*Official UL30VT-X1 Owners Lounge*

Well, after watching this thread for the past few days and waiting for my UL30XT to arrive, I figured I might as well ask a few questions.

Is the battery really going to be that much inferior? I find it strange that ASUS lists both batteries as 8 cell and with the exact same specs except for the mah.

How much life could you expect if you keep overclock turned on all the time and spend 20% of your time with the switchable graphics on while doing regular computing. Honestly even if it's 6 hours under those circumstances I would be very satisfied.

And I want to see how dragons age performs on it. My laptop should arrive in the next day or two but I won't see it until christmas morning, unfortunately.

 

The true factor for battery life is the Whr rating, not the mah which is what ASUS lists. Both are 8 cell but that just has to do with how many lithium cells they used to get the power rating of each battery and has no bearing on battery life except to how it relates to the Whr rating. The 4400mah one included with the UL30VT is rated at 63whr while the 5600mah one is rated at 84whr. Either way I have not had any trouble getting over 6 hours of battery life when surfing using wifi with life still left. That's more then enough for me.

 

I have no doubt the battery life will be stellar for a laptop either way
In my exp. the larger capacity batteries are heavier too right?

 

Thanks for that. I'm coming from an ancient Dell D600, so I'm excited to get my first brand new modern slim laptop.

What are the chances of Hackintoshing this thing? I haven't seen anything whether it's possible on the CULV.

 

You can't talk about that here; it is not allowed per our forum rules:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=109941

Thank you.

 

2nd review posted on amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/UL30Vt-X1-13-...dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

 

dang i want to order one just wish they had some up on ebay so i could use bing

 

Whoops, no harm meant in the hackintosh comment.

I'll turn my attention towards linux then. I remember reading the UL80VT and seeing problems with the switchable graphics not working correctly in linux. Is anybody here planning on throwing Ubuntu or anything as a separate partition? Actually I am really interested if Backtrack will work out of the box and if the built in wireless is compatible with all the auditing tools.

 

seriously! since bing is doing 15% cashback right now. But no one is selling this model besides Amazon right now. 799-15%=679.15...

DAMN GOOD DEAL! too bad

 

3dmark06 3419 with overclock

 

Is this something I find through bing?

 

not available unless u buy through ebay... but no one on ebay is selling this model

 

iclicku, I have a 30gb ocz sdd just waiting for the arrival of my ul30vt-x1 (should be here today!!!!) You mentioned a clean install of win 7, did your driver updates allow the facial recognition and overclocking/switchable graphics to work? Also is the expressgate feature still working? I'm trying to decide about clean install or included recovery software. Also, did you use external dvd drive or usb flash drive? I want to keep this pretty lean, sounds like I'll just be able to install on 30gb drive with some wiggle room for a few small apps right? I'll most likely disable page file and hibernation according to OCZ forums for ssd win 7 optimization, this should save space as well. Thoughts about how to make this go smoothly?

Thanks!

 

anyone thinking about getting it real light with windows xp?

 

Bwhahaha... Linux is a cool second, eh? If they don't like linux discussion, we can always try talking solaris! ... Of course, I'm just joking around .

If one owns OSX, I'm not really sure I understand why it's bad, but I suppose the moderators have their reasons. Besides, I'd guess that 99% of hackintoshes are using replicate OSX's anyway, so I s'ppose it's justified.

However, the UL80Vt in linux is only a problem in that the 'V' is on all the time. This results in really poor battery performance which is a compelling reason to get this lappie in the first place. I'm sure at some point, some new driver or patch will come along to remedy the solution, but for now, it's drain-city.
ref: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1305636

I'm looking forward to running dual booting ubuntu on this machine. However in the meantime, I'm just going to run a virtualbox guest session. While the performance isn't that great, for what I need linux for, it's generally a-ok.

}:^)~

 

damn. 30 gigs?

didn't someone post that windows 7 by itself was 20 something?

also, which model OCZ?

let me know how it turns out!

 

So did anyone order the Zeroshock III sleeve to try with the UL30VT? Is it stretchable? I'm looking for a good sleeve as well.

 

only a bit of stretch... not more then 1cm, but i cannot confirm fitment

 

Hey there. I did do a clean install of Win7 Ultimate using a USB flash drive. I did a very minimal install meaning I install all the essential drivers that power4gear needed to operate properly. After all was said and done, I had a functioning laptop that had 50GB left on my 80GB(74GB usable) HD. I didn't install Expressgate as I didn't think it would be necessary. The overclocking features and switchable graphics all work fine with the necessary drivers and programs. Hope this info helps. You'll definitely enjoy the SSD and the improved performance. However, you'll find yourself running out of space quickly with just the 30GB drive. As for optimizations, I didn't make many other than turn DEFRAG off. Other than that, it's pretty much a vanilla install with some tweaks here and there.

In hindsight, I should have bought the Intel 160GB SSD. I'm thinking about selling this HD and just buy it. We'll see.

 

The UPS man dropped mine off a few hours ago and so far so well. Definitely a sleek machine and I find the studded touch pad quite pleasant. The only things I dislike so far is that the keyboard, although chiclet style, seems to feel like something you'd find on a 250$ machine from best buy and that the viewing angle isn't the greatest.

As far as the bloatware I was able to remove quite a bit of games and the office trial, but I wasn't sure on which Asus programs to remove because I was not sure if any were a necessity..any recommendations on what to keep? I'd rather not do a clean install.

 

Thanks guys! Here is the drive that I bought. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227393
I use my laptop 99.9% at home, I work at a hospital so can't really use it at work. I have a N+ router with 1.5 TB networked storage, so I'm hopping to just get win 7, google chrome, microsoft security essentials, vlc media player or MPC and all necessary codecs, flash 10.1, etc. If I have room for that and maybe a few other random small apps, I'll be happy. Possible, or should I return drive before opening?

 

I think you should spring for a larger SSD if you can. You'll be happy you did if you can afford it.

 

iclicku, do you think the 80gig won't cut it?

i got an 80gig intel g2 as well, just wondering what your thoughts are.

 

COunter Strike runs flawlessly with all high settings 2x AA and 2x AF. And When I say flawlessly we are talking like 140fps. No problems there.

L4D 2 on the other hand crashes everytime I load a level. It doesnt even give me an errors message. But the games set nearly everything to high by deffualt, so we will see what happened when I get it working.

 

The 80GB will be fine for most people. I'm just thinking about it since I already paid this much for it, I don't know why I didn't go ahead for the 160GB. But even now, I'm still less than 50% full. So, don't worry about getting the 80GB. You'll be fine. Just get an enclosure for the 500GB drive and you'll have little to worry about in terms of storage. If you need a recommendation on enclosures, let me know. I have one that fits the 500GB nicely.

 

Has anyone tried to upgrade the video card drivers? The Intel drivers are based off an older version that doesn't take advantage of Flash 10.1 but it seems that the UL30VT uses a combined driver package for both the Nvidia and Intel video cards so I don't want to mess anything up.

 

I *love* the idea of an SSD, but for me, the benefit of a bit of the extra speed isn't worth the tradeoff of 400GB of storage. But that's just me. It would be ULTRA COOL if someone modded the UL30Vt to hold a hybrid drive. A tiny SSD for OS/progs, and a platter HDD for apps.

Perhaps the UL31Vt or something...

}:^)~

 

Well, I'm still using my 500GB HD as a portable external drive. My enclosure is really small and light. Easy to carry around in my backpack along with the laptop. I only recommend the SSD if you got the spare change and if you want to really maximize performance of this laptop.

 

iclicku can you post some SSD benchmarks? want to know the read and write speeds

 

Sure thing. Give me a couple minutes. I'll put HDtune tests on the first page.

 

L4D2
Medium Setting across the board with no AA and Bilinear Filtering
2009-12-04 16:04:54 - left4dead2
Frames: 2325 - Time: 60000ms - Avg: 38.750 - Min: 22 - Max: 59
This was a mix of outdoors and indoors.

 

HDtune and HWmonitor added to pictures.

Min: 138.5MB/sec
Max: 210.9MB/sec
Avg: 203.9MB/sec

access: 0.1ms
Burst: 114.8MB/sec

 

thx bro... looks like some good speeds. definitely a performance boost here...

i wonder what the load times are like when people load XP. HAHAHA

 

an7imatt3r and iclicku, you guys ROCK! Keep the info coming!

BTB: Third review is up on Amazon.com page. It's small, but it's something!
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002XZLURC

}:^)~

 

Fourth amazon review:

Look and Feel (4/5):
Besides the brushed aluminum lid (which is very good looking by the way), the plastic body feels very sturdy. I'm not the biggest fan of glossy plastic (would prefer matte), but it doesn't make the laptop feel or look cheap like other laptops.

The keyboard is nice to type on, much like the newer generation macbook / macbook pros. The trackpad is definitely unusual with it being made out of the same glossy plastic as the body, but once the initial shock of not having a usual trackpad surface is over with it's a pleasure to use. The multitouch is as good as you can get on a non-apple laptop too (that's not saying much, but I commend asus for the addition of it).

Power and Performance (5/5):
This is the first ultra portable computer that I've used that has very little compromise in terms of power and performance. Out of the box the 1.3ghz processor is actually overclocked by Asus to squeeze out even more power. I am a developer and can run multiple development environments / surf the web / run iTunes and the computer does not skip a beat.

I also love the ability to dial up the power of the computer when I'm not concerned about battery life and dial it back down when I'm trying to conserve. The Asus guys really engineered a great machine here.

If youre wondering how the Nvidia dedicated graphics performs, I just fired up Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 and played it at 1280x768 without a hitch! Again, no compromises there with bad gaming performance.


Durability (Initial thoughts: 4/5)
While it's not an aluminum unibody design, it feels quite sturdy. I've only had this a few days though, so we'll see how it holds up, but it feels alot better than most Sony laptops I've used in the past if that gives any indication. Also the aluminum lid feels fantastic and sturdy when opening / closing the laptop.

Value (5/5)
There is no reason to pay over $1000 for an ultra portable anymore. Get this, and spend the money you saved on an SSD hard drive to really make this computer scream. The power / performance / price ratio for this machine is rediculous. All other ultra portable manufacturers need to step it up bigtime, because Asus came to play with this laptop!

 

Not sure how many people had loaded cpuz on theirs yet, but I noticed somthing interesting yesterday. The multiplyer, which is ussualy at 6.5 and yields a speed of 1733Mhz like its supposed to be, was at at 8 and yielding a clock speed around 2100Mhz. Woundering if anyone else has had this happen. It may have been a fluke or a cpuz may have been wrong.
Also is it normal for Window 7 to report @ 1.3GHz when the processer is clocked at 1.73GHz. CPUz reports the clock at 1733Mhz but nothing else seems to pick it up and just reports the standard 1.3Ghz.

Aditionaly where are the touchpad drivers. I want to turn off some of these features, but I cant find the utility and its starting to drive me mad. Anyone know where to look or what this utility is called... if there is one.

 

I have the following gripes:

-too many stickers! and too much glue after I tried to remove them, had to use a lot of cologne and rubbing alcohol to get rid of the residues.

-Also I like the 1280x800 resolution on my xps M1330 better than this.

-bloatware gallore! Can someone make a list of the bloatware we can safely take off?

Everything else rocks, build quality is very good, up there with Apple and Sony. I am very happy, its a keeper for sure.

 

cpu-z's fault I think. I have a UL30A-X5 and one thing I noticed is if I was in performance mode (min processor state: 100%), cpu-z reports the correct clock speed (6.5*210MHz w/5% OC). When in power saving mode, though (min processor state: 5%), cpu-z was reporting 1680MHz (8*210MHz). Kinda unlikely since reported voltage was just 0.875 volts.

To buy or not to buy... That is the question... Gah, just bought the UL30A but I'm severely tempted to get the UL30VT. Why couldn't they have this a couple of months ago when my old Toshiba died?

 

erg.. holiday sales aren't picking up on ebay. i'm trying to get rid of my netbook so i can have an excuse to purchase to machine... santa please buy my NETBOOK!

 

I will work on a list. I slimmed mine way down to just 3/4 things out of the 4 million that came on it. I havent noticed anything not working properly yet.

Update:

What I know is necessary:
ATK Hotkey (if you want the hotkeys to work anyway)
WinFlash
ASUS Power4Gear Hybrid (if you want to be able to switch gfx and activate turbo)
Realtek Audio Drivers
Express Gate

Optional (I run these because they seem to be use full at times):
FastBoot
ControlDeck
ATKSOD2
ATK Media
ATK Generic Function Service

 

I just got mine.. and yeah.. lots of stickers to remove! It's doing the initial boot up. Very nice and sleek. I like how it's VERY thin compared to my Dell Vostro 1400.

 

An7imatt3r,
Great review on Amazon, by the way! I appreciate your thorough look into the characteristics of the laptop, and even more the fact that it came out with shining accolades! Good show!

}:^)~

 

i removed the realtek audio drivers, it just waste startup time. windows 7 audio drivers took over no problem, matter of fact,

-i also removed the asus web drive backup app (I like dropbox better)

win7 boot time has been reduced noticeable after I took off these apps. now exploring taking off the asus wifi controller

 

My method of deciding what software is worth keeping:

Clean install and see what component is not working correctly, install driver, until it works perfectly without all the original bloatware hehe.

 

That's a good method, just be so kind to share the list of things that need to be installed in order to have a fully working system.

}:^)~

 

Just to let you know guys, I didn't install ExpressGate and I don't see anything missing from it. So I don't think it's necessary.

 

Which ASUS software are you guys keeping?

 

cpuz for me alternates from 1600 to 2100 mhz also

 

Hi,

I'm yet another Dell D600 owner who has had his laptop for over 5 years now and haven't bought a new laptop since.

Was thinking of a Sony Vaio but am impressed to hear that this Asus unit is on equal footing in terms of quality at a much lower price point.

I do a fair bit of conferencing and video/audio calls on my old Dell and the speakers are still LOUD and builtin microphone is still fantastic.There's never been a need for me to get a headset/mic when am in my own room.

So, i'd appreciate if someone can let me know their impression of the UL30VT speakers.

1. Are the builtin speakers LOUD?

2. Does the UL30VT come with a builtin microphone or do you need to use the 3.5mm microphone jack to Skype for instance?

 

Yeah, just give it a try, if it doesn't work send it back, if it does, then that would be pretty cool.