Asus UL20A Owners Lounge

there's an option in the bios that needs to be enabled for express gate to work?? which option or what's the name of it?

i wouldn't call the noise normal, but a loose keyboard near the top center is pretty common. it's caused by the wire strip (that connects the keyboard to the motherboard) bulging up, and pushing that area of the keyboard to be slightly higher than the rest of the keyboard. you could RMA it to ASUS, but it'll cost shipping fees and i personally hate waiting for the RMA turnaround time. the fastest and cheapest way is to take the keyboard off, and put thin double sided tape on the bottom of they keyboard. that's what i did with mine.

 

I had the HP Mini with Windows 7 right before I got the ASUS UL20A. I noticed the ASUS literally takes forever for it to boot back up after hibernation, even if I don't have any open programs. It's probably way faster for me to simply shut down and boot up fresh again. When I try to boot up from hibernation, the windows resuming screen will come up, the screen will go black for 5 minutes, then windows will load, but everything is unusable (loading) for so long that I usually just shut it off and reboot. I probably allowed it to load for another 5-10 mins to no avail. Tried to search for answers on google but couldn't find anything that helped. Is anyone else experiencing this? I don't have any issues waking it from sleep, just hibernation.

My HP laptop with Vista boots up in a reasonable time from hibernation, and my work desktop with XP boots up in lightning speed. The HP Mini with Windows 7 also booted up slowly, but the ASUS simply doesn't fully wakeup from hibernation. Waiting 10+ minutes to resume from hibernation is ridiculous. Please help! Thanks in advance.

 

Anybody felt electric current flowing through the aluminium chassis when pluged in? I do get some minor shocks occasionally as well.

Running on batt is fine.

 

Yes, it shocks..

 

Can people let me know whether the UL20A has been superseded with a new model number? I.e. can/should I still buy a UL20A?

Any help appreciated.

 

Hi,

Anybody notice that their LED display has a bluish tint to it? I didn't notice until i had my old netbook next to it and it looked really cold. So i've now been playing around with .icc profiles and enjoying the pain for Win7 always unloading them through standby or hibernate. Very annoying.

thanks.

 

It's been updated with Asus UL20FT.
You may check out this review ASUS UL20FT Review

 

Many thanks onmyouza.

 

i got the UL20A with SU2300 Celeron CPU and it always stays at 1.2GHz, 1.000V when idle as well as when loaded. I could not find any option to enable Speedstep or anything similar. Doesn't this CPU support Speedstep?

 

It doesn't have speedstep in terms of changing the multiplier, which stays fixed at 6x. But i believe it does dynamically clock the voltage of the CPU. What app are you using that shows constant 1V?

I use batt stat and it shows total wattage usage which varies significantly between idle usage and processor intensive tasks. Also use Crystal CPUID which shows static numbers until you press F4 and load the realtime clock which then seems to show a dynamically changing base mhz that is multipled always by 6. My theory anyway.

 

I'm having issues doing a fresh windows install.

I installed an SSD and am using a USB drive with windows on it. The USB drive has a good windows install as I've used it before on another laptop. The SSD is also a working pull.

I set HDD 0 to the SSD and HDD 1 to the USB drive (for some reason it's seen as a USB and not removable storage).

Anyway, windows install setup will come up and when I choose where to put the install (i.e. the SSD) it says it can't install to the drive because it's not bootable? The drive is also marked as disk 1 partition 1....and not disk 0 partition 1 which I think might have something to do with it. The problem is I tried setting the SSD to disk 0 in the BIOS but that didn't have an effect on how windows sees the device?

Any help would be appreciated.

 

Hi atc9001 I got your PM, do you have the U L20A or the U20A?

Are you installing windows 7 or windows vista? From USB or CD?

Also what is your make/model of SSD and the exact error message the installer is giving you?

 

Ahhh, shoot, didn't notice this was U20!

I have a UL20A-A1, I'm using a OWC Sandforce based SSD (40GB). The error message was Windows cannot be installed on this drive because the disk is not bootable." I'm using a USB thumb drive.

I was actually able to get it working via a roundabout way. I started the install on my other laptop and at the first restart point during the windows install, swapped the disc to this laptop and it actually worked. I was amazed as this has always caused a BSOD with every prevoius version of windows.

 

That's weird. Maybe there is a firmware update for your SSD or a BIOS update for your UL20A?

ASUSTeK Computer Inc. -Support- Drivers and Download UL20A

http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus/174395-bios-update-guide-asus-notebooks.html

P.S. I'm moving these last posts into the UL20A owners lounge.

 

hello, I was wondering if anyone had any solutions for a problem I have with my Asus Ul20A computer. My monitor is completely blank, though it does power on. I've tried function+F7 but nothing happens. I can press the express gate button and those icons/menu appears but I can't access anything. It seems as though the hard drive is not responding at all. Any thoughts?

 

Hi... I'm having the same issue as "atc9001".... I have an UL20A-A1 and installed and OCZ ssd. Both have the latest firmware. When I insert my USB with Win7 Ultimate x64 it starts running it... when I get to the "select my drive" part... I can partition the SSD, and when I select the patition I just created for giving format to it and installing, it says that the disk is not bootable. Please, if someone could help. Thanks.

 

I've had my UL20A for 2 years now, and the plastic around the hinge for the keyboard/screen is starting to crack. Does anyone else have this problem?

 

Hi theo1358, the hinge cover cracking has been an issue I have seen a few times with the UL30A, so I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the UL20A had the same problem sometimes, since the design is essentially the same.

 

That's too bad, it seemed like a pretty sturdy laptop when I got it, with the metal finish and all. I don't suppose there's any way to fix it?

 

I think it's part of the screen bezel, so you would need to find a replacement for that part.