News|Movies|BD & DVD|Writings|Other

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

First post from my new laptop

11:43 PM / Technology / No Comments

My ASUS UL30A arrived first thing yesterday morning and I wasted no time in getting it up and running, which didn't take long, as I didn't have to install much - just OpenOffice, Google Chrome and a handful of other programs I use regularly. And of course reverting the taskbar back to its Windows 95-through-Vista state. This was never intended to be a heavy duty multimedia or gaming machine, just something light, portable and long-lasting.

And just how long-lasting is it? Judge for yourselves:

Obviously, that figure is just an estimate that Windows spits out based on your current usage, and it tends to yo-yo up and down like nobody's business. For instance, after installing a bunch of Windows Updates, it dropped to as low as four and a half hours on an 85% charge, but even that is light years ahead of my previous setup, the battery for which has just degraded to point that it's really only useful for checking my emails while sitting on the crapper. (Come on, laptop users, don't try to tell me you've never done it.)

I can't say I've run into any major problems yet. It's small without being overly tiny (I don't like squinting at minuscule screens, which is one reason why I didn't go the whole hog and get a netbook), the keyboard feels pretty nice to type on, and the thing resumes from hibernation pretty quickly (around 15 seconds, which is nearly double the 8 seconds ASUS boasts, but still pretty impressive). The quality of the screen, particularly its viewing angle, is several notches down from that of my old VAIO, but that was to be expected as the VAIO was built as a multimedia system (or as close as you can get with a laptop), and I suspect its display was responsible for the lion's share of the power suckage. In any event, image quality is rarely the first thing on my mind when I'm on the move, and when I'm at home I just hook it up to the Fujitsu Siemens Amilo 3230T monitor in my bedroom anyway.

Speaking of which, I did run into a slight problem with regard to compatibility between the laptop and the monitor. The laptop comes equipped with an embedded Intel GMA X4500MHD video card, hardly the most advanced piece of equipment out there. Its software is pretty substandard, and for some reason it detects my Amilo as a television rather than a monitor, and as such ends up sending video levels (16-235) rather than PC levels (0-255) via HDMI. Translation: severely washed out blacks. Unfortunately, there's no way to either tell it you have a computer monitor, not a television, nor is there any way to force it to use PC levels.

My (temporary) solution to this problem has been to use the VGA output instead of HDMI, which actually delivers a reasonably good image, albeit ever so slightly ringy, which isn't ideal when you're staring at scads of black-on-white text. That said, adjusting Windows' ClearType settings (a nice little unpublicised addition to Windows 7) has allowed me to alleviate the problem somewhat. I'm going to continue to explore the issue, but in the long run I suspect that, if I want to use HDMI and get the correct levels, I may have to look into a different monitor. I'd rather not have to spend yet more money... but then again, the laptop was pretty inexpensive to begin with. We'll see - it's not a life or death issue.

No Comments

 
Note: to combat spam and simplify site maintenance, all comments must be approved prior to appearing on the site. This is a necessary evil due to the volume of spam the site receives.