W7J Owners' Lounge

It looks like we're a growing community, so how about we put all useful information and advice in one place for current and potential owners?

:asus:W7J :centrino:Core Duo :nvidia:GeForce Go 7400

 

New forum member here. Got a lot of my information prior to purchasing my W7J just by reading this forum. Got my W7J two days ago. Like it a lot. I have just one issue with it. Can't get the vertical scroll to work on the touchpad. Horizontal scroll works fine. The vertical scroll option has been checked in the device settings. I've increased the region, etc. The driver appears to be the most current available on the Asus W7J support site. Anyone else with this problem?

 

oo.. everyone share their pros and cons of the w7j because im trying to make a decision on it or the w3j. your thoughts will be greatly appreciated =).

 

Are you using Firefox? Vertical scroll will not work in Firefox, only functions in IE (it's a driver issue).

 

No. Opera and IE6. Can't even get vertical scrolling to work in Synaptics' driver's practice area for virtual scrolling. I uninstalled and installed the driver from Asus' W7J download area but it didn't make a difference . I may try the drivers from Synaptic's site

 

You can also try making the scroll area larger. I have trouble getting the V6j touchpad working exactly like I want it too, but I think I just need to actually spend the time to adjust it more.

 

what are you guys using to monitor fan speed, cpu temps and etc? i tried to install asusprobe but it didnt work. bios are incompatible or something.

 

Is the uneven backlighting caused by the V-Cut screen an issue? What kind of battery life are you guys getting?

 

Not at all. Check the video i uploaded. Other then the very tip of the corners being slightly dimmer i cant say this any lcd is any different then the rest. Only way i was even able to tell is by reducing the brightness to 0. Then you can tell the backlight is slighgtly different where at 0 brightness the screen backlight is very uneven. Check the video look for yourself.

 

my vertical and horizontal scroll both work in firefox. the only mouse setting i've changed is the sensitivity of the normal touchpad, didnt touch anything with the scroll settings.

 

I'm using Asus' NB Probe. It didn't come with the notebook, but I downloaded it from Asus' site (it's not available under the W7J's download page, so I got it from one of the other model's download page). Seems to be working fine.

Got the vertical scrolling to finally work with the drivers from Synaptic's site. Don't know why I can't get the ones from Asus to work.

As for any uneven backlighting because of v-cut, I can't say that I've noticed it at all and I have the brightness level set very low.

 

link to where you found it?

and yeah i just watched a futurama episode and didnt notice the v-cut at all

EDIT

found it here under utilities:

http://support.asus.com/download/download_item.aspx?product=3&model=A6Ga

 

i've just noticed the webcam area on the screen gets warm. can someone check their machine while its on to see if its the same?

 

do you mean the sticker or the actual web cam part? i just checked the actual cam (it was off) and it was cool.

 

Yeah, I noticed that too, on the lid side. Wonder what's back there that could be generating the heat. It can't be the webcam as I haven't used it much except to see if it works.

 

its on the lid side and the lens side. i'm worried its actaully the web cam using power, for some unknown reason, which is causing heat.

 

really? try leaving it on for a while and then touching it

 

Disabling the webcam in Control Panel | System | Hardware |Device Manager seems to take care of it. Since I don't use the webcam much, I'm fine with that.

 

i wonder if that would save battery time too.

 

Wait so does the spot get hot even if you're not using the webcam? or only when you're actually taking picture/filming with it.

 

it doesnt get hot when my webcam is off. when it was on for like 20 minutes it got warm, just slightly tho.

what cpu temps are you guys getting? i seem to average about 50C

 

For me, it was getting warm even though I never turned on the webcam. It wasn't hot like the air blowing out of the vent but it was definitely warmer than the rest of the lid. Hopefully, it's corrected with the next driver release for the webcam

 

In high performance mode, running off AC, it's usually in the mid-40's C. Not doing anything too intensive though, just browsing, email, installing software, etc. Making it compile some code in Visual Studio got it up to the mid-60's C, so it hasn't been too bad. This is based on readings from Asus' NB Probe

 

You guys should start posting pictures of your setup so us wannabe w7j owners can get a glimpse of it.

 

gets warm even if webcam not in use.

 

sorry for the quality, its nothing special. and the stupid flash is impossible to shut off.



its a pen!


mmm pretty box

 

Same here, the webcam is warm to the touch even when not in use.



Here are some of my picks of the W7J.

W7J


W7J under different light.


Keyboard shot. My only complaint is the shortened backspace and enter keys.


Right side


Left side


Front. **** flash


Two DVD's for size comparison


Two DVD's for thickness comparison


Holy smokes! Look at all those bloatware Asus installs


Standard battery installed. Doesn't stick out much

 

I just got my new w7j a few hours go! Did a fresh install with the recovery disk + drivers disk. (upgraded HDD, so it didn't have it pre-installed). Everything seems to be running fine. The right hand side of the touchpad does warm up a little, but not to the point where it's uncomfortable at all. The webcam itself (the metallic block looking part) does get a little warm even when it's not in use. Doesn't bother me Sure was a bit of bloadware but I got all that taken care of now . Air vent on the right blows quite warm air, I'm trying to use to using my mouse a little bit further down so it's not blowing right at my hand, not a big deal. Very very quite machine.

The bottom 2 corners of the screen does seem a tiny bit dark but it is barely noticible unless you purposely really look for it. It seems more obvious at certain angles than others, and obviously more visible if you make your whole screen just one color. But in normal application it is hardly noticible.

The touchpad isn't the easiest thing to use, haven't tried messing with sensitivity yet as I do have an usb mouse that I'm using right now. Seems everyone else solved that problem so I'm not gonna worry.

Gonna download the essentials for by my daily usage (vlc media player, winamp, flashget, firefox!, etc. etc.) and then run some benchmarks. Stay tuned

 

3DMark05: 1886
PCMark05: 3807
super pi: 1m 19s to 2million digits

upgraded with 7200RPM seagate HDD and 1.5GB of ram.

 

Tell me about your clean install from the recovery disk. Why? Were you able to reformat to NTFS with 4K clusters?

Thanks
Tom

 

i had bought an upgrade for the HDD to 7200RPM. Therefore it came clean, so i had to run the recovery disk to format and install windows XP on it.

and then i converted to NTFS with the converter asus provided.

 

Which 7200rpm model did you buy? Did you notice a signicant speed increase? Did you notice a significant heat increase? Thanks

 

I got the upgrade from milestonepc.com. The 80GB 7200RPM Seagate option, didn't open up the case to look at it so I don't know the model. Having never used it with the 5400rpm hitachi drive I can't comment on performance difference. The right hand side of the touch pad (where the HDD resides) does get quite warm. but I don't reall use it as a palm rest, the way I type my palm kinda floats right above that spot, rarely actually touching it (only when I reach for certain keys with my right hand). So it's not much of a problem.

Right now I'm on quiet office mode + 3rd level of brightness wifi on. Battery says 2:30 min (95%) But I'm gonna actually run it out to see what kinda battery life I'll get as if I took it to a college lecture.

 

Also imo the built in speakers are definitely loud enough. Not much base, and not very quality, but more than usable.

 

only lasted 2h20min on 3rd level brightness quiet office mode webcam disabled wifi on bluetooth off. doing just chatting online, browsing web, listening to maybe 1 hour of music and stuff :-/

 

That's pretty sad for battery life. I was hoping for closer to 3hr. Might have to consider the 9-cell once it comes out for the W7J, though extrapolating battery life for the 9-cell based on your result would only give 3h30min of battery life

 

Wait, you were running wifi? Wifi off completely should give you around 30min more time if it stays off - you aren't supposed to be surfing during a college lecture anyway . In any event, it sounds like the 2:30 estimate that Power Meter gave you at the start was right on.

3rd level brightness down from top or 3rd level from the bottom? Lowering lcd brightness also increases batt life (lcd is a huge power hungry component), as would changing the p4g profile to battery saving rather than office (which would still have been adequate for the activities that you were using for your test).

People shouldn't write off the W7's battery time numbers as bad until you set it up and run it in a max saving mode - this is what kind of time you can get for max usage. Getting 3 hours or so in a machine like the W7 or W3 with powerful cpu and a dedicated graphics card (another power sink) is pretty good. To get closer to 4 hours or more, you have to step down to an integrated graphics [my machine averages 4-4.5 hr minimum with undervolting and wifi on ]. You can also improve batt time considerably by undervolting the cpu using NHC or RMClock.

 

I'll try that next time.

Turned off P4G and just installed NHC. I'm getting a whopping 54C CPU temp and 56C HDD temp :-/ Granted the air conditioning is horrible at my house and the room temperature is about 85F

How do I set ACPI to turn on fan when cpu is >50C instead of 60C which seems to be the default?

also NHC has my cpu clock speed bouncing between 998MHz and 1.8Ghz, 90% time it says 998/997Mhz. is this normal? :-/

and yes the brightness was 3rd level from the bottom.

NHC seem to have my CPU undervolted at .95V even though it's set at max performance?


i have a cheap laptop cooler. hooked it up.after 20 min or so the temps managed to drop to around 51/53 for cpu/hdd respectively.

 

Both of your temps are normal for your ambient air temp and usage .

1. You can't. Thermal profile is controlled by BIOS, and not changeable by user unless/until Speedfan someday supports more Asus notebook motherboards.

2. Yes, that is the normal dynamic switching protocol.

3. OK, not much more you can gain from that.

4. NHC is running fine, and you don't want to run the cpu at max speed all the time anyway - the heat levels shoot up and all you'll get is hot air for your trouble. NHC has a few little bugs like that with freq reads on the CDuo that will hopefully be worked out when the revision comes out someday. You should stay with using Dynamic Switching anyway; it allows the cpu freq to push up whenever system load requires more cycles, and then fall back (saving batt and heat production) when the system doesn't need the cpu cycles. Running a cpu constantly at max freq is the surest way to *quickly* eat all of your battery life.

To max your battery life with NHC, you need to change the profile to MaxBattery or BatteryOptimized. This locks the cpu at the lowest freq and keeps it there, saving battery life over the dynamic switching.

 

Thanks a bunch.

I thought the w7j would have the fan start at 50C not 60C :-/ Whenever the voltage of the cpu is upped to 1.2V the cpu temp gets shot to 56-57C, Really would like the fan to do something at that point -_-.

A the lapcool3 I have now the temp is settled at 51 for both cpu and hdd, with cpu at .95volts.

I have both P4G and NHC on right now, NHC is set on dynamic and power schemed with P4G. Is this a good idea? I like NHC because of the temp display. Should I just not use P4G at all?


I hope the temp will go down a bit when i get to college, my dorm should have a room temp of no more than 78F, at most 80. XD

 

Nothing bad will happen at the temps you're getting - that's the way that Asus' engineers designed the notebook, so you don't need to worry about it.

You can run P4G and NHC concurrently. P4G will not override the cpu freq settings assigned by NHC, so the power scheme button is then only good for changing LCD profiles and standby timeouts. You can always do these manually using Fn for lcd and System power for timeouts, but some people like having these at the touch of a button - it's just one more system process running in the background, and some folks like to keep that as streamlined as possible . Good luck and enjoy your new toy!

 

ok last question for real! lol

What's a reasonable temp while gaming? I'm getting 70C. I THINK the fan is turned on, cant tell if thats the HDD sound or the fan ~_~.

 

gaming temp of 70 is fine (high cpu usage will do that). the noise is the fan.

 

Ok now I have the laptop on max battery mode in NHC and 3rd lowest brightness. wifi still on, webcam disabled (it gets warm even when not in use, so it must be drawing power), bluetooth off. the battery display now says I can get 2hr 55 min instead of 2hr 30min like before.

a few other changes include using touchpad instead of corded usb mouse. I just remembered I also had a external USB HDD hooked up for a good amount of time last test. Although it's an 3.5 hdd so it had its own AC power, dont think it should draw much power from the laptop.

it must've been really hot in the room earlier today, because the temps now are 47/45 C for cpu/hdd, but this is max battery mode as opposed to max performance (although even that had the cpu undervolted unless needed as it was dynamic) and this is without the laptop cooler i was using before (hey that thing draws power from usb too so even that helps battery life)

looking pretty promising to get 2hr 50min this way. 3hr shouldn't be a problem if wifi is off then . The shorts I'm wearing aren't the thinnest out there, but so far the laptop doens't feel warm at all, very lapable.

 

Just curious as to whether folks with a w7j need to perform the USB patch that was using excess battery power. It was a registry tweak in xp.

 

i installed the hotfix for that in middle of my battery test. Didn't seem like it made any difference. But the camera was already disabled as is bluetooth. I think the only thing left thats internal USB is the touchpad, which i doubt draws much power to begin with, so it's hard to tell if that did anything or not.

btw the touchpad is excellent once you set the sensitivity to most sensitive, and the horzontal + verticle scroll works nicely as well. the odd texture of the touchpad i got used to pretty quickly.

It's been an hour and 25 min since I started the test, and the battery is at exactly 50%.

 

Got 2 hours and 40 min out of it when hit 5% and went to hibernate.

 

MrBamboo, you should note in BIG, BOLD LETTERS that you got the battery specs while having a souped up w7j. Your times of 2:20 and 2:40 are somewhat misleading because of your higher specs.

I am sure someone who isn't reading as carefully as I have (I nearly missed it myself) will be lead to believe that 3 hours on the w7j is unattainable. They will then call every reseller on the Asus forums, post something stupid, etc. Rule of thumb? Common sense is not that common.

 

Just had a quick question regarding the W7J ..
Those of you who have bought this online from retailers could you please let us know what exactly is included in the box ?? (accessories, case, etc ?)

It would be nice if we could get a few pictures of the contents as well
thnks

 

Just the usual

- quick installation guide, user manual
- telephone cable for modem
- RCA to S-Video adapter cable
- W7J driver disk
- Nero, AsusDVD, Cyberlink software disks
- Windows XP Pro recovery CD, manual
- AC power adapter, cable
- 6-cell battery
- W7J notebook itself