I hate adjusting sound on Asus laptops

If the stupidity of having to hold two function keys at the same time to adjust the sound isn't enough, there's also a small lagtime until the most meaningless and needlessly-complex and gigantic visualization appears over the centre of the screen to remind me that I'm adjusting the sound, and only after that does the sound actually change.

This is terrible if I'm gaming and relying on seeing the screen constantly, or watching "movies" and need to turn down the volume quick. My toshiba from 2005 (which worked just as well with 1/8th the RAM) had a little dial where I could control the volume in realtime... and with ONLY ONE HAND... why don't they have that anymore?

Back to that stupid visualization...

Which way is up? Does the blue slice get bigger with volume? No, it's just a really fat needle, and it doesn't turn more than 90 degrees even though there's a full 360 degrees to that circle! What, but I thought the needle is that little white arrow at the bottom! Oh, it doesn't do anything, just like the random water ripples underneath it...

 

Oh, yeah. The "you're on battery, and I still played the rippling wave-effect in a transparent layer" effect. Love it.

If you close HControlUser.exe (or prevent it at startup), you basically disable all the popups and weird increments on the volume and so on, but keep the functions.

Then you can use this http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus/150016-asus-notebook-keys-v1-3-a.html
to add your custom functions.

Sadly, Asus support had no intention of giving up any of the command lines used to trigger the functions. But essentially all of the function keys call a shell-command of some sort through for example Hcontroluser.exe.

So there's nothing stopping you from using the nbkeys tool, or the shortcut key setup, to trigger something like this:
NirCmd - Windows command line tool

...as a command. Like setting the vol-up key to "Nircmd changesysvolume 3000". In Win7... since Vista, I think.. you can execute two commands by putting an & between them. Two ampersands means the second command will trigger if the first one completes. I.e., "If the volume changes, then also execute annoying visualiser".

 

If you install Windows 7, you get rid of those useless animations. You get a much better non-animated sound bar on the top left hand side of the screen.

 

I agree, it will look like this (check the upper left corner):

 

If I uninstall the Asus program will it default back to the standard Win7 bar shown and the FN buttons still function? I just assumed the Asus program was needed for the buttons to work which meant it used its icons as well.

 

Some of the buttons will still work. Most won't.

 

I have no idea what the above means, but do I seriously need to download an external program just to adjust my sound???

No, I reinstalled windows 7 and ended up with the fuction keys not working at all, as was the case on my other asus machine.

 

Yeah. If you want to do something else than what Asus intended you to do - you need to hack the entire thing to pieces. ...Just a tiny little bit of hairy hex-surgery, though. Nothing much.

Tried talking to Asus support about it. Insisting that maybe it would be an idea to have a few more options. And perhaps make the functions and the calls to the atk package public in the meantime.

They thought I was mad or something.

Because, I mean.. who can't just open up an exe and hack a little bit of hex, right? Everyone can do that. Obviously..

Bears to be said as well that Asus isn't even the worst when it comes to this kind of thing. Actually, they have made it relatively easy to use the computers as you want to. Asus motherboards have always been great overclockers, for example. Intended to be used with unlocked cpus, and to customize ram-timings. They recognised that as a good way to earn marketshare.

That philosophy didn't bleed that much over into the notebook line, though...

 

I owned my first laptop in 2005; it did everything I wanted it to do. 7 years later my needs are exactly the same... I didn't think life would be harder in 2012. I never thought I'll have to do surgery for a simple task like adjusting volume... (shakes head in disbelief).

I definitely betted on the wrong horse when I decided not to switch to mac.

 

..not the first time I've heard that. And after a while now, when I don't have time to mess around with everything to get it to work the way I want any more, I'm starting to understand it more and more. That, yeah, they have restrictions as well. But at least most of the things you need just work.

(By the way - when I get my laptop, I'm going to write a small "non command shell oriented" linux guide. For people who might want to try linux, but aren't interested in spending a year learning syntax. If you're not ready to jump ship just yet, I mean.)