is an attractive laptop as well. The same basic design comes in both silver and black. Looking only at pictures I thought the black looked slightly better of the two, but on receiving the UL30A-A2 (which is the silver model) I am quite satisfied with how it looks, and even impressed. Asus did a very good job on this one!
4. Cooling system. As advertised, Asus did an impressive job with this. The machine stays very, VERY cool when running. Even when doing high intensive cpu tasks the machine only heats up in a barely noticeable way.
5. HDMI Port. This is something I have seen many people ask about. Different models of the UL series either come with or omit the hdmi port. This hdmi port also is not of the sort that can also be used as a usb port.
6. Not a whole lot of bloatware. Mostly Asus programs - a few could be useful, like the power saving app, which I have not yet used. Mine came with a trial of Trend Micro antivirus and MS Office 2007 student level - both were easy enough to uninstall.
7. Windows 7. This is my first hands on look at the OS, and while it took a while to find my way around the thing, I have to say I am impressed, in particular by the power saving features and general speed improvement over Vista.
8. Battery Life. This was the deal breaker for me. The battery itself fits up very snugly to the overall design of the laptop, and the UL30A-A2 model was advertised (perhaps incorrectly) as having up to 16 hours of battery life. I put it through some initial tests and these are the rough figures I came up with:

Initial Battery Life Results:

When I make a power saving profile maximized for battery length (which means screen dimmed to lowest possible and wireless turned off) AND reduce the color from 32 bit to 16 bit this is what I got before shutting down the machine at 5% power - these are rough numbers only, mind you:

Playing .avi files and installing a fair size program: about 8 hours of battery life.
Playing .avi files only: about 10 - 10 1/2 hours of battery life.
Only word processing: about 13 - 13 1/2 hours battery life.
So, at least based on the first run of draining the battery life, while it does not live up to the 16 hours listed on amazon.com, it DOES do better than the advertised "up to 12 hours" for the other machines - but this is in extreme power saving mode.

Conclusion

Overall this is an ideal machine for me personally. i thought long and hard before choosing what my next laptop was going to be, and I am very satisfied with the result. I would recommend this machine to others who need long battery life with decent cpu strength and speed in their machine at the same time. For the record, the Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 cpu is very roughly the equivalent of an Intel Core 2 Duo T5500 and/or an AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-64.

I am hopeful that in the future Asus (or some third party) will make available larger power supplies and especially larger batteries! Then something like 16 hours of battery life could easily be reached with dedicated power saving settings (as opposed to ultra-extensive, as I did).

 

Hmm ... pulling out the battery and looking in the upper left hand corner it says the model is an a43-ul50, 5600mAh, 84Wh, +15V

 

Thanks for the in-depth review. I'm supposed to get mine today... hmz

 

This has confirmed my purchase. ASUS ftw!!

 

I think I received a lemon. I can't get WIFI to work at all. It picks up full signal but won't connect for some reason. "No internet access." lol Went into Device manager and reinstalled the driver. Still no luck.

1) Laptop detects WIFI signal but cannot connect to the internet indicated by the yellow exclamation mark by the WIFI connection icon (bottom right corner of taskbar).

2) Hard drive making unusual whirring noise (spinning sound). Sounds like a defected HDD.

3) Top screen edge approx. 0.5-1.0” left of the webcam, the screen flexes when you push the edge of the screen a little and makes a slight popping noise. Most noticeable and annoying when opening the lid from the middle of the screen.

4) Don’t know if this is how the laptop was built but there is a significantly larger gap (where the screen actually connects to the laptop frame) on the right hinge than on the left one.

 

Thank you for the info!



Does anyone know if the 4400 mAh (X5-model) vs. 5600 mAh (A2-model) affects the weight of the battery?

 

Mycanid: You notice the hinge spacing? My right hinge has a larger gap than the left one... And it feels as if the battery wobbles a little bit when you hold onto it carrying the laptop...

 

i just got my ul30-x5 and am overall very satisfied. my first impressions are that culv processers are indeed very slow lol. im glad i waited for the duel core 7300 version because any slower and i probably would've wined even more. the build quality is simply put, very awesome. my other notebook is a t400 with 9 cell but it is too little to bulky and heavy to carry around to class everyday. the x5 will be perfect for going to school with. you should diffidently update the graphic drivers since i did see lines at first boot. the viewing angles are a little limited but if it's in front there shouldnt be a problem at all. the laptop is indeed very quiet and barely makes any noises. the wobblyness mentioned is pretty minimal and doesn't bother me much. also if you checked earlier posts fixing the battery wobble is very easy in that all you have to do is pretty much add a little piece of paper into the slot where the battery goes to make the wobblyness completely disappear. i struggled with it since i didn't know how to do it but ended up jamming some paper in and boom the wobbyness went away. I've never used windows 7 but was wondering which programs are safe to delete? I noticed theres a crapload of microsoft live stuff, but arent sure if it's safe to delete. so far i've deleted office and office live 1.4. also anyone know any good anti virus or firewall for these notebooks preferably free?

 

It sounds like Asus didn't fix the battery wiggle issue with this new batch of Windows 7 machines. Maybe the only difference is the o/s after all.

Here's what a member did to fix the battery wiggle. Most of the original UL30A-A1 owners have done the same.

 

I currently have the 3810TZ, ASUS's counterpart on me right now, and I'm pretty impressed with it so far, though there are a few things that can be improved. I will have my hands on the UL30A within the next week(hopefully), so I'll be able to compare and contrast on it.

This unit's pretty solid, though the performance of the SU2700 is clearly lacking, if anything, a slight increase in performance versus the N270 Atom chip on my EEE 1000h. But for under $600, hard to compromise really.

 

Hmm, I'm not noticing any wiggle/wobble...

 

Hello everyone, just signed in today. Got my own UL30 yesterday. In Finland this model is sold as PRO32A-QX179X. I think that it's UL30-2BQX. There are a few differences in the specs. This has bluetooth and gigabit ethernet. The OS is Windows 7 professional with XP pro downgrade. And the colour is black .

I have used this for a day now and it's an amazing laptop.

 

FYI, Amazon doesn't pay for saturday delivery with their Amazon Prime two-day delivery. It shipped thursday, but will arrive monday. It's currently sitting in the sort facility at the airport after arriving 5:00 pm friday. I was a little surprised by this. Personally, I can't see the value in the $79 annual fee. I don't mind waiting. Monday would already be quick enough, imo. But I'd expect they include saturday delivery (since Fedex offers it) for that kind of special service fee.

 

So far, the A2 model has mostly lived up to expectations. Early impressions:

QUALITY: Excellent. No keyboard flex when typing, but I am a light typer. I'm not sure if there is any flex at all. Keypad is comfortable to type on. Battery pack does not wiggle, except when I push hard on it. Battery charger felt warm during battery charge, but not extremely hot. It did not feel like 130 deg F.

DISPLAY: Very good -- typical laptop display, not as good as a desk monitor in terms of color accuracy. Viewing angle is not the greatest, but is very serviceable. Display is plenty bright.

TOUCHPAD: I had to disable tapping feature because sometimes when I tried to move the cursor, it would left think I was trying to left-click. Besides that, the touchpad feels nice and I had no trouble moving the cursor around.

VIDEO PLAYBACK: Plays video files on hard drive better than my desktop Pentium 4 2.5GHz with NV 6600GT. MPEG-2 TS, Divx, Xvid, mkv, mov playback is smooth. This includes 1080 and 720 files that my P4 struggles with. Divx Player showed around 50% CPU load when playing a 1080p mkv file. Youtube and Hulu HD plays stutter-free except in full-screen mode. I ordered a HDMI cable and HDMI/DVI adapter from Monoprice. When it arrives, I am going to test its performance outputing to a HDTV and a 24" monitor.

ATHEROS WI-FI: weak. It sometimes disconnects due to low sensitivity. I may replace the wireless card in the future. For now, I have an Alfa USB wireless adapter that is much, much better.

NOISE: I had to move my ear closer to hear the fan. I can hear the hard drive working, but it is a low tone and not obtrusive at all. The hard drive noise is not bad at all.

SOFTWARE INSTALL: In progress. No troubles so far, including installing MS Office 2003 and Quicken 2001.

BATTERY LIFE: After putting the laptop in powersave mode, the meter showed 10+ hours remaining. I need more time with the laptop to see how it performs.

So far, this laptop is outperforming a desktop Pentium 4 2.5 Ghz with NV 6600GT in performance.

 

yea i am getting weak wifi signals and occasional drops too.. altho it has to do with a myriad of factors I'd still like the option of trying out another wifi card for comparison purpose. how much are we looking at to replace it with something else? and is that even feasible without voiding the warranty?

 

To all of you who have a black Asus UL30: Could you tell me if the top lid attracts fingerprints? I understand that the silver model hides the fingerprints very well. Also could you tell me if the palmrests are the same material/design as the lid or is it a high gloss finish? I can't really tell from the few photos I have seen.

As an aside, have most of you picked up your UL30's from online or from brick and mortar stores? I would really like to see one in person but am having trouble finding one in stores. Do you know of any major store that carries it?

Thanks!

 

Ok, so I've decided to cancel my order for the Win 7 upgrade disc so that I can purchase the Win 7 professional version from Microsoft (Ultimate Steal promotion, $40 cad). I've already nabbed all the drivers from Asus' site, so the only thing left to do is to decide whether to go 32bit or 64bit Win 7. Any suggestions?

 

the retail version should come with both 32 and 64 bit. i would go with 64 bit to future proof your system in case you upgrade past 4gb of memory. the ul30 supports up to 8gb.

yes, although the top lid is made of aluminum, it still attracts fingerprints. the palmrests are not the same material as the lid. it is a black, glossy plastic. i picked mine up from amazon.

 

I've seen the Intel mini-PCIe cards for $25 or so on eBay. So far, on the laptops I have, those have been pretty easy to replace (not that I've ever found the need to do so). I just usually find them in the same compartment as the RAM and the RAM I tend to max out.

Just did some more playing around, this time with the laptop plugged into a Kill-A-Watt and no battery installed. At high performance settings (min proc state: 100%), I was able to get fairly smooth fullscreen Hulu HD (Legend of the Seeker episode 1) with only the occasional frame drop. I'm pretty impressed. Unfortunately, idle power consumption jumped from 7~8W to 10W and power consumption during Hulu playback jumped from 12~14W to 18W. While the difference may not seem like much, they're pretty big as pertains to battery life. Made a chart for the values I was getting.

Code:

[FONT="Courier New"]Estimated battery life (hrs)

        UL30A-X5        UL30A-A2
         4400mAh         5600mAh
           63WHr           84WHr

 7W          9.0            12.0
 8W          7.9            10.5
10W          6.3             8.4
12W          5.3             7.0
14W          4.5             6.0
18W          3.5             4.7[/FONT]

Man, looking at the above values, has anyone found the 5600mAh battery for sale anywhere yet? Does anyone here know if either the UL50AG or UL50VT come with the 5600mAh battery? I seem to recall reading somewhere that the UL30, UL50 and UL80 all come with the same battery. I've already been planning on getting a 15" laptop so if either the UL50AG or UL50VT come with the higher capacity battery, I'd just swap that one out with the UL30.

One interesting thing, playing back a full 1080p Blu-ray rip of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (MKV format created with eac3to+mkvmerge, no re-encoding) only used 14~15W so at least we know hardware acceleration is working.

 

64-bit all the way, unless you have a compelling reason not to. A compelling reason would be a piece of legacy software that you have to have, that's not 64-bit compatible. I've been 64-bit with vista/win 7 for over a year, and ran into only a couple of programs that didn't either work with 64-bit or have a 64-bit version. (My work vpn client is one, and I can run that in an xp or win 7 32-bit virtual machine with virtual box without an issue. Google desktop search is another, though I haven't checked for an updated version in awhile.)

Big reason to go 64-bit, you can address all 4 GB of ram. Since I had to RMA my ul30a-x1, I'm almost tempted to with a UL80 instead, just for the 8 GB max ram, which 64-bit only can address.

 

Thanks folks, this makes my decision quite a bit easier. Regarding the UL30a addressing 8GB of RAM, where is this stated? Is this implied with 64-bit systems? Has anyone actually achieved this much ram on this particular system?

 

Ok im gonna buy a lap now, im really torn between the ASUS UL30A-A2 OR UL30A-X5 , the main difference being windows 7 and the color of the computer.

I like the black better, but I have oily fingers, so if its glossy plastic, wouldnt it be covered with fingerprints?

Also , WHY is the ASUS UL30A-A2 more expensive than X5 on amazon?

hope u can help!

 

and oh yeah why is Asus UL30A-A2 only available in pre-order ?

Well I noticed a few copys on amazon, but when i googled, all the webshops showed it was only available in "pre-order" , hasnt it been released yet or what....

 

lol strange timing, amazon changed the status to "in stock 30 october"

 

I haven't seen an Asus UL30 in person yet so I need to ask a question about the keyboard. How is the flex on the keyboard as compared to the new HP DM3 or the Acer Timeline? Also how is the typing experience as compared to the HP DM3 and Acer Timeline?

Thanks for all your help!

 

does this happen to anyone else or is it just me. whenever i lift up my ul30 the notebook starts making crazy noises. also the hard drive likes to squeak alot.

 

Hey all , last night I bought a UL30A-A2. I am a Mac user but wanted to try Windows 7 and the UL30A-A2 kinda has a MacBook attitude.

I just now learned that this laptop does not have a CD/DVD drive.
Is it possible to use a CD walkman with this laptop ?>>>


I realize the walkman is a player only. The other thing I am wondering , is there any way to send stuff from my iMac to the UL30? Id like to send my iTunes library to the UL30.
I hope I don't regret buying this UL30. I have a day to think it over and cancel my order and just buy a MacBook which I know are highly regarded laptops.

 

Uhhh, the walkman is essentially a walkman, It's not a external optical drive. You will need to transfer files using a USB, or over the network. Or get an optical drive, its up to you.

 

Gotcha , thanks.

BTW , what is the thickness of the the UL30? Is it as thin as the current MacBook Air which is .76" thick ?

 

I found a nice drive......
http://store.apple.com/us/product/MB397G/A

Anyone know of a cheaper one that is decent quality?

 

Mine does that too. I'm pretty sure it's just the mechanics of the hdd making all the noise. I'll be upgrading to an ssd soon though

 

......ssd?

 

Solid State Drive, pretty much a non moving hard drive. Think of booting from a large flash drive over SATA, faster writing and reading speeds, no moving parts so its dead quiet and it doesn't produce much heat.



I have one on my desktop that I'm loving. I'm picking one up for my notebook too.

 

Thickness: 0.6" - 0.98" varying on different points.


Optical drive: http://www.newegg.ca/store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=420&Tpk=external dvd drive

 

Thank you. I did not know that technology had come so far. I would not be surprised if SSDs completely replaced SATA hard drives. A quick look at Apple and I see the upper end MacBook Air comes with a SSD.
I bet if one replaced the SATA in the UL30 with a SSD the battery would last longer.....of course this is just a guess that SSDs use less power than SATAs.

 

The outside of the X5 is black, brushed aluminum but it still retains fingerprints. Not as bad as glossy plastic, but it's not something I expected. Unfortunately, the interior of the laptop is glossy plastic. As for the price disparity, the A2 has considerably longer batter life than the X5 (~30%).

 

Laptop hard drives actually use very little power. When I was doing research for my HTPC, the 2.5" drives I researched had peak usage around 1W. Idle was like 0.5W. I'm not sure how much lower power consumption SSDs have.

The reason to get SSDs, however, is because they're silent and can withstand greater shock due to the lack of moving parts making them ideal for laptops, tablets and other mobile devices. There's also the near instantaneous access times. You have to pay for the privilege, though, as the cheap SSD's usually are no better than hard drives, performance-wise.

 

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827151186

I bought this one, but from NCIX in Canada. Works and looks great.

 

You misread what I said. The UL30A only supports 4GB of RAM. This is a motherboard/chipset limitation, not a OS limitation. The UL80 can support 8GB of ram, at least according to amazon, which is why I'm considering it. ( http://www.amazon.com/UL80Vt-A1-14-...1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1256499989&sr=8-1) The extra ram is very handy for multi-tasking, as well as running virtual machines (virtualbox).

Now, a 32-bit OS can only address around 3ish GB of ram. It's essentially 4GB minus all the system devices, or around 3.3 ish GB. Here's the gritty details: http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=3124

"With a 64-bit CPU the addressable memory is now 2^64 or 16.8 million terabytes." That's theoretical, the physical limit is dependent again on your motherboard and chipset. Also, windows caps the max memory by flavor of windows as well: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778(VS.85).aspx (short answer is 192GB for win 7 pro or ultimate variations, or 16GB for home premium).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit has a breakdown about the pros and cons of 64-bit.

Just one more followup point. Most of the cpus made for laptops/desktops today are 64-bit OS compatible. (The Atom is one of the exceptions.)

 

Technically, a 32-bit OS (at least the Windows consumer flavors) has 4GB addressable memory space. However, since part of that 4GB goes to various devices (including video memory), you're only able to utilize around 3~3.5GB of RAM if you have more than that installed.

 

hmmm that "crazy" noise you guys talk about when you pick up the computer , is that normal? or like really loud noise? i havent owned many laptops but ive never heard of it before, i was gonna buy this laptop tomorrow, but if this is some problem im gonna step back. He talked about some squeeky noise from the hard drive as well......

Please share some info

 

I RMA'ed mine because of the sound the HDD was making.

 

RME'd ? got a new copy?

was it a constant noise or...

 

hdd sound is very minimal on mine. sure u get subtle clicking noise whenever its accessing some data but its never loud enough to be distracting. very good laptop overall.

 

It was more like a "spinning" noise for me as if the HDD was dieing and when you lift the laptop, the HDD will make some unusual noises which I have never heard and I have had my share of laptops. I bought mine from Buy.com and returning it for a replacement.

 

So I'm curious about wifi and bluetooth compatibility. For those of you who are familiar with laptop hardware, what do you suppose our options are for upgrading the wireless card and also adding bluetooth? I have yet to test the wireless capabilities for myself, but I've been reading how it seems to be sub-par. I don't mind changing it out for a better one if I have the option. And if adding bluetooth is doable then I'd probably give that a go as well. I don't expect you all have the answers for this particular laptop (since it's so new). I'm just curious based on your experience with such hardware

Oh, and I'm referring to the X5. That's the model I purchased and which will be arriving monday.

 

Has anyone, been "approved" for their windows 7 upgrade. Mine still says pending proof of purchase. I emailed my proof of purchase over a month ago.

I wonder how long it will take to get, no biggie since I'm running the RC without any problems. I just want to get the final copy on.

 

To those who have the Ul30a X5, how fast is the laptop? The entire laptop seems dreamy to me except the SU7300 1.3 scares me a little. Also, how good is the video camera?

My daily computing contains of surfing two different windows of firefox/chrome with multiple tabs while streaming hulu in one window and maybe a flash game in another window and using Microsoft word.

Can this laptop handle this kind of usage? Also, is the build issues the same for most of the owners or just those few?

Thanks!

 

a ul30vt is slated for release in December according to an Amazon discussion thread with an Asus rep

http://www.amazon.com/UL30vt/forum/...in=B002Q8HK7K&store=electronics&cdSort=newest