Asus UL30A

olivier renault · 13 May 2011 at 18:33

Techn said:
Just have a quick query if anyone can help.

When my ul30 is sitting idle and eventually the screen turns off (screen saver) after a few minutes the hard drive seems to start up, flashing light and audible.

What could be going on here?
Its not set up to hibernate or anything like that, and as far as i can tell theres no maybe processes running in the background. When its idle with the screen on its silent

Looks like a power save feature. Could be indexing the hard drive, or moving memory to swap file.

If you look at hte power saving options, you should see which one turns on after x minutes. You can also change power profiles with the blue asus key + spacebar.

2StepSteve · 9 Jul 2011 at 14:14

Correct me if I am wrong but a year on and this notebook still seems like it is unique in the market. I can't seem to find anything else in this form factor and price bracket which has 8+ hours on battery and decent-ish processing power.

The only thing I can find that comes near to it (well actually it out performs it on processing power by quite a margin) is the Acer TimelineX 3820TZ which is running a P6100 Dual Core (2.0 GHz, 3MB Cache).

Passmark CPU Scores are as follows

SU7300 processor: 978

P6100 processor: 1519

There is hardly any info out there about the Acer TimelineX 3820TZ, but the single review I can find of it has a lot of praise for it. Battery life is comparable to the UL30A and by just looking at photos of it I can tell the build quality is above the UL30A.

Hmm would be nice if it had inbuilt 3G like the UL30A has but it can be overlooked.

twe · 13 Jul 2011 at 13:52

Acer 4810T and 4820T too.

Techn · 20 Jul 2011 at 21:12

Well my ul30 (the lowered cpw one) has survived my 5 month travels around the world. It was kept in a zeroshock sleeve and in a backpack, no visible problems, infact its been great. As others have said the main feature is the length of the battery life, this was brilliant and extremely useful.

I have one technical question/issue though. I didnt use the express gate when away, but since i've been back i decided to mess around with it. However i cant get it to connect to my home wifi. The password is correct and the laptop is added to the routers 'trusted' list but it still wont connect. Anyone have any ideas?