W2PB-7M005M (UXGA/HD-DVD) in stock at Newegg

So I'm about to pull the trigger on this bad boy but have a couple of questions;

1. When will Asus begin to ship Vista on their laptops? I'd rather pick this up with Vista Ultimate 64-bit already installed, vs XP MCE (which is that Egg is currently listing for this unit).

2. Will Ultimate even be an option from Asus on their high end notebooks, or will we be stuck with Home Premium?

3. Since I may need to have an XP boot partition, would I be better off just picking it up with XP MCE and then just get Vista Ultimate separately?

4. Am I likely to experience Vista 64-bit driver issues with this machine?

5. Any reviews out there for this unit yet? I had the Toshiba HD-DVD notebook, but that thing would overheat like crazy. Will this Asus run nice and cool?

Thanks!

 

it probably will have not problems at all,

Note* Toshiba has rep of running very very very hot.

 

You can get it with XP MCE now + free Vista Home Premium upgrade. There is no way to upgrade to Ultimate, though... Annoying

 

I pulled the trigger on Newegg about 2 hours ago and they are already showing that it has been sent to the shipper for FedEx econo overnight delivery. I'm stoked!

I see that Asus has a BIOS 203 available since 1/11/2007 for the W2P that supports Vista 32-bit, so I guess I'll go ahead and take advantage of the free upgrade to Vista Home Premium 32 bit, even though I really want to run Ultimate 64 bit on this machine.

Hmm, I wonder if I can just install the Vista Home Premium 32-bit upgrade on my P4 3.2GHz home machine currently running XP Pro? That would be ideal and then purchase the Ultimate 64-bit upgrade @ $200 for this new laptop. Yeah, that's the ticket (once a 64-bit Vista BIOS comes out and I know that HD-DVD playback will work in that environment).

Talk about the bleeding edge...

 

lucky you.. I want one!!

I m trying to find a good deal for it but 2800 seems to be the cheapest... which is actually not too cheap. I guess I ll wait longer

 

I think its going for $2120 from newegg.

 

give me a link I m buying it NOW!

 

If you upgrade, you will be stuck with Business Premium, which is missing Media Centre - a sore loss to a multimedia laptop with a DVB-T tuner.

No. Drivers are available, either at the manufacturer sites or through Asus, for all of the hardware.

**** no. I would have expected that the engineers would take advantage of the 17" chassis and put in a very capable cooling system, but the CPU heatsink is tiny. Expect it to idle at between 50 and 60c, even if you reduce the voltage to 0.950v.

 

the model with the HD-DVD drive and UXGA screen is $2800, and the one with the SXGA+ screen without the HD-DVD drive is 2400 right now. The price quoted in the above post was for a previous model

 

yup, and the model @ $2800 also has 2gb on mem and a larger HD.. I think all that is definitely worth the extra 400.. I just wish I had the dough.

 

OOOPs my bad, I was looking at the wxga, but the WSXGA is on sale for $2400.

 

I thought the upgrade path from XP MCE was Home Premium, which includes MCE?

Ok, so the XP/Vista 32 bit BIOS Asus has posted will also work with Vista 64 bit?

Wow, that is hot. I'll keep an eye on that. Guess I won't be folding on this laptop!

 

Apparently Newegg only had 1 of these in stock. When I try to go back to look at it again, I get a message:

We apologize for the inconvenience, but the item you are looking for has been deactivated.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16834220119

Weird. Also I messed up and ordered it FedEx "Express Saver" which cost $35.75. Turns out that is 3 business days, so I won't get it until Monday. Should have just gone UPS 2nd day for $5 more. Grrrr.

I also went ahead and downloaded all the Vista 64-bit drivers from the ASUS website and burned them to a CD. There was no driver for the HD-DVD drive, so hopefully that means it is natively supported under Vista.