01.23
I rebuilt my Asus ultra-slim laptop over the weekend. I’ve never been the biggest fan of OEM builds because of the 3rd party stuff that gets included. On went Windows 7 Ultimate with the intention of migrating from my Latitude which will probably be rebuilt with some Hyper-V version (it has more RAM and eSATA).
After dealing with the drivers (conveniently placed on the hard disk by Asus) and putting on the usuals (thanks to ninite) I installed a few bits of the Asus software, including power stuff and a boot accelerator.
Some info:
- The power stuff customises the power options. The battery saving one boosts Windows 7 battery life to around 7 hours.
- The machine starts in around 2 seconds from cold, then hits the boot loader.
- A cold boot & logon takes 24 seconds, with things like Office 2010 installed.
- Wake from sleep (open the lid) is less than 1 second. The hardest bit here is finding the gap between the lid and the keyboard because the machine is so thin.
All this will only get better with Windows 8. I already see that on my old netbook and the DevPrev release from last September.
Glad I didn’t toss the Asus packaging yet – I found two dongles:
- A USB one for adding a NIC
- A micro VGA converter for connecting a VGA lead.
Some manufacturers have native VGA and NIC ports in the chassis but have to sacrifice thickness to fit them in.
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