Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
Finally received my F9S and, as promised, I am doing a quick write up on instaling XP on it.
I have owned 2 A8 series laptops from Asus, so most of my comparisons are against those machines. Upon inspection, the F9S appears to be built better than the A8 laptops. There is virtually no flex in the lid or keyboard. It feels very solid yet lighter than the other laptops. It is smaller, but exactly as thick as the A8 laptops. There is no latch on the lid, it just kind of rests on the bottom part when you close it. The revolving camera does kind of stick out a bit from the top and looks like it may break off easily. I am going to have to be careful about that when putting it in and taking it out of its bag. The buttons on the touchpad were perfect; way softer and easier to click than the ones on the A8 laptops. Overall, it appears quite a bit more professional than the A8 laptops. However, I really don't like the fact that Asus covered it with stickers on the palm rests. They look really cheesy. I will be removing those huge stickers once everything is up and running.
Upon receiving it I upgraded the RAM with another stick of 1GB DDR2, making 2GB total. When I removed the component cover on the back, I noticed the CPU, the RAM, and the HD were easily accessible. I did not see the wireless nic card, so that may be under the keyboard. I hope its not too difficult to get to because I was interested in upgrading it to Intel's latest wireless card. I'm not too worried about that right now. I tried booting it after upgrading the RAM and it launched right into the Vista OOBE setup. At this time I noticed that the screen appeared much brighter and higher in contrast than my A8 laptops. I cancelled out of it since I was now going to load XP on it.
Before starting the XP setup, I checked for BIOS updates and found version 205 with a note on it about "allowing user to install XP" on it. So, I figured I better install that before trying to install XP on it. I put the bios on my bootable usb stick and proceeded with the update. The update went fine and after rebooting, I entered the BIOS to ensure boot from CD was enabled. While in the BIOS, I noticed that the vent on the left side of the laptop was blowing out REALLY hot air. Good thing this vent is not on the right side where I usually have my mouse.
I put in a bootable XP SP2 CD and launched into the setup. First issue: the windows setup did not detect any hard drives. Must be the SATA Operation Mode in the BIOS. I changed this from "Enhanced" to "Compatible" then relaunched the XP setup. This time the windows setup detected the hard drive and all the various partitions that come from the factory just fine. I deleted the partitions and created some to my own liking. Windows XP installed fine, and pretty quickly.
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Issues
I cannot get Fn+F9 to disable the touchpad as it should. Does anybody have an idea about this? This would be a really useful feature, but I'm guessing it is only supported in Vista. I have tried the latest Synaptics driver and the latest ATK0100 driver. I can get the touchpad to disable when I plug in a USB mouse via the Synaptics driver, yet Fn+F9 seems to do nothing at all. Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.
Other than the issues mentioned, I am happy to report that everything is functioning perfectly!
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Asus F9S Review and XP Installation Guide
Discussion in 'Asus' started by ra990, Nov 12, 2007.
