My Own Pirate Radio

About a year and a half ago, after much hemming and hawing, I bought an Asus W3V laptop. 

I was pretty happy about it.

I even blogged about it.

I knew at the time that I was ignoring Mike Zintel’s First Rule of Laptop Purchasing: “Osh, don’t be a chump, buy an IBM.” (Insert your name to customize this rule to your own situation.) Mike and I worked together for years, and we had a tradition whereby I would buy a new laptop — not an IBM, usually some sort of Toshiba — and Mike would then make predictions on mean time to failure, until the laptop duly failed. He was usually right on target.

But I’d done my research this time. After all, Asustek makes heaps of hardware for other OEMs, including, apparently, the motherboards in many PCs. I figured they would be amply capable of making an Asus-branded machine. And besides, as their home page explains, they are “No. 1 in Quality and Services”. So I toodled off down to College and Spadina and bought one.

The Honeymoon

It was good. The shell was metallic gray. The screen was wide, and shiny. The CPU was fast. A little hot, maybe, but fast.  Wheeee!

Prelude to the Fits: A First Inkling of Something Not Quite Right

After using the laptop for a few days I was happy, but puzzled by one annoying design flaw: the Super Weird Launcher Buttons. (I don’t know what Asus officially calls them, but this name seems appropriate to me.) These are programmable hardware buttons situated on the left and right edges of the laptop, exactly where you would naturally put your hands in order to grasp and lift a laptop off a table.

        

Now, if these buttons had no function other than to look cool, this wouldn’t be a design flaw. But they do things. And they’re placed so that it’s nearly impossible to lift the laptop without inadvertently pressing a button. As a result, whenever you move this laptop, Unfortunate Things happen… disabling the wireless network, for instance, or disabling the mousepad, or (my personal favorite) launching the built-in DVD Movie Player software. Why you would ever want an easy-to-trigger hardware button to do any of these things, much less ten such buttons, one of which launches a DVD movie player, is beyond me. Perhaps nobody at Asus actually tried moving the laptop? Or maybe I was going about my laptop-lifting the wrong way. Anway, I decided to avoid the SWLBs.

Week number two revealed a second design flaw: the BBBBL (Blindingly Bright Blinky Blue Light). Now, don’t get me wrong, I like blinking lights. Especially red ones. And flashy things! But this laptop — even in standby mode — has a power indicator so bright it lights up a decent-sized room at night. And it flashes. You can see it lighting up my 3rd floor office from the sidewalk. It is not possible to sleep in the same room as this laptop (hey, I like to be near my computers), unless you cover it up. With something thick.

I couldn’t find a software fix for disabling the light. After some web searching the best solution I came up with was to color over the blue light with a black permanent marker. Sigh.

Design flaws aside, it ran fine. For about a month. Until…

Fit the First: Power Management Has Trouble Coping. Screens Turn Blue. Data is Lost.

It was a bad day. The blue screen made me sad, and reminded me of the time I worked on Windows NT 3.51, and got made fun of by Dave Cutler for having a strange name, even though I was just an intern. Fortunately I found a fix. I even blogged about it.

All was good, again. For a while. But then…

Fit the Second: Power Management Turns Ugly. Frustration Mounts. Global Warming Accelerates.

More blue screens, this time with nasty beeps. Three minutes to resume from hibernation, or worse, no resume at all. I searched the web. I tried Uninstalling Things. I even tried communicating with Asus technical support. Like my highschool French teachers, the Asus staff seemed nice, but unable to help me. Fixing would require sending it in, which I was unwilling to do: work stoppages are bad.

This time my solution was to give up on hibernate altogether. Who needs it anyway, right? Hibernation’s for sissies and scaredy cats. And besides, there’s boatloads more oil left in the ground, so who cares if I burn a few more watts by leaving my machine on standby instead of hibernate. Let’s move on.

I moved on. Six months passed peacefully.

(Except for kicking the power cord, thereby breaking the power connector, and subsequently frying the keyboard. That was entirely my fault. So now I have to use an external USB keyboard. I can type sitting two feet away from the screen. How cool is that? The other mobile workers in coffee shops are secretly jealous of me.

)

Fit the Third: Support Expires. CD No Read-ee.

This laptop has a CD/DVD drive built in. It worked fine until about three months ago, when it began struggling with reading CDs. Some CDs were OK, others were not. Perhaps a comment on my musical taste. The drive would make nasty buzzing noises for about thirty seconds and then give up. No fix for this one. Sadly, and perhaps cunningly, the machine was by then out of warranty. On principle, I refused to buy a new drive. Masochism is a terrible thing.

More time passed.

Fit the Fourth: Chronic Fatigue Sets In. The Freewheeling Untethered Lifestyle Comes to an End.

Recently I realized the battery would no longer charge to 100%. In fact, as I write this, my laptop has been plugged in all night, and when I detach the cord the battery shows a 60% charge. And that drains to zero in about half an hour. I could buy a new battery, but I refuse, again, on principle. A battery should last more than 18 months. The show must go on.

By this time I was starting to feel a little bit down about the W3V. My faith in Asus was weakening. Had I chosen wrongly? Was Mike “Yoda” Zintel to be proven correct, yet again, despite my feverish pre-purchasing research? I needed inspiration. I needed encouragement. I needed a visit to the Asus website.

Once there I read this:

ASUS products’ top quality stems from product development. It’s like learning Chinese Kung-Fu; one must begin with cultivating the “Chi” and inner strength.

Bracing! Exactly what I needed. Cultivate Chi.

Fit the Fifth: Burn, Baby, Burn! The MacBook Beckons.

Last week I decided to burn a CD, and found the CD burner would no longer burn. More buzzing and grinding noises. Refusal to acknowledge blank CDs. Repeated Windows Media Player crashes. Cats and dogs, sleeping together. Defcon 5. Incalcitrance.

Desparate, dazed, despairing, I turned on Katrin’s Macbook and fired up iTunes. Five minutes later I had a finished CD in my hands, courtesy Apple Computing. No buzzing. No blinking blue lights. No wmplayer.exe lockup. Just a soothingly simple experience and a freshly burned CD.

Five days passed, and then…

Fit the Sixth: The Hard Drive Ticks. Death Approaches.

In the middle of a particularly vigorous programming session a few days ago, the hard drive started ticking. Have you ever heard a hard drive tick? For your sake, I hope not. Hard drives shouldn’t tick. Ever. And certainly not in the middle of programming sessions, vigorous or otherwise. Ticking — or any noise other than a quiet susurrating whir — means your hard drive is probably about to die, taking all of your data with it to wherever it is that dead hard drives scuttle off to when they expire. 

I got lucky. My hard drive didn’t die. And it hasn’t, yet. But the computer did crash again, this time by slowing to a halt over the course of ten minutes. Good thing I used Foldershare to back up my files. Sure hope none of them were corrupted before being backed up.

This brings us to the present.

Here I sit, two feet away, USB keyboard in hand, waiting for the ominous ticking to signal its last goodbye. 

Thanks to my clumsy mishaps and Asus’ product development Chi I now have a laptop that…
- must remain plugged in almost all the time
- when unplugged, drains to zero power in thirty minutes
- rarely resumes properly from standby
- requires an external USB keyboard
- selectively reads CDs and DVDs
- no longer burns CDs
- ticks

The Blindingly Bright Blinkly Blue Light and the Super Weird Launcher Buttons still work, though. Perhaps they’re run by a separate motherboard.