W3V owners, does your chrome finish look like this? And some thoughts...

I have a couple of dimples on the right side chrome strip on top of the cover, it seems like a defect on my new W3V , does your W3V have this?

Here is a link to the pictures on what I am talking about:
Picture 1
Picture 2

Yeah I am being pickey, but its no Dell, so I expected better....

Some other opinions on my new W3V:

Screen: The viewing angle on the screen is fine, I was worried after reading the negative posts on the W3V display, and the screen brightness is actually brighter than my other Sony FS550 and the color really looks good and I have no dead pixels *knock on wood*. I wonder if Asus updated to a different supplier for their LCD?

Sound: Sound is loud enough and pretty good for the small notebook speakers.

As for the audio output level from the headphone jack, others were right that it is not "loud enough" however I find the volume acceptable, the sound quality is pretty good. When connected to external powered speakers, the sound is really good. As for DVD viewing, I suggest buying a Creative Audigy PCMCIA card because the voice is hard to hear like many have said.

Build Quality: With the exception of the above comment on the chrome strip finish (I wonder how it passed quality control), everything else feels solid and the brushed aluminum cover is great. The keyboard is comparable to my Fujitsu S6120, and they have great keyboards. However IBM Thinkpad T4X series keyboards are still the best

Noise/Heat: The fan is constantly on and when I am just surfing or browsing the internet, the fan is @ 1500 RPM's and its pretty quiet, its just air noise coming out of the vents, I do not hear the fan whine. When running 3DMark 05 the fan ramp's up to 2000 RPM's and its more noticable, then from here you can hear the fan whine with more air noise, but it is not intrusive when playing games with audio effects.

When the W3V is on idle for hours, or when I was playing BF 2, the wrist pad and the mouse was not hot at all, it felt warm but bearable, which is similar to all notebooks. I went through alot of notebooks so this is my opinion from my experience

Battery Life: This is a weak spot for the W3V, on Email/Office setting in Power4Gear, and with just browsing the web and typing, I get only 2 hours and 30 minutes of battery life. What is everyone else getting?

 

Here are some pictures I took of my W3V:

 

Well, for my w3v which i bought it online half way round the world, the only dislike was the build of the battery bamboo compartment connecting to w3v does lock, but it isnt tightly lock with the w3v. But still its safe enough to travel along with it. Does anyone have any solution to secure the bamboo battery nicely onto the w3v?

 

My battery kind of wiggles a bit also. I never messed with it, but maybe a piece of tape or something in there will make it fit more snugly.

(My chrome looks fine though)

 

I think power4gear sucks, the power saving modes dont do much except change the brightness, or if they do I have no idea what theyre doing. I unistalled power4gear on my w3v and am instead using RightMark CPU Clock to undervolt and control the processor. When plugged in RM Clock automatically scales the processor to provide enough juice, for example right now Im just browing so the cpu is at 800 mhz. If I were to start gaming it would automatically scale up to 1.86 ghz. This keeps the computer ALOT cooler. Also, when on battery life you can use RM Clock to force the cpu to stay at 800 mhz.

Also, to help your battery life you should turn brightness down to as low as you can comfortably stand, unplug any peripherals you're not using (USB connections such as a charging ipod or external sound card will really drain your battery), and undervolting will also help. Additionally, if you go to the ATI settings pannel and enable Power Play you can force the GPU to be at minimal clock speeds while on battery power.

With all said and done you should easily be able toget 3.5 - 4 hours on ur battery.

 

JK -

Hey, I believe I got forwarded over a copy of your photos. That bubbling on the one little chrome piece.... is that it or is there more of it all over your notebook? Our RMA guy John asked me to send an email over to the head tech to make him aware of the situation. They really have limited our own quality checks since they requested that all units be shipped to the customer with their Taiwan factory seal intact. With that, even though we're more than capable of say changing out that lid for you, if we modify the system it would void your warranty. So we've come to the point that if they want to do that, we're going to make sure they honor the warranty and I can tell you that we're not going to have a problem helping you out with that one. It's just a matter of my buddy there getting back to me and he'll make sure Asus sets everything right.

If you don't hear anything from us or Asus, please drop me a line directly.

 

jkrd101, I noticed you use the wireless logitech mouse that came with your W3v. Can you get it to connect without the USB donggle? I installed the bluetooth stak but it wont' connect.

 

I tried using the ASUS Bluetooth Stack, and no it does not work for me. The reason is the Logitech Wireless mouse is not a Bluetooth device, therefore it needs that RF reciever that it came with in order to function.

 

Yeah.. that's a big reason why it won't work. RF and BT are two very different things.