Asus support on why the trackpad driver sets the cpu-speed at maximum during scroll.

I'm just posting this for your amusement.

So, I guess some of you might have noticed that when you are using two-finger scroll on an asus laptop, the processor is immediately bumped to whatever maximum speed the processor has. This annoyed me a bit on my previous two laptops, since the processor state stats were so unpredictable. It took me forever to figure out what was actually causing the processor to seemingly randomly ramp up and slow down.

But I finally figured out that it is actually a power policy setting enforced by a trackpad driver component. (And yes, I know it sounds insane, just trust me, it's actually the case).

And on my last laptop/haswell, what this basically means is that I can do everything I need when the processor is running at 700Mhz, and the laptop is comfortably reverting to a completely passive cooling scheme. ....As in the fan isn't running, and my battery-time easily reaches 6-7hours while using it as a typewriter and music box...

Anyway. So I can do everything I need while running passive cooling -- EXCEPT TWO-FINGER SCROLLING. Any scrolling ramps the cpu to 2.7Ghz, increases the power-draw by 15w, spins up the fans, and so on.

Note that all and every single asus laptop has the same behavior. (Though I am fairly certain that the touch-scroll functions on the vivobooks actually don't have this "feature", since the in-house twerked trackpad drivers are not involved).

And note that no other laptop maker actually uses this type of direct power policy commands from their software to affect the processor states. One thing is that it's dangerous to input commands like that, but another is that you simply don't do it that way - the on-demand governor is so sensitive by default, and can be tweaked to be as sensitive as you want, that such a function is obsoleted. And it has been obsolete since.. 2006 at the very least. Aside from that, the input polling has no bearing on the processor speed. So unless you're scrolling some purely software based thing here - it simply does not make sense to have this function.

So after convincing myself that being annoyed by this probably doesn't actually prove I have Asbergers after all --- I wrote Asus support a message. In another vain attempt to have someone write a sentence such as "remove unneeded and annoying power-policy commands from touch-pad driver? Really, dudes, trackpad driver controls processor speed - lel?" and send it to r&d.

It takes a month, and this comes back:

...You can read the entire exchange below.

So another day, another mystifying Asus platform decision. Play/pause keys hardcoded to Windows Media Player -- even though Microsoft themselves favor the general interface for media-keys, and recommend everyone to use the general interface over specific ID implementations. Power key/sleep key on the zenbook placed where the delete key normally would be..? Why? If the macbuk had it, I suppose I would understand where it'd come from - but they don't. It's just a bad idea that looks bad and doesn't work - so why? And of course the hard-set and model-specific ram-timing and bios settings. That - as actually we can see on this forum - causes quite a lot of issues for people who buy laptop configs other than the standard one. And in certain cases, even on the standard config as well. With instability, curious hangs, and very unpredictable errors. It stems from this. Variable bus-timing, different types of ram - it's ensured that it cannot work from the forced settings and features, via firmware flashed on the extended acpi functionality package. Which also ensures that you can't actually circumvent these functions if you want your windows boot to actually work.

And Asus won't do anything about it. Ten minutes with the bios. And removing one function from a specific trackpad component module. But Asus won't do it.

Seriously, what the f.

 

Latest reply.

That's right, folks. The RAM Timing affects the power draw to such a degree that they must be fine-tuned to each individual model.

"These people have jobs?", like one of my friends says.

 

Can't seem to find out what touchpad your model uses but have you tried 3rd party drivers for it? IMHO the standard Asus install is much worse than the bare bones drivers available for other machines with the same kind of touchpad - that applies for both Elantech and Synaptics pads.

 

Well, yes. But the problem is that they've branded the actual synaptics pad... it's made up of two different interfaces.. with some sort of unique id that the standard synaptics package won't detect as valid. Or something. So I'm stuck with either the default driver without the swipe and scroll components. Or using the asus driver with the inf-rewrites.

It's infuriating.

 

You might have better luck if you contact Asus HQ in Taiwan. They actually seem to want to fix things (according to my last inquiry).

 

This is a very interesting read. My Asus UX32A laptop showed good promise when I bought it, as most laptops do specs-wise and on the reputation of the ubiquitous unreliable reviews you find online. But it had so many issues, the present touchpad issue being one of the main ones. The others were:
- The loss of gesture support on wake up from sleep, necessitating an end task of the Asus Touchpad Center process (although for months I thought the only fix was to do a full restart- eurgh!).
- The computer would sometimes hang for 5 seconds to about 2 minutes at a time due for no apparent reason.
- The screen colour calibration resetting to extremely cool colours every wake from sleep/restart. I had to reload my custom calibration every time I started to use my computer.
- The hard drive was sometimes constantly indexing or in use. I have no idea why. I disabled the usual culprits such as Dropbox etc. and found only Asus processes causing the issues. When this indexing occurred, other programs were so painfully slow it was unusable. I had used barely a quarter of the hard drive space, and closed intensive programs I wasn't using (e..g only left Chrome with a few tabs open if I was internet browsing). I suspect terrible hybrid hard drive drivers.
- Cooling fans randomly turning onto full blast, when the laptop had barely been used. They wouldn't slow down without a full restart.

I bit the bullet and bought a Mac, as I thought I would never do. Having gone through Asus, hp, Sony, Acer, I couldn't bear another irksome experience (for the record my father's Toshiba is older and works far better than my Asus, even if the build quality isn't great). I was tempted by Lenovo's better reputation but it's a false economy to keep taking the chance.

 

Lazy Shortcut software development. I see it everywhere. Just don't buy an ASUS anymore. There are lots of great brands out there.

The MSI I just got is pretty nice.

 

..that sounds like a good idea. Honestly, I haven't had this kind of unresponsive.. ******* bull****.. from Asus before, when I chatted via e-mail (and they used to do amazing mainboards, and the forests were greener and the snow whiter, and so on..).

But I don't have any of their corporate contact information any more, and I'm not sure if their support portal allows me to pick where to send the question..?

 

Hey, this probably doesn't help you, but I'm using a custom Elantech touchpad driver with my Asus N750JK and I'm not seeing this behavior. Maybe this is isolated to Synaptics touchpads?

See the following gif, when I switch to performance mode, I just do it via the ASUS Console or whatever they want to call it. When I'm in power saving mode, the scrolling is noticeably choppier (not represented in the gif), but I gladly take that compromise when running on batteries, since it lasts a lot longer.

 

^ In power profile power saver settingsthe check if max cpu is 100% when plugged in . for battery you can give lower number


try setting process affinity and priority to low and cpu0 for touchpad process ,

 

This is all to do with which country you select. Selecting a country like South Africa will send your question to Taiwan HQ.

 

^thanks, will try that.

Yeah, it's a new problem to me.. used the standard elantech driver as well on my other laptop. If I try to use the generic synaptics driver on my current one, I'm losing scroll and so on, apparently because the plugin is not compatible with the branded extra "asus device". It's a hardware id of some sort that the generic driver won't recognize..