*Official UL30VT-X1 Owners Lounge*

That would be me.

 

what SSD do you have, archangel? did you do a clean install?

any reason why others are around 30 seconds and you're getting there in half that time?

 

Let's not forget that the 25-30 seconds is still plenty fast I mentioned before that if my screen didn't go black for like 5 seconds right before getting to desktop, I'd be in the 20 second range.

 

Just got my UL30VT in! It's extremely light compared to my 5 year old Dell Inspirion 6000.

One thing I'm kind of off put by the chatter that the HD makes even while doing nothing it seems to be making a lot of chatter. Is this usual? My previous laptop doesn't have this much noise.

Also I have the white box of pixels that someone else had on this forum.

 

Turn off Indexing.

 

Quite a few people have noticed that this HD is pretty noisy. So it seems to be a normal thing with the hard drive they used.

A few of us have installed SSD's. After the upgrade, it's been a very silent machine. I'll barely hear the CPU fan only when playing video games.

 

it has been a 1 hours that ive played with this comouter now.....
im very unhappy with it!!!!
first while i was trying to plug my usb powered speakers into the headphone jack i guess i accidently touch the usb port with speaker jack and pop! it shutted down suddenly what is this!!?? i had to wait about 30 seconds to reboot the computer...im afraid to do it again yes im still using this usb powered speakers but im being very careful where i plug in..
aslo now im having this bluetooth problem i have this mouse that works perfectly with my old HP laptop but somehow it consistently not working with this laptop it works about 10 seconds then drop the signal?????
third, i dont get this power 4 gear...so when it is in highperformance and entertainment it is on 33% turbo?
finally my laptop does not blink the moniter whenever i push the graphic boosts or Fn + Space bar........anyone have same problem???
i think the speaker jack with used port problem is very serious one i freaked out i thought i broke it after 30 minutes of usage,,,

 

Got my Intel G2 SSD in and installed today. So far it's great!

I noticed this issue and after some investigation I think I've figured it out. I don't have this problem when I have the graphics switched to Integrated, only when I have the graphics on Independent do I experience the delay. It seems to be an issue with the nVidia drivers. With the graphics set to Integrated my boot time is ~20 seconds, whereas on Independent I have the blank screen and boot time is ~26 seconds.

 

i just got my ul30vt in the mail today and there are some definite downsides to the laptop

for one, the screen isnt very good. the colors seem very washed out. lowering the brightness and messing around with some of the contrast options in the nvidia control panel helped, but i have a feeling i will not be able to get the settings right for both the nvidia and intel cards. all in all, the screen is underwhelming and just screaming to be 1600x900.

asus does preload way too much software, but i plan on doing a reinstall of win7 ultimate, so it doesnt bother me too much.

it will take me a while to get used to where the function keys are. my last laptop (compal cl56) had the screen brightness as the up and down arrow keys, so i immediately tried that on the ul30vt and spawned about 20 instances of windows media center. i also miss the hardware wireless switch from my old laptop.

asus puts WAY WAY too many stickers on everything. getting some of them off will be a pain and the few i already got off from the power cable left behind a ton of residue. very annoying.

finally, im not a fan of the mouse buttons combined into one rocker. it makes clicking anywhere near the middle of the buttons impossible, so it will take a while to train myself to not do that.

hopefully i will adjust to some of the issues i have with the laptop. i really missed having a laptop and there is nothing else out there that interests me, so i need to stick with the ul30vt.

 

Also hearing the clicking noise from my hard drive. It's very subtle, but it's there. For what it's worth, you may be able to sell this 500 hdd to someone with a playstation 3 to help offset some of the cost of the ssd. I have been wanting to upgrade the 60GB drive in my PS3 forever and this gives me a great excuse heh.

On the battery life side - I have some bad news. I have had it here by my side while I play Demon Souls (on aformentioned PS3) just running a messenger client and refreshing a few web pages every 20min or so and it's drained the battery to 11% in only 3.5 hours. Yes, I've had it in performance mode, but I haven't been doing any demanding tasks and 3.5 hours on a "12 hour" battery seems pretty bad, performance mode or no.

 

I'm not sure if this is the case but when I first got Windows Vista and then Windows 7, I was alarmed about the HDD noise. If the people noticing this issue used Win XP as their last operating system, perhaps this is also why they notice this issue?

New installs of Vista and Windows 7 have things like search, indexing, restore and defrag enabled and they often go hard out on the hdd. I end up disabling a lot of stuff and the hdd noise/activity reduces considerably. Someone moving from WinXP is more likely to notice the extra hdd activity.

On the other hand, as you mentioned, it may just be a noisy/loud hdd

 

How many HD slots does ul30vt and ul80vt have? Can I put SSD into 1 slot and the normal HD into the other slot?

 

It sounds like the computer shorted. If the usb powered speakers are cheap, they probably would be the cause of this issue.

 

The UL30VT only has 1 HD compartment. Not enough space for 2 (would've been awesome though.)

 

I've been playing with my UL30VT all day today, here are my thoughts:

I immediately formatted and put win 7 ultimate on it and installed all the drivers and got all the function keys to work.

The screen isn't terrible, but it isn't impressive either. Coming from a laptop resolution of 1440x900, I wish the resolution was AT LEAST the same.

The touchpad is nice now that I've greased it up a bit. I wish it was a tad bigger. I would sacrifice the physical buttons for a larger track pad.

I also am hearing the hard drive working away when the room is silent. Doesn't bother me too much though.

I'm still trying to figure out the GPU switch button. I assume it is only switching if the actual screen flickers? It doesn't do that everytime. I'm not sure how to see if it's working. Just little things like this seem to work sometimes and not other times. For example right now I am trying the three finger right click and it's not working, though it was working a little while ago.

I got about 6 hours while just playing with the laptop, installing/uninstalling, trying out games briefly, etc.

Dragons Age runs as well as I would expect it. I'm used to running it on a beastly gaming desktop so I'm not going to say it's comparable, because it's not. I don't plan on playing games like that on this anyway. I'll play light Indie games like torchlight and world of goo and for that this works great.

Overall it is what I would expect and lives up to my needs and wants.

 

actually there are user discussions in Taiwanese forums too. Trouble is it's in Chinese. You can use Google Translate but making sense of it is another question. If anyone here could read Chinese and give a SUMMARY it'd be great.

here's the link:

http://www.mobile01.com/topicdetail.php?f=233&t=1337365&last=16306047#16306047

i did get this much being discussed on one of the replies.:

1. noisy hard drive - strange clacking/clicking noises

2. poor build quality - (on this forum though, none is complaining much)

3. Touchpad does not support multi-point

rest seems like minor gripes.

 

i'm in Malaysia and the first batch of UL30Vt's that were sold were of a different spec then the one in Amazon.

Over here they were sold with 2GB RAM, 320GB HDD,2 years warranty and 5600mAh battery.

Still they sold out within days near my home due to limited quantities. No idea if the 2nd batch would be similar or different.

 

I'm not even talking about HD spinning loudly, it's like it's always active doing something

 

To those who are disappointed with this notebook, don't judge until you have done a clean install because all that unnecessary crap from Asus really drags it down. Besides the drivers, the utilities I installed were Power4Gear, Fastboot, and Wireless Console. The notebook is rock solid now. No more random screen flickering, much faster boot time, and I find the hard drive spinning up less. The screen won't get any awards but it is perfectly adequate for regular use. What do you expect for 850 bucks? I am still trying to get used to the touch pad which isn't as accurate as I would hope considering using the physical buttons are somewhat painful to use. I hope they break in a little with use.

 

what is the wireless console? i havn't installed that yet after i did a clean install of windows 7.

 

It is a program that sits in the taskbar allows you to switch the bluetooth and wireless on and off easily without having to cycle through all the options as you have to do with the Fn + F2 hotkey.

 

Does anyone use there UL30VT with Visual Studio? Or does anyone run any virtual machines on this laptop? Does it perform ok?

 

I am running vs2008 and sql server 2008 right now, works fine.

 

Sweet...that is exactly what i wanted to hear!

Anyone else run Microsoft Virtual PC or something similar for a virtual machine?

 

Problem with networking:

Just turned on the computer and finished the win 7 install. Didn't do a clean install, just the system install as it came.

I got almost 80% time out replies when ping'ing any IP adress (even my router). I did change the cable and used a different computer on the same connection without a problem. It happens the same with the wireless connection which makes me believe that this is a driver problem and not a hardware problem.

I haven't yet installed any new apps on the system.

Any clues on what I might try?

Thx,

 

It allows you to turn the wireless on and off with the FN keys.

 

are you using the windows 7 drivers? or the drivers on the CD that the laptop came with.

 

to the person who shorted his laptop using USB speakers... dump the cheap speakers and watch out what your doing next time. it's not the laptops fault that you shorted the laptop yourself. as for bluetooth issues your having, did you install the newest win7 drivers for the mouse? that might help even if your just connecting through bluetooth.

other than that, most of the people just needs to get used to the laptop. single rocker for right click and left click isn't a big deal, ur just too used to 2 different buttons. how come macbook people aren't complaining about only one click and the weird multitouch mousepad?

as for other hiccups, clean install!

oh and the guy on amazon who deducted a star for the touchpad because he didn't like dots on the touchpad... just ridiculous. he even deducted a star because it had glossy coating and the laptop attracted a bit more fingerprint than normal comps.

i feel sad for asus. they just can't satisfy everyone ehh?

just my 2cents. don't get mad.

 

I just want to echo some thoughts after having mine for a few days now:

Fingerprint magnet (I would've chosen the silver, if available, but the outside is not really my concern, its more the shiny plastic of the palm rest and around the LCD.) I don't think this looks cheap, I just hate the grease and fingerprints that can be seen on it.

Lots of bloatware - I just completed installing a clean version of Win 7 so we'll see how that goes. To those that did a clean install - did you install control deck or power4gear, do I need both or just one or the other? And what driver will let me enable turbo mode?

The hard drive is loud with the clicking noises, as mentioned. This isn't a concern to me as I put a SSD drive in the laptop. Otherwise the laptop is very very quiet.

When lifting the laptop from the right palm rest area (with one hand), there is a creak. This doesn't seem to happen on the left side palm rest. Other than that I have no problems with build quality.

The keyboard is soft-touch enough for me.

The single mouse button is not. I prefer the much softer, and separate keys on the touchpad of the m1330. This isn't a big deal for me, as I usually use the touchpad itself to tap to click, but if you're someone who regularly uses the buttons, its something to look at.

I like the multi-gesture feature (however I wish there were a few more customization options) but what's there is great, and works well.

I have no issues with the space bar, mine works fine.

I have not gamed or anything, but so far this laptop is quite cool, temperature wise. Much, much improved from my m1330 (which would hit 60C+ just web browsing)

I wish the FN + brightness keys were the arrows, just because that's what I'm used to. and I'd prefer dedicated media buttons for play, stop, previous & next, because as it is, you need two hands to control media play-back (Fn key and the arrow keys). Not a deal breaker by any means, just something I'm not used to yet.

That's about it for now.

 

Could someone post what programs they installed after making a Clean install.

make a simple list.

also , how did you make a Clean install , since it has not DVD drive, any simple guide?

Thank you

ps. is it advised to wait for the 5600 battery combo that is perhaps coming out in 2 months or so..

 

Hmm, why is this bad news? In performance mode, the dedicated card is always on and consuming power. You also played a game which consumed more power so I'm not sure what you're expecting here, especially with the smaller 4400mAh battery (which is more like 10 hours). The only way you're going to get anywhere near what is advertised is with the overclock off and integrated graphics on. Even with everything on, 3.5 hours is still pretty damn good. Are there other laptops out there that'll offer more than 3.5 hours of battery life with a dedicated card? Just curious as to why you think this is bad news.

FWIW, while on battery yesterday, I played Dragon Age for a bit and when I exited, it said I had roughly 35 minutes of battery life left. I switched it over to integrated and next thing you know, 2.5 hours of battery life.

 

I have visual studio and sql server express installed. Haven't done any development work just yet but I'm sure there won't be any issues.

Comparing this laptop to machines I've used in the past to run VM's, this laptop should be perfectly fine to run VM's. It's not as if this is an Atom cpu so don't worry too much. I plan on installing an Ubuntu VM over the weekend so I'll follow up then.

 

From the Asus website: the entire ATK section, the Realtek Audio drivers/software, Wireless Console (to turn off wireless and bluetooth), Power4Gear and the nvidia drivers/software.

Just google "installing windows 7 from usb" for your second question. Plenty of guides out there.

 

just wondering would the 5600mAH battery add more weight to the laptop....
its 1.5kg at 2200mAH (according to asus website)1.7kg at 4400mah (can someone confirm this)

also i found a similiar laptop by asus...the ux30 infact that one is much thinner...

i wonder how it fair against the ul30vt

 

Dec9th, no signs of the laptop coming back in stock yet.

 

I hope it comes back in stock soon. I'm selling my 13" macbook pro at the moment and I'm looking to the UL30VT as a suitable replacement. The macbook isn't bad I just want something else (and I'm tired of Apple right now).

 

FYI - I was playing a game on the PS3 (Playstation 3). The computer was just sitting there next to me with the screen dimmed out from lack of use. I didn't think the video card sucked that much power if you weren't.. you know... asking it to do a million matrix math operations a second. It makes me think that when I'm actually playing a game on it, the battery life will be a lot less than 3.5 hours, which would be kinda pathetic. Am I wrong about this? Do video cards drain the same amt. of battery while on whether you're playing a game or not?

 

The last two amazon reviewers are idiots and don't know what they are talking about. One guy says he can't stand to use the integrated graphics mode because the screen is too dim. Uhm...I guess he hasn't found this great feature most notebooks have these days that allow you to increase or decrease brightness to your pleasure. Both the integrated and discreet can be the same brightness.

The next guy is convinced Amazon jacked their prices to 1000 for the laptops. No, Amazon is simply out of stock and there is some private bag selling them for $1000.

Personally, I give the laptop 4/5 stars. But you can't dock the laptop for reasons that don't exist.

 

my two finger scrolling has stopped working for reasons that I can't figure out. two finger scrolling still works in windows, just not in chrome, firefox or IE. could this be related to UAC settings? I've tried reloading elan driver. Suggestions?

 

The nvidia card will probably cause at least a 25% decrease in battery life even if you are doing nothing with it. This is due to several factors.

First off the card itself requires power. The TDP of the card is 14 watts, this is actually even higher then the processor itself so in a sense its like having two processors running at the same time! Also just because you switched to the nvidia card doesn't mean it doesn't have to power the integrated one. This is the one flaw in offering switchable graphics in the fact that the integrated graphics controller still needs to be powered even if it's not in use as its part of the chipset itself. The other factor is heat. The Nvidia card runs hotter then the integrated card thus requiring the fan to come on more frequently and this also uses up battery life.

Hopefully this helps explain why it works this way. There is an option in the power management to have it shut off the nvidia card after a certain period of being idle. Maybe you should try this? I don't use the nvidia card much but using the integrated graphics and surfing on wifi I easily get 6.5-7 hours with the brightness at 40% and all aero features still enabled.

 

using the live usb stick will make battery life better since hdd is off most of the time, i didn't drain it all, the estimate is about 90 minutes for 40% battery.

 

Quick question:

Does the ULvt have an expresscard slot (I don't think so)?

I was looking at inexpensive expresscard SSD drives in order to have a fast boot and application drive for <$110 while being able to keep the onboard HDD for storage. But if there is no exporesscard...


http://www.buy.com/prod/48gb-ssd-exp...211580172.html

Here is a discussion of mac users using an expresscard ssd as a boot drive: http://forums.macnn.com/69/mac-noteb...ard-ssd-320gb/

Also, since it is removable and has a mini-usb port, you can bring it with you and use it as a boot drive on any computer when you travel.

 

These are good points. My point is it's advertised as a 12-hour battery. I would accept 10 hours because all businesses get away with that crap, and I'm used to that. But this is much much less (12 - 25% for gpu (doing nothing) and fan = 9 hours - I got about 3.5). It doesn't even really bother me since I'm always near an outlet - I'm just sharing that information for any people that care about battery life.

 

i think your expectations for this laptop are to high with the settings you're using. and you do have to condition the battery (meaning let it fully drain from when you first turned it on).

 

From the Asus legal disclaimer;

*12hr battery life is based on 8cell, 5600mAh battery & Intelligent Power Management with ASUS Power4 Gear (Battery Saving Mode).

Which means you have to have the larger battery (the UL30VT-X1 shipped with the 4400mAh battery) and in Battery Saving mode which uses the Intel graphics and really underclocks the the CPU. It's mainly just for web browsing.


Edit: This may be of interest. http://event.asus.com/2009/nb/legal_disclaimer/

 

Speaking of which, what's the best way to condition the battery? Run it until the system automatically hibernates (~5% I think)? Or force it to run till it's all the way dead?

 

I'm surprised no one these forums has said anything about purchasing the 8-cell 5600mah battery.

 

Ummm.... a while ago there was a huge discussion about this. It might've been in the UL30VT speculation thread, and not the owner's thread, but I definitely remember reading about it as I've lurked in this thread and followed it from day 1.

 

Thanks, I'll take a look. I should have searched first...(I know, I know)

 

I've tried searching within this thread for info I know is there, and it always comes back not found.

Is it just me or is this a problem (searching within a thread)?