Jack Scott's Blog

Well, yesterday sucked. Not only did I have a cold (which I still have), but two of my computers died: ‘Europa’, my main laptop; and ‘halley’, my spare machine and OS testbed.

Everything was going quite well up until dinner. I had a working GCC cross-compiler (if you don’t know what that is, don’t bother caring), I had my operating system kernel compiling with no errors, and I had some music playing. All was well. Just before dinner, I noticed that when I played Time by Pink Floyd, it was actually playing an ABBA song. ‘No worries’, I thought. I’d seen this before, and a chkdsk had fixed it. I decided to run a chkdsk before bed that night. So I went to dinner.

I came back into the room after dinner, and found my laptop at the Vista bootup screen, asking me to choose whether to resume a normal boot, or run the memory diagnostic. ‘No worries’, I thought again. Obviously, one of my applications had managed to crash the Vista kernel. Not a difficult task. So I told it to resume booting normally. It didn’t. I powered it off, and then back on again. It still didn’t. My heart sank.

So I got out my trusty Vista installation DVD. I was hoping to repair the Vista process to the point where it would allow me to get into safe mode, and find out what was going on. No such luck. The DVD wouldn’t boot. I don’t know much about Vista’s internal boot process, but I suspect it was around either the time it went to protected (32 bit) mode, or into a non-VGA graphics mode. This was bad. I tried a Windows XP CD, and that didn’t work properly either. I don’t know what the problem is, but it’s serious. On Monday I am going to try and send it back to the manufacturer.

At this point, I was frustrated beyond anything. Now, I don’t only have a laptop. As an avid computer hardware collector, I had another working machine. It was my old server and before that, my main PC. Last night, it had Ubuntu server on it (my ISP has a Ubuntu mirror). So I quickly booted it up. At this stage, all I wanted was to get on the Internet (and more specifically, MSN). Unfortunately, Ubuntu doesn’t have a kde-base package (or at least, not one that I could remember the name of). So I sat there for 40 minutes waiting for it to download and install all the KDE packages (including games, useless admin tools and half of TeX Live). When it had finished downloading, I ran ‘startx’ (which should, in my opinion, work). It didn’t. None of a number of other commands (xdm, kdm, kde, etc) worked either. Massive Ubuntu failure.

So I tried a Windows XP installation CD over the spare machine. That wouldn’t boot up either. It hung at the point where it loads the Windows components. I tried it with only one hard drive plugged. That didn’t work either. Now came my silliest moment. In anger, I took out the XP CD, and turned off the machine to try and get Ubuntu working again. Unfortunately, I began plugging in the hard drives onto which Ubuntu is installed before the machine had finished turning off. *ZZAP*. And then it didn’t work anymore. I suspect it’s only the power supply that’s dead… but still. Massive human failure.

So now, I have two dead machines. One should be easy to fix (buy new PSU, install fresh Ubuntu desktop, go on MSN). My laptop… well… I think my data has survived, maybe. I’ll let the manufacturer find out. I hate fixing laptops.

Around the end of the last financial year, I decided it would be a good idea to buy myself a laptop. So I did. I originally wanted a cheap Compaq one, simply because of it’s cheapness. But my local computer shop didn’t have any in stock. So I got an ASUS F3Sg instead. It costs about AUD $1300, and it’s pretty decent. Here’s why.

I’m not exactly a fan of the styling of recent ASUS laptops, and this one is no different. It’s very grey… and has holes and shapes that are perfectly designed for nothing, except getting biscuit crumbs in them. Out of the box it also comes covered in useless Intel, Nvidia and Microsoft stickers (some of which I still haven’t been able to remove). As far as bad points go though, that’s pretty much it.

To start off the list of good points, I’ll start with the screen. It’s a 15.4″ widescreen, with a resolution of 1440×900. That’s as good as the 19″ monitor sitting on my desk, and with the decreased viewing distance, it’s just as usable. I certainly wouldn’t like it any larger, as it would then be quite difficult to get into my laptop bag (and to carry around generally).

The internals also match up to my (still pretty new) desktop. 2 GiB of DDR2 memory, a Core 2 Duo processor running at 2.4GHz, and a 250GB hard drive are all very respectable. The NVidia 9300M graphics chip plays Counter Strike: Source well enough to be comparable to the 8800GT in my desktop. That said, CSS isn’t one of the latest games anymore. I fear that Call of Duty 4 would stress it a bit too much.

Multimedia is okay. The onboard speakers are utter rubbish, but then those that come with laptops generally are. The audio chip is decent, as sound quality improves immensely when a pair of Sennheiser headphones are plugged in. The laptop has an onboard microphone, but I haven’t used it. Any attempt to use it for Skype would likely result in the glorious sound of feedback.

The F3Sg also has a webcam built into the screen. Quality is fine, though when I used the driver that Windows Update found for me after a fresh install, the picture was upside down. The other nice feature this laptop has is a built-in digital TV Tuner. Apart from the fact that Sesame Street has gone downhill, I don’t have much to report on that… it’s fairly ordinary, and suffers from the same problems (bad reception, worse content) that all other TV tuners suffer from.

Battery life is around 2.5 hours on the most conservative setting. Compared to the 5 hours an old G4 iBook of mine used to do, this is pitiful. But the iBook had nowhere near as many goodies. The F3Sg also burns a hole in your pants if you actually use it as a laptop, so it’s best to use it on a table. At 2.95kg, it’s just in the region of being carryable without breaking your shoulder. The large screen (and large battery to compensate) would be the cause of this.

As with all out-of-the-box computers, the included software on all ASUS laptops is sub optimal. Offerings include Nero, Norton Internet Security, and other such horrors. One thing I can say is, though, the drivers are rock solid. In two months I’ve never had any bluescreens or crashes, which is a miracle for a Windows-based machine.

To sum up: As far as Windows-based laptops go, this one is really good. I certainly wouldn’t have it over a MacBook Pro, but then, no sane person would. It has enough power to do all the things I want, and still remains light and small enough to carry to and from work. The only real downside as far as usability is concerned is the battery life. 4 Stars.