Asus UL30VT FAQ / Official Owners Lounge redux

thanks - I thought it was the fan at first, but now I agree I think it is the HD. I might just do a ssd sometime - it sounds very attractive. And yes - if there is any background noise, I can't hear it, but in a silent room, I can hear the spinning.


mitt

 

Well this is the best point IMO. It really is best to just use your battery as you need to use it. At the end of the day, your battery is gonna be a long term use product. So even if your battery dies a few months early (regardless of what method you use), it's after years of use. So batteries are long term investments and even with bad methods, it's not like you're losing much.

But as to your method working for you, well I can't say that it's not working for you. I'm just saying that the methods/patterns suggested by battery university (and their tests) would work better.

 

And that *can* be annoying, so I agree 100% with the "I might just do a ssd sometime" thought, because you won't regret it, it's a very positive thing to do with a notebook. Notebooks are supposed to be quiet things, and not make crazy vibrations or noises and in the smaller notebooks it's bad enough...as they lack a lot of volume and/or structural material which *can* isolate and/or minimize HD noise...but in a larger notebook the vibrations can be very, very annoying and distracting, even worse than in a small notebook.

I returned a nice N71JQ-A1 notebook recently, with all the goodies, ie BluRay optical drive, twin 7200RPM HD's (Seagate brand in my particular example), Core i7 720QM CPU, 17.3" LCD display, pretty much a desktop replacement computer, and yet it had some serious faults. One was HD noise, and it was just totally unnerving, and there was VIBRATION out of one/both of the HD's, which indicated the HD's had bad spindles, ie the platters were literally not balanced correctly in the HD's. This made the whole notebook sort of quiver and shake a little, and it was really noticeable when it was quiet in the evening when I wanted to work alone, not distracted by my co-workers or family or friends, pets etc.

I installed an SSD into the notebook, and it changed the whole thing 100% with respect to the VIBRATION and quivering of the notebook, but there were other issues so back it went, exchanged for a G51JX-A1 notebook, which I haven't received yet...will arrive in the next couple of days they tell me.

Noise from a HD and/or vibration from them is a very bad thing, a telling thing with respect to the HD and/or its brand, and I will say this about Seagate HD's of late, their Quality Control is on the downward side because that was not the 1st notebook I've had recently with HD issues when new, with Seagate HD's the brand in question. HD's with bad vibration and/or noise will most likely fail prematurely, so it's best to deal with them up front, and as soon as possible if you happen to get one with a new notebook.

It's a difficult thing to deal with when the notebook is new, also, because unless it outright fails, the manufacturer will probably not replace it. That is why there are Return Privileges at most good computer resellers, and I encourage people who are having this difficulty, ie noise and/or vibration from new HD's in a new computer, to RETURN the computers and exchange them for another if possible.

Even if you have to "tell a white lie" and exchange the computer for another one by saying that the computer "crashes under load", or "can't install programs", or "WiFi doesn't work with my network," or "Sound doesn't work", ie there are any number of legitimate complaints to give resellers/retailer/etailers when you want to exchange a notebook because of bad HD's, noisy or vibrating HD's.

When I wanted to exchange/return a computer recently I actually loaded up the OS from the Recovery Partition, and when the computer was in the middle of the Recovery sequence I cut the power from the computer, ie pulled the AC plug out of the jack (I'd already removed the battery so it had no backup), and that effectively rendered the HD useless.

I am not proud of doing this, honestly, but I hated the computer and wanted desperately to return it...that tactic worked 100% by the way, not that I am encouraging people to do this, but if you are creative about what condition a computer is "in" to your reseller and you're within the window of Return for the reseller, RETURN IT!

 

OT..
Hey, your talking to ex Fat Mac owner (512K ram!) I was also first kid on block with a Levco Monster Mac, woohoo! 2 MEGS of ram!!!. I only had to deal with Photo shop 1 back then, only available on the Mac

I think its safe to say with our 30vts and 4 Gigs! of ram we have the best of class. To spend the big bucks for 8 gigs would be a excessive if your a PS power user.. on a laptop? But then if I did I could have some fun with ram disks, no?

 

The OCZ Solid 2 is really cheap on A M A Z O N right now. It is about $100 cheaper and has decent specs, TRIM, GC. Getting mine this afternoon. There is also a $30 rebate today. The unit would be 226 beans and change for a 120gb Gen 2 SSD. Not so bad....

 

Is there any method of disabling charging above a certain rate, for example, in my Lenovo Thinkpad, I set Power Manager to charge only when the battery is lower than 30%. Is that possible to do so on an Asus through Power4Gear? I plan to get a UL30Vt from Hong Kong some time this month so I'll need to figure out how to do these things soon.

Another question is how to stop Power Saving Mode from being so annoying, such as changing the background? I remember I had one hell of a frustrating time trying to get my background back and getting Aero back on when I had my N10. Unfortunately I can't remember what I did to make it less annoying.

 

+1. I would also like to know. I really dont like how the power4gear takes over simple windows functions.

 

OK, which ones are out of date as per the DVD? One..all? I have had no problems using the ones off the DVD.

 

Since you and I are away from home right now I cannot tell you. but the DVD was most likely created in Dec-Jan. Since many of the driver have been updated since that time it may be all. I could confirm at a later time when I can actually check the disc. My guess is all the drivers are outdated. If you are not experiencing any issues doesn't mean you don't have outdated drivers. In fact you may be fine with what you have for a long time. I just try to install the latest and greatest when I do a clean install to maximize efficiency and minimize problems. Again, I can confirm when I get a chance to look at the disk.

 

P4G is changing my wallpaper/theme when I toggle settings. I've unchecked all the "change wallpaper" "power saving desktop" stuff. I'll switch off low power, then switch back, and it reverts to default windows background. Rather annoying I searched around and the solutions are "Save your windows customization" (which I've done) and turn off wallpaper changing in P4G (which I've also done.)

Any ideas?

 

Thx. I tried to check the installed versions to no avail. AFAIK only the video and the Power4Gear were updated. People are having issues with the newer Power4Gear and the newer video drivers, once you get then installed , improved nothing.

In the windows world I don't update anything without reason

 

I suppose this is true. I guess YMMV. Generally for me newer drivers are better not worse. Asus may be a rare exception here.

 

This is a good general outlook until there are big changes in a given driver, then it's time to update. I have a utility called Driver Magician, which is not free, but then the good things never are...and it's a little wonder for driver updates.

Once or twice a year with my PC's I'll use Magician and update everything that needs it, and I determine that myself by practical research, ie reading reviews and forums for major items like video or VGA drivers, sound drivers, mainboard drivers, and most important for us SSD owners and users the AHCI driver. Of special import for my uses are the WiFi drivers, and I update WiFi with the latest and greatest, which are always an improvement, at least in my experience it's been like that with WiFi drivers...especially Atheros.

Google is your friend for comparative research on drivers also, and I often check on a driver's popularity or effectiveness by just doing a Google on it...this always pops up some interesting stuff, YMMV.

The conservative approach is good until you are so far out of date with the drivers that it can compromise the computer... that's my only thought on the idea of never changing them. At some point it's good to at least check on the major system drivers, and that's only a suggestion of course...you can always just not do it for the life of the machine, but I think that it's questionable to practice exclusion.

I also keep a Driver Magician Self-Extracting EXE file of ALL the drivers in each of my PC's, just in case I were to *lose* a HD and be desperate to fix the machine quickly, and I keep those stored on a DVD-RAM disk, which may sound old-fashioned, but it's media that is incredibly stout vs DVDs and CDs. Also you can write to DVD RAM disks over and over up to 1000 times or so, thus when I get a new PC I always make a DM EXE File of the OEM drivers, A to Z, and write it to my "Drivers Pile" DVD RAM disc, just in case...

 

Which Power4Gear Hybrid are you using?

If you are using anything other than v1.25 you need to vanish it (uninstall it completely with the Control Panel function), and install v1.25, which is not problematical like what you are describing. Be sure and Restart the computer after you change/uninstall it to remove all traces of the old one.

P4G v1.25 in this UL30VT-X1 has those boxes unchecked you are writing about, and it does *not* do the "LCD wobble-jobble and presto-change-O" act, as that is really annoying. Please check which version you are using in the Control Panel for Uninstall and do the necessary adjustments. I don't think you'll have this problem if you use v1.25.

I have resisted changing my P4G to anything other than v1.25 with good results, ie it works correctly and does not cause issues...

 

Be careful which SSD you install, because it can be a nightmare with the wrong SSD...price is not everything, although it is of course wise to save $$ whenever we can. I went with Intel because of their general heavy-duty support of the products overall, and the lack of bad reports on the product I ended up with.

After doing research for many weeks, slowly but surely, there was an overwhelming body of people and cases with other manufacturers having massive problems of one sort or another, while the Intel SSD owners were fairly pleased with support, drivers, and the product itself.

If you are satisfied that OCZ is a good brand, and that particular SSD is a good type from OCZ, then go for it. Just do your research first if you can, check out some forums, check out the reviews at Amazon.com for example, and if the product you want is a good one you'll know it by just doing a little reading.

 

LOL guys, I didn't say I never update..I said with reason

I've been burned on enough "updates", in the last 10 years, to do a bit of research before leaping.

rexrzer, are you a Mac OS6 vet?

Nope, Asus is no worse that the rest

 

I just checked the DVD and can confirm the atheros Wifi and ATK ACPI are up to date. I cannot confirm anything else. The descriptions are not available and i would have to install them in order to find out. So I guess the DVD I received was perhaps more upto date than I had predicted. I am still going to install the driver via flash drive.

From what I gathered this is quite the find as it uses the same controller as the Intel SSD's. I will let you all know tonight or tomorrow. The deal is good until the 15th.

Infact the UPS man just droppped off my SSD. Stay tuned kids...

 

So far so good. The UL30VT-A1 recognized the Solid 2 right away and is humming along. I will keep at it until I either a. have finished and it works or b. have an issue and need your help...

 

windows just finished installing. Wow that was fast.

 

hydra wrote: "rexrzer, are you a Mac OS6 vet?"

My first Mac was a pre-PowerPC 68040 CPU Computer like this Performa CD:

Apple Macintosh Performa 600 (CD) Specs @ EveryMac.com

It didn't have OS 6.x, it came with v7.1.2 as I recall, and over time I updated it to 7.5.1 before I ended up with one of these:

Apple Power Macintosh 8100/110 Specs @ EveryMac.com

The 8100 was quite the machine to have back then, and we upgraded the BeJesus out of it too, my friends and I who were budding Mac enthusiasts...and that's what got me started on Macs for real.

This is soooo OT it's not even funny!

Send me a PM if you want more Apple/Mac data from me hydra, this is a bit far-fetched for this forum...!

 

Okay having a problem. Everything is fine except the nvidia driver is freaking out the computer and it keeps switching back and forth from Nvdia to intel then freezes. I have not installed the p4g yet. Any suggestions?

Update: Okay I think I got it now. When you install the nVidia drivers leave the laptop uplugged so it switches back to the intel card. Then install the p4g. Now it is stable and fast as lightning. When I first booted my Ul30VT it had 83 processes running. Now after the fresh install 53. It is very zippy now. Two thumbs up so far for the OCZ Solid 2 as well.

 

@Sanmanatoo--

How did you do the clean install?

Did you make up your own driver/utilities DVD ROM or Flash Drive, or did you use the Asus supplied D&U disk? How about the OS, did you have a Recovery DVD from Asus, ie No.3439 V1.0, and use that for the OS or did you use a fresh copy of Windows with new license?

Just curious, because everybody has their own way of doing this stuff...

Way to go with your new SSD in the house now, it's an amazing deal huh?

You should do some benchmarks and see how it stacks up...ie use ATTO Tools Benchmarking Tool, and the new one SS SSD Benchmarking Tool, just see how it's doing.

And what is your WEI Score up to for the Disk now?

Post it all when you get it together, if you feel up to it...

 

keep letting us know how you go with this one.

 

I hate every bit of Asus software that comes on this laptop. Cheap chinese junk software with broken english (Elan trackpad).
Now my rant aside, is there ANY way to enable turbo33 without installing P4G? I don't need 4 different profiles for power, my macbook pro had a way superior user experience out of the box compared to crap asus.

 

Glad your up. I'm guessing the order of software installed or your version of OS image file tripped you up.

Scary, 53 processes running after clean install. After I installed all my core apps I now have lost count

 

The digital river method and used an external DVD drive. I then put all the drivers on a flash drive and installed them one by one.I have not activated the key from the bottom of the laptop yet. I will do so next week.

so far so good. The SSD seems well... solid as its name suggests. It appears to be pretty snappy an much faster than advertised. What do you guys think?

 

For the record I also own a corsair p128 in my desktop. It appears the Ocz solid 2 is faster despite being advertised as being slower. Weird. How do these number stack up to your Intel X-25's?

 

I hear you, but IMO you should just suck it up and install P4G, it's pretty much a core part of this laptop's functionality. You need it to be able to switch graphics. It doesn't slow down your system, and you don't have to use the power profiles at all if you don't want to, you can just stick to one profile and use the graphics button to turn the nVidia on and off. This way you will never, ever see P4G.

 

First of all, make sure you use version 1.25 or 1.24.

Then, switch to battery saving mode and power P4G:



1. In the bottom right corner, where it says "Battery Saving Desktop" and "Deactivate Sidebar" say no to both.
2. Hit "Save" at the bottom
3. In the middle left, if you were "On battery" change to "Plugged in", or vice-versa. Change the settings to "no" and hit "save" again".
4. Switch to High Performance, your desktop should return to normal.
5. Switch back to Battery Saving, and your desktop should stay normal.

 

Correct, with the caveat that if you have more RAM available, chances are more RAM will be used and thus will take longer to write to disk. Anecdotally, when I upgraded my RAM on previous systems I noticed that with more RAM the hibernation time took longer. Windows tends to use much of your available memory if you have more of it, even if you're running the same number of programs. So it makes sense that hibernate on a system with more RAM would have more data to save. Your hibernate file should not be fragmented since it'll get reserved when you install Windows and it shouldn't get fragmented after.

Also consider that the hibernation file requires the same amount of space as your RAM. If you have a 40 GB SSD, there's a very large jump from sacrificing 8 GB of your precious SSD to the hibernate file vs. 4 GB. If I had a 40 GB SSD and 8 GB RAM I would probably give up on hibernation altogether just to save the space.

Your amount of RAM does indeed have an impact on hibernation, as I explained above.

I like more RAM too, I just want to point out that there are issues to consider and you do get a slight hibernation benefit in return for not having a huge armount of RAM. The other considerations of course being the huge price and the diminishing performance returns after you get to a certain point. 4 GB is pretty generous for Windows 7. But if you have hundreds of dollars extra to spend on the laptop, why not.

 

The above highlighted statement is incorrect. By default, windows 7 sets your hibernation file to 75% of your total physical memory (ram). If you think the size of your hibernation file is the cause for the slow hibernation process, you can change your file size by typing in "C:\>PowerCfg.exe /HIBERNATE /SIZE XX" in your command prompt (XX denotes the number in percent).

 

Ok this is my second ATTO run after some tweaks and installing all my games, steam, Impulse, etc (30+ Gb used). Please let me know your thoughts. Thanks,



and now compared to the 1st run.

 

Sanmanatoo, those numbers look great
I'm getting max speeds at about 261MB/s read and 194MB/s write with my SSD.

 

Thanks for the info, I looked into this and this paper gives some more background and recommendations:
Reducing the Disk Footprint for Windows 7 Hibernation

 

Thanks David. I am pretty happy with the Ocz Solid 2. Works better than advertised and I had no issues installing it. What drive do you have?

 

I have a 256GB G.Skill Falcon SSD.

 

"Ok this is my second ATTO run after some tweaks and installing all my games, steam, Impulse, etc (30+ Gb used). Please let me know your thoughts. Thanks,"--you wrote.

I'm sorry I didn't get to answer you before now, Friday is always a ball buster at my place of work and I just got free for a couple minutes to check out your scores with the ATTO benchmark, which is SSD Savvy.

The two scores are GREAT, the 2nd reflecting the normal slight loss in speed after you've filled the drive up with more apps and data...this is normal.

As for comparing with the Intel X25-M? Your write speeds are much, much faster as the Intel SSDs are not optimized for writing. The read speeds are very similar, with the Intel X25-M in my UL30Vt-X1 just a tad faster across the board, but this is to be expected as it's optimized for reading in the 8K-8192MB-sized files in that particular test....I'm on my PC desktop right now or I'd put up my score for the test so you could compare them...it's very close in read speeds that much I remember, and writes are slower on the Intel SSDs literally by design.

I might suggest one thing to help your throughput, and the same for David or anyone else re this updated the driver.

Intel's latest AHCI Driver is optimized for SSDs and RAID use in both Desktop and PC notebooks, and I highly recommend it over the OEM AHCI driver which is generic, and not optimized at all.

Here's the link...it's an EXE file, ie don't download the ZIP file, that's for RAID managers, the EXE file is for desktop and notebook installs.

Intel AHCI Controller Driver v 9.6.0.1014:

Intel(R) Rapid Storage Technology

It's ready to install upon downloading, ie no unpacking or unzipping necessary. Just simply double-click the installer Icon, install, RESTART, and you're done! To double/triple check if the driver installed correctly, confirm in Device Manager by Right Clicking on Intel AHCI Driver>Properties>Driver and BAM! Should see the correct version v9.6.0.1014 listed there.

This install is for ALL SSDs and RAIDs, not just Intel SSDs, ie it's the driver for AHCI that gets updated, nothing on the SSD is touched.

I posted this driver at my Amazon.com review for the Intel X25-M SSD, and there have been nothing but rave reviews from people after the install, as it seems to increase throughput significantly with RAIDs and SSDs.

Enjoy!

 

Thanks Rexrzer727 here is the run post intel driver.

 

"Thanks Rexrzer727 here is the run post intel driver."--you wrote...

Yup, sure works wonders on the bottom end, right? (The low Kb files, like below 4096Kb) That's where I saw my performance pick up a bunch of power too, so it's good to know that little things like this are really important for SSD use..."it's the little things that count."

That's why my Mom always used to say when I was growing up and you know she's right on the $$$! If you take care of the little things, the big things seem to work out better.

I'm glad it worked for you too...

 

Thanks all for the suggestions and support. I am really loving my ul30vt now. The SSD was an incredible upgrade and I dont think I will buy another laptop or desktop without an SSD. It's just too good to pass up. I suggest anyone conteplating to just do it. It is worth it.

Cheers,

Sanmanatoo

 

I've had my UL30vt-A1 for about a month and a half now and I'm pretty peased with it for the most part... About 2-3 weeks ago, I installed the latest BIOS to fix the issue of not being able to adjust brightness after coming out of sleep mode.

Since I've done that, I've noticed it seems my battery life has been shortened... On the "Quiet Office" P4G setting, it used to always estimate me at 8-10 hours of battery remaining on a fresh charge, and that seemed to be what I'd get with just some internet browsing and document editing.

Now, however, as soon as the battery estimate comes up, it usually shows 6-7 hours left. I'm using the same brightness (usually 3rd or 4th up from the lowest setting), etc so I'm not really what's causing the drop in battery life.

 

I can only offer that this is Estimated. I've noticed if CPU or drive activity at above normal, as in housekeeping, the estimate changes like the wind.

You could use a utility like Hardware Monitor and log your "full charge capacity" to a dated text file. You can review this every month or so to track battery health.

 

Is there anyway to get the following to work with a Standard User in Windows 7 on a ULx0VT series computer?

1) The GraphicsX Boost Key / ExpressGate Key to switch between discrete and internal GPU?

2) The Fn + Spacebar to switch between power plans?

3) The right click on the battery button in taskbar and choosing Power4Gear Hybrid to open Power4Gear Hybrid?

These all work fine with an Admin User, but not a Standard User in Windows 7.

Surely, Hydra, Rexrzer727, Bezelbut, Itaru or one of the other Experts here can figure this out?

If not, is there a way to request that ASUS include this in future versions?

Thanks

 

Well, I'm a little relieved, and slightly embarrassed to say I think I found my problem... I've had Firefox open for a LONG time, with probably 20+ tabs... I started task manager to see Firefox was eating about 20-25% of the CPU and 600+ mb of RAM. I closed it, and just opened it up with 4 tabs, which is much more realistic/reasonable and it's only taking 1-3% CPU and about 80mb of RAM. Since I did that, my estimate shot up from 4.5 hours @ ~70% battery left to 7 hours @ 70% battery left. Although, as I typed this it went from 7 to 5 hours...

The battery estimate on this seems very finicky... I don't know if it's Windows 7, the hardware, or what. On my Asus 1000HE netbook, the battery estimate was pretty much always spot on and rarely jumped around as much.

 

As you know, battery life is estimated by looking at current power usage and battery charge. Combine that with efficient CPU down-clocking (CPU-Z reports ~1000MHz on idle vs ~1700MHz under load with Turbo on) and you get rather large variations in estimated battery life. Even more so when you suddenly switch from integrated to discrete GPU.
Your Eee is probably more accurate because of lesser variations in power usage of whole notebook (Atom CPU, with it's 2W TDP has less impact on overall consumption).

I'm getting used to this tho. I just try to ignore windows estimate and make my own, considering tasks I'm about to do.

 

You're an honest guy at least, because many wouldn't post back here when finding such a situation was caused by an open browser, albeit one that was eating 600MB RAM and 25% of CPU power, Hah-Hah! That's almost comical it's so severe, my Lordie! I guess you won't let *that* happen again, so good detective work, because we could never have discovered that from here...that's definitely an owner's deal and a very good thing to find out and fix.

I am going to take this one step further, ie about battery life estimates et al. The software you are using is not a very telling gauge, because it's constantly interacting with the computer's sending units from battery, CPU, GPU etc and the flux will be evident as you are seeing when tasking in different uses and switching power consumption a lot.

I suggest you get yerself a regular battery utility if you want accuracy, as that's really the only way to go, and I'm not talking about Hardware Monitor either! I know that many here utilize HM for everything for their laptops, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it has its limits. A utility as all encompassing as HM must compromise many things to be "good" at all of them, yah? It's actually a very nice utility, but if you're going "all encompassing" I suggest Everest Ultimate as the one to get, as that's a much more comprehensive and hardware oriented utility, the standard bearer such as it is... so think about that, too.

But for battery use being "accurate" there's nothing like EmBatPower or Battery Monitor, either of those will tell the Gospel about battery estimates, be it instant, long term, trends, or capacity, and they *can* be believed as they are dedicated solely to the battery and its performance, not many, many things and trying to be good at all of them.

I latched onto EmBatPower about 2.5 years ago, when it was 1st released, and am partial to it, but Battery Monitor is equally excellent and highly recommended, although I think the Shareware fee is now $25 for its license, while EmBatPower is still $10. You can use the software on all your laptops and it transfers from one to another also once you get the license, and it will truly and completely end your "guessing" situation with respect to battery use of all kinds, including battery health and safety issues also.

That's my recommendation to *everybody* about battery use and prognostication, ie "guessing" is not a grand thing to be doing if you are serious about knowing what is going on with your battery 100% of the time...it's the only way to go, and just leaves all the guesswork in the dust and solves this dilemma that we are addressing here, so that's my suggestion for the day and I hope people take it to heart.

 

Does anyone else have an OCZ agility installed with the ul30VT-A1? i'm trying to do an HDDerase but it doesn't go past the welcome screen. I've tried OCZ sanitary_erase as well and it doesn't run the program

 

Why don't you just use Disk Management in Windows?

It works fine with Intel SSD's...doesn't it work with OCZ also?

I have erased my SSD's twice and counting, one for each SSD, and no problems using Disk Management...just format them @ 1024KB and you'll have Parity and Alignment.

That's the easy way to do it.

 

I heard some bad stories about locking the drive and it's not the "right way" to erase an SSD. I ended up using the sanitary_erase program from OCZ's website. Now it's all fine and dandy.

I have a new problem now:

For some reason after the computer goes to sleep, the graphiX switch button stops working even after rebooting. The only way to get it working again is by booting into express gate and then rebooting into windows. The weird thing is that this doesn't happen all the time.

 

As long as you are happy, that's what is important...as for Intel SSDs and using DM it seems to be OK, as my SSD is performing @ incredible speeds for an X25-M after the full format and 1024KB sector alignment with PAT (Paragon Alignment Tool). My Windows WEI score is 7.8, and my AS SSD score is 386 fyi, not to mention it is reading @ up to 272MB/sec and writing @ up to 115MB/sec which is top-drawer for an Intel SSD. As to your new issue...

What version of P4G are you using? Is it V1.25? That is the *only one* to be using, so if it's something else you need to completely uninstall the P4G you have, Restart, then install V1.25 and I think you will have better luck with P4G and the GraphiX Boost Button. Even V1.24 gives fits to people who don't know better, so take my advice and check which version you have and do the necessary maintenance and install the good one, IF you aren't using V1.25 that is.

If you are using V1.25 and you're having that problem, you need to reinstall all of the ATK Hot Key utilities and the Keyboard Driver to boot, Restart and you should be Golden after that. There are 7 drivers total to install, get them off the Asus web site or your Utility and Drivers DVD ROM that came with the laptop.

I hope this is the information you are looking for, and I don't know what to do if all that doesn't work 100% for you...I am using V1.25 and the button works as advertised, no issues at all.