My Own Pirate Radio

Last May I bought a new laptop, an Asus W3V. About a month later it started behaving badly: occasionally refusing to enter or return from standby, randomly changing the display resolution when changing power management state, and, once in a while, blue-screening with a complaint about the video driver ati2dvag.dll toodling off into an infinite loop. Not want you want from a brand new laptop.

In the bad old days — 1993, to be specific — I would have walked down the hall, found “Andre the device driver guy from Quebec”, and handed him my laptop to debug. An hour later, he would have handed it back, fixed. Such were the benefits of working on the Windows NT team. (That and once-a-week “Weekly Integration Meetings”, i.e. “free party with heaps of great food and beer”. Intern heaven.) This being the Internet era I am sadly no longer in touch with Andre or anyone else who regularly debugs at the kernel level. So I searched around online for a fix, including an abortive attempt at communicating with Asus (their support is, shall we say, lacking in chi), and eventually gave up. My fix was to keep the laptop plugged in and avoid standby. How embarrassing.

Thankfully, the story has a happy ending: I just searched again and finally found this fix, which recommended removing the Power4Gear power management software. So far, so good: my laptop is working again, and standby works just fine now.

Internet: 1, Power4Gear: 0. Thank you, Mavtop. You are wise.

P.S. Other Asus W3V flaws and foibles:
- the speaker is tinny and too quiet. strange for a multimedia-oriented machine.
- flashing blue light when in standby will eventually drive you insane. low-tech fix: color it black with a marker
- “fast launch” keys on either side of keyboard inevitably launch something, turn off the mousepad, or turn off wireless when you hand the laptop to someone else.
- nifty mousepad scrolling gestures don’t work with Firefox

Thanks everyone who recommended laptop models to consider. After much debate and hunting around I bagged an Asus W3V. So far, so good: it’s plenty fast, compact, easy on the eyes, and has all the ports and connectivity I wanted.

Cons: at 5.5 pounds this notebook is a wee bit heavy for my taste (although I must say it’s hard to find a lighter config in widescreen models); the super-fast CD/DVD drive is also super-noisy; the Ctrl, Function and Delete keys are in slightly wonky non-standard places; and the default touchpad configuration has a bit of a learning curve to it. In other words, there’s not much to complain about.

See specs here. I got the 1GB RAM config. At $1800 CAD before tax it’s pretty good bang for the buck.

Asus has long made white-label PC components for many PC OEMs. Apparently they also manufacture iBooks and PowerBooks for Apple. This helps explain why their own laptops have such interesting aesthetics; they are clearly experimenting in industrial design, and having spent time looking at many models the past few weeks I’d assert they are one of the leaders. (Hey, it’s a PC… you don’t have to do much innovation to take pole position on aesthetics.)

The range of laptop products they offer is bewildering. They would do much better only offering 5 choices instead of the 20 they have today on their site. Less is more.

You can also buy barebones machines and configure them as you like.

If you are buying in the Toronto area, your best bet is to check out the stores clustered at Spadina and Bloor. I bought from PC-Metro for $1800 CAD. I saw prices as high as $2200 CAD. I also shopped online but there just aren’t that many online sellers who ship within Canada.

The W3V will be replaced soon by a new model — W3J, I believe, with a Duo Core processor and a much more hefty pricetag — so inventory is starting to drop. If you are not a fan of widescreen form factors, check out the Asus V6V.

I also considered other Asus notebooks, IBM ThinkPads (T43, z60m) and Apple’s luscious new MacBook Pro which runs on the Intel Core Duo. I must admit I was tempted by the MacBook, but that price tag and some gossip about heat problems turned me off. I’ll wait for v3. :-)

I’ve managed to last 7 months without a laptop. I’m sure this has helped me build character, and fend off carpal tunnel, and decrease my chances of being reincarnated as a piece of beige office furniture. But now the call of the wild has become too strong for me to resist, and it’s time to re-equip.

Does anyone have recommendations or anti-recs to share on recent laptop purchases?

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