ASUS Laptop Adventures

I've been looking for a new laptop for my wife for the past 6 months. I knew what I wanted for performance and what I wanted to pay. To problem was that the two concepts were not getting along until I finally spied an Asus F3sA-A1 from Newegg for $999 with a 15.4" screen, 2.2 Core 2 Duo (T7500), 1GB ram, 160GB drive, 512 Video Ram, Gigabit Ethernet, Wireless ABGN & bluetooth, & 1GB of Turbo memory. The memory was low but it came as only one stick so I could easily upgrade it to 3 which I did. The core features were there along with a few extras that I didn't require like N, Gigabit, and 512 video ram. I was looking for at least 128 video RAM. We'll have had the machine for almost a week and here are my adventures and reactions so far.

Initially I turned it on with 1G of ram just to see how Vista would perform. As expected there was a lot of swapping going on in the page file. The Windows Experience Index was around 4.5 because of the memory which is DDR2 667. When I upgraded the memory to 3GB it increased the index value to 4.7 which was the of everything except the processor which is 5.1. I finally dug around to try and figure out what this Tubro memory is and found it on Intel's website. It is a large cache of either 512MB or 1GB of SSD memory that helps the hard drive work more effectively.

Since my wife is willing using Linux and doesn't care for Vista. I started rummaging around to see how things were configured. I'm a debian fan so I first tried booting with Debian Edgy and it didn't find the network drivers out of the box which I thought was a problem that could be overcome by finding the right module but I thought this would be a good time to give Ubuntu a try. So I downloaded the Install/Live DVD from Ubuntu because I read on a blog that they got it to work with no problem on this laptop.

Next I started looking around at the partitions to see how they were configured. I found that there is a 6+ Gb at the beginning of the drive which I correctly assumed was for restorations. Since I purchased Vista I didn't want to get rid of this. I started searching for a partition backup solution. Initially I looked at Ghost because I was familiar with it. Since there were a bunch of bad reviews that I saw on Newegg. I returned to the open source options and found DriveXML & Clonezilla. DriveXML isn't open source but it is free and several reviews spoke highly of it. Initially I created a backup using this but the restore process looked cumbersome. That's when I stumbled upon Clonezilla which is based on a bunch of Open Source tools and a Debian live CD.

I downloaded the Clonezilla live CD which was less than 100MB. I used this to backup my OS partition and the hidden partition which it reported as vfat to the data partition. Next I transferred this to an external drive which I could have done initially but I didn't have access to it at the time.

Well back to the hardware. The laptop came with a finger printer reader which makes logins super simple. It also came with a few extras such as a nice little case, screen cleaning cloth, and small mouse. With Vista there are some excellent options available for adjusting the screen to your liking.

The biggest problem with the computer so far is the batter life. It only appears to have about 2 hours which is pretty unacceptable. But for the price and portability I was willing to sacrifice that for how my wife will be using the computer. It will mostly be a home computer that will be travelling on occasions.

At this point the machine is backed up and ready for the Ubuntu install. I'll post those in my next blog.