Shamil's Blog. Software Engineering Processes, Android, CI, Devops.

Scrolling using synaptics touchpad breaks after watch of fullscreen youtube adobe flash video. Seems that problem is spread wide and browser-independent (opera and firefox confirmed, at least), but not fixed for more that a year. FIX: press space OR restart synaptics driver (disable/enable synaptics touchpad or kill and restart its process SynTPEnh.exe).

Labels: flash, fullscreen, laptop, notebook, touchpad

I've just read this Computerworld article and made these two charts (using google chart api, which is relatively simple, but does not show any syntax error, which sometimes hard to find inside the debris of chart image HTTP GET parameters :-) ) of failure rates. First one is for different manufacturers (for comparision) and the second one is about aging of hardware.

Labels: acer, apple, dell, failure, hardware, hp, notebook, sony, toshiba

So, I followed the AVK's advice (see comment to my previous post, in russian) and disabled Intel WIFI manager, now using Windows for connecting to WiFi. It's OK now, but have still no luck with keyboard lag. Although it's very small, it really makes me work slow on keyboard. Seems that there's some problem of synchronization in a query of system keyboard events. The common errors as a result of it are:
1. TWo title letters instead of one
2. After releasing change keyboard language shotcut (Shift-Alt) Alt seems to remain pressed and therefore I pressing the menu hotkeys instead of text for example.
So, seems that modifier keys presses are wrongly processed by some layer of processing (driver). I tried to mention where in software could be problem and updated the synaptics driver for touch-screen (NOT from ASUS support - they do not have any updates for 3 years!), but 1) problem remained and 2) hibernating started to become unstable: it did not turn off after hibernation (a REALLY big problem: overheating in a bag, battery discharging to 0%, etc.).
ASUS seems to be very uncertain to updating drivers. They are very simple chineese guys: sold laptop - very good! Now making a new notebook to sell it. Why to update drivers for already sold machine? I think their business is even effective, BUT. But it's not about long-time perspective: I won't even think of buying ASUS next time. Sorry, ASUS is not about support or customer care - it's about only SELLING of laptops, that's all.
SO, please, UPDATE your drivers, evil chineese devils!)

Labels: asus, driver, laptop, notebook, review

I just got ASUS V6J in temporal replacement of notebook, and soon had the problem of having very bad drivers in Toshiba Bluetooth stack (they ate ~30% CPU even when BT was OFF! - it's the battery killer). The default MS drivers (winxp) did not recognize Toshiba BT device (some internal one for ASUS V6J, I don't know its exactly name). So I've found the way of installing MS drivers! Here's link to installator (INF) of Microsoft Bluetooth Stack drivers (default MS) for ASUS V6J notebook. Use it instead of Toshiba (ASUS default BT drivers), so if you have it installed, uninstall before using this.
Enjoy (save and right-mouse-click->Install)! :-)

Labels: asus, bluetooth, driver, hacking, notebook, v6j