W3j Owners Lounge

2 Extra Gigs? What are you doing with this laptop. 2GB of RAM is really the most you should need, and unless you are going 64-bit with it, 3GB is the most. Is there something here I am missing?

 

3 GB, for the hell of it? I dunno.... Will there be no performance advantage between 2 and 3 GB? I had read a thread which compared a 2 GB vs 3 GB on a G1S (?) that showed modest improvement in gameplay or was it a bogus thread? http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=131467

Will the W3j not show any advantage?



Anybody know how compatible G.skill is with the W3j? just wondering as that is the memory that I'm interested in.

THanks!

David

 

I have 1.5 GB on my W3j in Vista. I rarely use more than 80% of that memory. If you are using XP you would have to be photoshopping, gaming, encoding, and more to use 3 GB (that might be an exaggeration, but seriously, you will have to try hard to use that much). What is it that you really plan to do with this computer?

 

Plan A? Rule the world! Plan B? nothing in particular... windows vista and adobe photoshop would be the most resource consuming hogs. I'd like to run games without lag. 2 gigs will most likely be enough, but it's always fun to throw 3 gigs out there. eh? 3 gigs anybody?

So now that my bubble's been popped , I'll most likely go with this 1 gig stick:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820134129

Anybody know if this sleeve will fit around the w3j? Might make for a tight fit:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834990013

 

As far as I can tell that RAM would work. There is no way the W3j will fit in there. The W3j is at least 13" across, and way more than .75" tall. I have one of these, and it fits and works great, plus its pretty lightweight. And, the price is right on it.

 

That looks like what I'm looking for. Are there cushions on all sides? It's hard to tell from the pic. Also does the w3j slide around alot or is it pretty snug?

After doing some searches, turns out this topic has been brought up more than once.

Thanks caleb,

david

 

Yes, there are cushions on all sides, it is a good product. The W3j doesn't slide around, and there is a strap to secure it if you want to. It fits really well, its lightweight, and built well.

 

Depends what you use it for, I run Photoshop CAD and 3D VIZ Google earth etc and would quite often hit my 2GB limmit as I normally have 3 of these running at a time, so I got 3GB any more than that under XP or any laptop under this chipset will not be recognised and is a waste.

I even had 4GB on my work station, under XP it actually slowed windows!

I now run XP64 at work with 4GB, rocks uses all of it and fast! much better than XP32bit.

Oh yeah I installed a new 250gb WD Scorpio in my W3J seems to run faster bit some speed is surely due to a freash install of XP and surprisingly runs 5deg lower than my old 160 GB Seagate 5400.3??

 

Ah, so you got the drive! I have been thinking about it, but with new SSD drives, I think the W3j would scream with one of them. A bit more expensive though.

 

At a curiosity, has anyone tried to run the UT3 Beta Demo on their W3J? I can't get it to run past the intro commercials (after which it crashes to the desktop).

If it helps, I have the 1.83GHz Core Duo + 2.5GB of RAM and the 7.10 mobile catalyst drivers installed.

 

Yeah I did, Ive been a but busy with work to run any benchmarks, but hopefully this weekend ill give it a spin.

Yeah SSD would be good but they are very expensive for limited space, they are only up to 32GB arent they? which is crazy because you can get 8gb M2 & micro SD cards now, surely they could stack a heap and get well over a couple of hundred gb, hopefully wont take long befre the price drops and capacity rises.

 

Part of me says to just buy the fastest 32 GB at the end of the summer (10 months from now) and then use dual hard drives when I need them. Most of the time that I need battery is for class time or surfing. For those, 32 GB is enough (my system partition is 30 GB with 10 free, so I could easily keep notes in there). Then I would have a really fast system, and things like Lightroom should run faster (dual drives). Oh the choices!

 

Or if you have enough money, buy two and run the second in the multibay, then you could use that for a scratch disk, or a 32 SSD as main and a WD 250gb in the multibay for data.

I normally do that, I hardly ever use my DVD and its awesome saying you have half a terrabite (2x250gb) in a 14" laptop

 

I would probably go the route of the 250HD, I probably will get one of those, then get an SSD when prices come down. Right now I use the Second battery, and I could do so most of the time with the SSD (especially if I waited for 64GB to be affordable). I rarely use the DVD drive either.

 

Hey fellow w3j owners,

I just recently reformatted my w3j and after installing windows updates/drivers/apps, HControl crashes on me. I am not sure which program is causing it but every time on startup i get a error saying "HControl has encountered a problem and needs to close"

All my drivers are latest and video card driver is same as pre-format (6.10), which was working fine.

Anyone know a fix?

 

did you try uninstalling ATK100 utility driver, and reinstalling it again. Hope that helps.

 

Greetings All,

I'm usually the one giving advice, instead of asking for it, but this is a rare occasion.

I recently had an unfortunate malfunction on my W3J. I was finishing some last-minute work on my laptop, before going to sleep. The laptop was on my bare lap, running on battery only, and well vented. When finished, I shut down the laptop via the start menu, closed it, and set it aside. The next morning I pick it up, walk into the living room and power it on. At this point, it hangs on the Asus splash screen, and remains there, frozen.

After a few reboots, I discovered that I can only reach the POST screen if I press Tab -before- the Asus splash animation finishes, and not after. The POST screen gets to "Initializing USB Controller..." then hangs. Every time.

I have already contacted Eddie @ btotech.com, and have an RMA currently being processed. Eddy has been WONDERFUL, assisting me in troubleshooting over the phone, with very detailed and professional instruction. I am extremely familiar with the internal workings of laptops, but he approached the problem from a very professional standpoint, which only increases my already high respect for him. Since I purchased ADP (Accidental Damage Protection) for 2 years from www.btotech.com I am confident my problem will be taken care of quickly and to my satisfaction. I'll post here again once all is well again. Thanks in advance, Eddie

We both agree that the problem has to be the USB controller or something on the motherboard, having systematically eliminated both of the RAM Modules, Battery, AC Adapter, Hard Drive, Wireless Card, CD-ROM, CPU Heatsink (very clean, btw) and Video Card as possible culprits. However, this is puzzling because this is normally a very reliable section of the computer, according to Eddie. Neither of us have seen a problem like this before.


I was wondering if anyone else has had similar trouble with their W3J or similar Asus laptop? Any thoughts?

Thanks,

 

yes, i have

the HControll still crashes on start up and manually.

 

Hey - anyone have the pages or thread on W3j Bios settings/updates or ATI driver updates bookmarked and can post the links?

I know I'm cheating.

 

Try this out.

 

Hello,

Back again, I think there might be a problem with my video card. The video card sometimes refuses to initialize graphics engines, and sometimes games claim it lacks shader support 3.0 etc. Even if a game runs for about 15-20 minutes, it crashes sometime and throws me back to the desktop, and then I cannot run anymore games because it throws the errors listed above at me.

I have reinstalled drivers numerous times, currently using the latest version of omegadrivers. In addition, I have memtested the RAM.

 

That sucks, what kind of heat is it outputting? and a question from me, I am looking for the drive replacement piece that will allow me to add a second hard drive in place of my disc drive. I live in canada (but then again the dollar is amazing atm) and I was wondering where a good place would be to order from?

 

You can order it from the Asus estore.

 

one other thing, is the what is the interface for the hot swap hard drive bay? ide, sata?

 

I would imagine it is IDE since the main hard drive is also IDE.

 

It isn't a problem with overheating though, I checked the air vents and the heat pipes, there's little or no dust. It only seems to happen after a restart from hibernate; part of the problem probably lies with Hellgate London as well, which ha smanaged to be the largest memory leak I've ever seen.

 

I just wanted to report on my last post, regarding my laptop's USB Controller giving out and hardlocking on boot.

Well, I got my laptop back, and I'm now cruisin' along just like old times. It's not missing a lick, with it's new motherboard.

< shameless plug >
Eddie at BTOTech has once again both met and exceeded my expectations. My RMA went off without a hitch, and I even had my Laptop back in time to take it with me to work on Turkey Day! It made for great entertainment as I made double-time pay waiting for the phone to not-ring.

Eddie, like I told my wife and my friends. Anyone I know who wants a laptop, You are my first (and only) recommendation!
< /shameless plug >

Anyway, all is well in Chet-land once again. Thanks

 

Anybody here have experience with this 2gb corsair?
http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=90061

 

I use their 1 GB model, so that should be fine. Just pay attention, as some people have reported problems with running 3GB or more in the W3j.

 

well i'm not in the mood to take out the keyboard so it'd be only 1stick, i.e. 2.5gb total. As long as there were no operational problems I'm going to get it. Tomorrow's the last day for the $15 rebate lol.

 

Wow thats a good price, I installed one of those in my W3J about 2 months ago now, no complaits from me! all is working well, go for it!

 

hmm..looks like my last step is the processor upgrade...though the half TB notebook is tempting...is the 2.33proc capable of decoding 1080p?

damn the 2.33's still going for upper 600s

 

Hi, could I know what kind of problems might arise from having more than 2gb of ram?

because I intend to upgrade my ram, add a 2gb stick in.

w3j comes with 2 x 512 ram right?

so i'll be having 2.5gb ram if so.

anyone ever tried going up to 4gb ram?

 

You won't be able to go to 4GB. I have just heard people say that more than 2GB might be a bit buggy. I'm just curious, what do you need with more than 2GB?

 

I do maya rendering and gaming on my laptop.

rendering takes a super long time.

photoshop gets really laggy when I'm making a super big print file.

so was hoping to be able to upgrade it to 2 x 2gb ram.

what are the problems that you've heard of for those that have gone over 2gb ram?

 

It is just buggy. The 2x2GB RAM is a waste of money, go 1GB + 2GB, because 3.2 is the maximum in 32-bit anyway, so why spend the extra money on the 2GB stick when you can only use half of it?

 

I upgraded to one of those, absoloutely flies now I got mine on ebay for like 450 you just have to search around.

If you are rendering you should deffinately upgrade your processor, I noticed a big improvement in encoding video/audio rendering etc when I upgraded.
I Use AutoCAD photoshop and 3DViz (out of all photoshop is the most resource hungry, uses soo much RAM)

Under XP 32bit Windows only recognises 3gb, so if you buy 4 it will work but it will be a waste as windows does not see or use it all. (I instaled 4GB under XP and it achually slowed performance, for some reason page filing even more memory to the HDD)

The only way to ulitize 4GB or more ram is to install XP64 (I use this at work) because I work on large files and often sit around 3.8gb of ram usage. and it is a lot faster than XP32 just because it uses more RAM and doesn' have to write memory to the HDD, fastest opening times in XP32 under XP64+4gb went from 89 sec down to 9sec! considering on an older computer took up to 400sec!
However if you run your W3J with XP64 or Vista64 it will only use 3GB aparently it is a limitation of the chipset and the way it shares memory.

Do some research you will see what I mean.

I would just get 3GB RAM, 2.33ghz T7600, and western digital 250gb HDD, I have upgraded to this spec for a while now and everything has run fine, no problems at all even running Quake and Doom all run fine.

only problem was when I reinstalling windows on my new HDD and the recovery CD wouldn't work untill I removed the 2GB stick, I just loaded windows and then put it back in!

 

Thanks CalebSchmerge and NZwaverider for your replies.

For me, I'm just using winxp, have vista at home, but it's the 32bit and i don't intend to change from xp to vista anytime soon.

So i guess i'll just add 1 x 2gb ram having a total of 3gb ram. [just found out today that i have 1x1gb ram instead of 2x512 which i thought i did..]

A noob question from me here, im running on a 2.0ghz processor, how do i upgrade to a 2.33ghz processor?

coz im getting very irritated with having to wait for quite a while to open my psd files and saving them. takes a long time.
><

Thanks for the info and help.
I'll go down to the local pc fair to get my 2gb ram tomorrow, 70bucks, sing dollars. pretty cheap i think.

 

If opening files is what takes a while, then you want a faster hard drive. The processors in most computers are ridiculously fast compared to every other component. Usually, the slowest part is the hard drive. I don't think that 333MHz upgrade in processor speed is warranted at $400. From a 1.6 or 1.83 maybe, but you would really have to be doing a lot of encoding type stuff to need that kind of processor upgrade at that price.

 

I have to agree with CalebSchmerge, I have had a lot of experience with Photoshop and large files, and for fast oprning times I would recomend buying the HDD travelers drawer and installing a second HDD and using it as a photoshop scratch disc, know what that is? if not check out the link

here are some tweaks to improve performance and memory usage and assigning scratch discs.
http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=318243&sliceId=2

Actually in terms of priotiry what helps opening files is, in the first instance the HDD as it loads the file into RAM, if the file is large it will fill ram untill (if the file is large) you will notice status bar starts moving slowly and your HDD will be working overtime, it is writing virtual memory to the HDD which is very slow.

The cheapest upgrade in this case is buy more RAM, if your files are opening completely in RAM it will be fast, as soon as you run out and it writes to the HDD it slows down a lot. where a fast HDD and second HDD will help.

Processor installation is easy just pull back cover off, remove GPU and heat sink and lift the processor out then just replace hradest thing is spreading thermal compound into the processor to make sure the processor is cooled properly

 

just did the 2gb mem upgrade yesterday and I have to say I was shocked at how little dust there was in the cpu fan area. I was expecting clumps of lint (see old thread about overheated asus from lack of cleaning), but other than a thin dust coating on the fins, it was practically spotless. That said, this is literally a desktop replacement for me and hasn't been brought out of the house in months. Still, I have used it heavily almost daily since it was bought in the first shipment of W3J's through proportable back in May of 06. Looks like every 1.5yr isn't unreasonable.

On the HD front, I am debating whether to go external esata (w/ adapter, another 70) or external 1394 with the 1TB mybook studio. It'd be only a bit more than going 2x 250 for internal and it may even be faster (tests have shown 1394 to hold a steady 50ish rate in write and read and esata with the ability to peak up to 70s, with a slightly higher average in both)

Last internal change probably will be the processor, but what kind of real world improvements should I expect to see with the 2.33 over the stock 1.83..other than help with decoding high def content (which as of now stutters with 720p in VLC, and playing in media player classic causes the fan to come on ala gaming)

 

That processor will be hotter, which means that your fan will be on more. Day to day performance I would guess won't change. I don't think that it would be worth the money, unless you do a lot of high def stuff, then it might be.

 

oh by high def i'm just talking about movie watching..guess i'll wait till the prices come down a bit more then.

 

thanks again for the suggestions and info guys.

bought my 2gb ram the other day, next would be to upgrade my hdd to a 7200rpm.
XD

 

how would you do esata external off the w3j? I thought it didnt have the outputs for that. As far as decoding high def, I have had no problem with 1080p (i have the 1.83)... maybe the fan comes on, cant say that I remember, have you tried quiet office mode? not a performance hit for me in most things, and it stays quite

EDIT

just noticed you said with adapter, but doesnt that defeat the pupose? firewire is usually really good for vid transfer, personally I use wireless and store vid on my desktop

 

If you used an expresscard adapter you could get some good throughput.

 

hmm I just upgraded to the latest omegas (7.10 based) we'll see if that helps with the 720p movies. Out of curiosity are you using vlc or MPC and did you install anything other than the h.264 for ati?

 

I noticed that in the newest drivers 7.11, according to the faq on the ati site it says that the h.264 driver is included in the CCC. I am running the 7.10 omega's right now. Do I need to install CCC to get the H.264 or is it possible that the old H.264 driver remained, since it was initially installed seaparately.

Question 2 is how to get hardware decoding from either VLC or MPC, when I run bourne ultimatum in 720p through VLC it's choppy but fan is only on level 1 (all of my other movies run perfectly fine through VLC with this exception), when I run it again through MPC, the CPU utilization goes through the roof and it runs smooth but the fan goes to level 2, the same level I get when gaming. Is there a codec I can dl for VLC or MPC to allow hardware decoding?

 

hey guys,
I have the t2500 version W3J, is there anyway to disable the intel speedstep feature? im experimenting something. the bios does not have the option.
thank

 

Is this still the latest version and how is everyone finding it? I just started getting driver crashes (not sure what version i'm on, but I'm sure it's older) so I'm wanting to update but it's always a hassel. Can anyone let me know what they think, and also if there is a direct link to the right drivers?