Feedback on a8jm

I'm getting close to pulling the trigger on a a8jm, but before I do I thought I'd ask all you a8jm owners how you're liking them. What do you like, not like, any problems? Are you happy overall?

 

I've had mine for 2 months now, can't be happier. Great machine, no regrets. The only dislike is the exclusion of internal BT for North American models.

Tons of threads here re: A8Jm, do a search and you'll find lots of them.

 

I've had mine a few days, and overall it's a thumbs up, but it DOES have some caveats:

* poor vertical viewing angle (note: could be a problem with all 14.x" panels, not ASUS specific)
* problems coming out of standby requiring a hard reboot
* only ~3 hours of battery life vs. 4 hours for my 3 year old Gateway M505XL

Other than that, it's great and it gives me at least two things I find necessary: DVI and high performance 3D graphics. DVI was vitally important to me.

I got mine at PortableOne (PortableOne MX) and they were awesome to deal with.

If I had to do it again, the only difference is that I'd drop the extra few hundred for the better screen that P1 offers. The W3J is missing 32 rows of pixels and lacks DVI, otherwise I would have considered it seriously. V6j lacks DVI, and I didn't want anything > 15".

Sony SZ had 7400 graphics and lacked DVI. MacBook Pro is underclocked and lacks second mouse button and Boot Camp is beta.

So the A8jm (or A8ja) are really the only ones that offered mem everything I needed.

 

no complaints with mine, no problems with standby or viewing angles either.

 

Love mine, I got it the day they came out, the view angle and colours are not as nice as my dell 20" panel but it's very good for a laptop.

machine performs well i play games on it all the time, it stays pretty cool if i play games for a couple hours it gets up to 60-61*C..

my only annoyance really is that since the firmware update the fan is ALWAYS on.. except for the first 10 seconds of boot.. its on slowly.. but it's still on.. machine idles around 38*C though

 

atom: if you don't like the always on fan, just downgrade to the 207 BIOS using winflash /nodate

 

I might give that a rip tonight, before i upgraded it used to just turn on and off all the time which is quite annoying as well, the fan would run for about 10seconds every 2-3 minutes.

Has anyone else noticed theirs doing this? I'm running linux on mine so the graphics card may not be clocking down like it should when not running 3d.

 

Yeah it does it on mine. I think the fan is set to go at 48 or 49 C on the old BIOS, and usually when working it goes up to 51 - 52, and when you stop for awhile, it goes back to 48 - 49, hence the on and off fan...

 

One other minor annoyance, which is probably an NVidia driver thing -- it doesn't remember my second monitor information. I'm not sure why that it is, but every time I reconnect I have to go into settings, "Extend Windows onto this monitor", readjust the monitor's virtual location, and apply. I didn't have to do this with my Mobility 9600 based machine.

 

Well, if you're not going to get it what else are you going to get?

I picked A8Jm instead of W3J because for one I have next to no money and the A8Jm saves me >$500. Plus, it's far less likely to attract unwanted attention. I bought my notebook for my personal use, not for the eyes of others and the hands of a thief

MY regret is for cheaping out and using NCIX points to get free shipping. It occurs to me know that there's an awful lot of ground to ship over b/w BC and home. I WANT IT NOW GRR. Express Shipping was only $8.99!!!

 

i concur, the fan switches on at temps higher than 49. This weekend i moved from my condo to a house, and its quieter and the fan seems louder lol.

But im impressed you are idling at 38, thats pretty good.

I was the 2nd person in Toronto to have the A8Jm (maybe all of canada who knows ) after gusto who is also on these boards. I am very happy with my machine. I can squeeze out 3:15hrs of my machine, when i used it in school a couple of times with wifi on and brightness on 2nd lowest using internet/word and pwer4gear on battery setting.

The only problem i have with mine is my hcontrol gave me problems and i had to install a different hcontrol.exe but now some of the quicklaunch buttons, not the Fn key ones but the other ones don't work. i dont really mind cos the only one i use is pwr4gear and that does work.

Something else that might be irksome, is that in my case, some parts if squeezed do flex. The sides/bottom. This in no way means that the chasis is weak, there's just a very little flex.

One more thing which by no means is Asus fault, is that the vid card severly underclocks on battery mode. In counterstrike source my frame rate on power is about 110 - 120 and on battery drops down to 30. I can still play but, there are times when i want to show off the card, but since im on battery i can't

Lastly, if you are quiet computer freak, u will notice that the hdd is louder than the fan sometimes. And the fan isn't loud

 

I've had mine for two weeks & I love it - it's just the right compromise (for me) between moderate portability, power, price, and screen size. But of course what you need depends on how you use it. It's not for the traveling salesman, nor the hardcore gamer, but for power users who also like to game.

 

Thanks for the feedback guys. Overall, it sounds like everybody is pretty happy with the A8jm.

Rwei, to answer your question, I was also looking at the S96j, W7j and W3j, but I think the A8jm is the best option for me. I will be carrying this around on a daily basis, so the S96j seemed to big. $1500 for the A8jm is already a reach on my budget, so the W3j is definitely too expensive. I took a long hard look at the W7j, but 1.5 GB max ram and the less than stellar battery life (at least from the preliminary reviews on this site) are both a big turnoff for me. Besides, it is the same price as the A8jm, but not as powerful. It is more portable though, but I don't mind the extra weight of a 14"

If anybody has any other suggestions or insights I'm open to them, but I think the A8jm is the way to go for me.

 

I updated my driver and mine has works properly now.

It is a great laptop and I have no regrets with the purchase. If I could choose one thing to improve it would be the battery life. It is a mean combination of power and portability.

 

cdd: How did you update your driver? I downloaded the drivers from nVidia site, but everytime I try to install it, it just says no compatible hardware found or something like that.

 

You can update your drivers by downloading new inf from http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/ or modifying your own. I chose to mod my own because laptovideo2go drivers seems to have some options that I really don't need or want.

 

Which are the best drivers to get? I have been onthat site but they have so many to choose from. And the modded inf does allow it to be installed on my laptop. But which one offers the best performance etc etc.

 

Thanks Quattra, will try them later on. I've read in the nvidia forums that the 90 series drivers are still buggy and cause lots of problems with display. Have you had any problems whatsoever?

 

That standby problem sounds like a software problem to me.

The a8j is a great little machine for the money, but I am disappointed with Asus going mainstream and cutting corners in build quality and the materials they used in this machine.

Screen is beautiful though. Very comparable to the LG T1 which is an emmaculate machine that costs 2000 after taxes.

 

Haha I was in the same boat except the W7J didn't register on my radar; I like my games . I don't understand all these people beating down on the A8Jm's build quality, from what I heard it's at least as good as the W3J's, possibly better due to it being less prone to overheating. Danny from MilestonePC said he was "more confident" about the A8Jm because of the heat on the W3J. Still, in answer to my initial question to him, he said he wouldn't drop any basketballs on an A8Jm, while he could easily jump on a Thinkpad.

Still I won't act like I wouldn't have wanted a W3J if it'd been the same price. But, $500 (considering I bought from NCIX) is alot of money just to satisfy my vanity. For $500 I could have gotten either:

-A 20'' widescreen LCD
-A NICE new suit (which works much better for vanity, trust me)
-Another ridiculously good speaker set
-A Wii or
-Alot closer to a PS3

But while being frugal is good I can't berate myself enough for not picking the $8.99 Express Shipping. I'm an idiot.

 

What driver did you update to? I'm using 8x.42 that comes from P1, which is fairly up to date unless you move up to the 9x drivers, but I've heard iffy things about those.

So you currently run two monitors in a stacked config and can disconnect, remove laptop, and reconnect and it remembers the config? Right now I'm REAL annoyed that I have to re-enable the second monitor and re-adjust its position every time I disconnect the DVI.

 

Bacon, I read in the LaptopVideo2Go forums that somehow the not remembering config is part of the Forceware 87.xx and above problems... The last stable one that remembers things if I'm not mistaken is mentioned as 84.xx.

Look up the forums there, I can't remember the exact thread though...

 

Unfortunately that doesn't help since I'm running 84.xx I believe =(

 

Are you sure? My default A8Jm drivers from ASUS are 87.xx...

 

are u sure darrick? My defaults from asus are 84.26

 

Zydus: Ugh.. yeah... sorry.. my bad... 84.26...

 

Still I won't act like I wouldn't have wanted a W3J if it'd been the same price. But, $500 (considering I bought from NCIX) is alot of money just to satisfy my vanity. For $500 I could have gotten either:

-A 20'' widescreen LCD
-A NICE new suit (which works much better for vanity, trust me)
-Another ridiculously good speaker set
-A Wii or
-Alot closer to a PS3


so true