Asus Vivobook X202E DH31T: Quick review

I mostly love my Asus Vivobook X202E DH31t. It's almost an ultrabook, for a netbook price. There are just a few things that bother me about it. Perhaps I can fix some of them...
Things I really like about it:

People seem to like to complain about the Intel Core I3 processor, saying it is slow. However, my view is that it's pretty fast as I was comparing it to AMD quad core and Intel dual core Atom processors. This actually what I consider to be a "real processor".
Touch screen is sort of convenient, though I admittedly still don't think about using it often.
Aluminum case feels high quality

Things that are kind of a bummer:

Built-in, non-upgradeable 2 cell battery with fairly atrocious life (about 2.5 hours).
Touchpad, despite having upgraded the drivers to something other than stock (which did slightly improve things), is very large and overly sensitive, causing inadvertent movements and clicks while typing.
In Windows 8, the screen starts to flicker badly after running for about 30 min (varies).

I'd like to take a moment to talk about the screen flicker. Essentially the entire screen starts to jump to the left and back, rapidly. It makes me a little sick to my stomach if I try to work around it. Rebooting seems to resolve the screen flicker issue temporarily. It's worth noting that this only happens when it is booted into Windows. It doesn't happen in Linux (I am running dual boot with Ubuntu), so we can rule out any hardware issue. I have Googled a lot for answers but haven't really found anyone else reporting this screen flicker problem. Perhaps it is a program I have loaded since I got the machine, but as I recall it happened pretty early on. I'll post updates if I make an progress on this.

Comments

Reaper, Linux, and the Behringer X-Air - Complete Studio Solution, Part 1

Introduction and Rationale This is part one of a major effort to document my experiences with recreating my home studio, entirely using Linux. Without getting into too many of the specifics, a few months ago I decided that I was unhappy with Windows' shenanigans - to the point that I was ready to make a serious attempt to leave it behind. For most in this situation, the obvious choice is to switch to Mac OS. With its proven track record, support, and options for multimedia production, it is naturally the first alternative to consider if your goal is to simply use something other than Windows. For me the choice was not so simple. I despise Mac OS and, in general, the goals and philosophies put forth by Apple in an effort to ostensibly provide users with an "easy" working environment. It does not help that I have also failed to find any aspect of the Mac OS UI intuitive, but I realize that this is a subjective matter. With my IT background and user-control* f...

An Alternative Take on AI Doom and Gloom

I've purposely held my tongue until now on commenting about "AI" (or, more specifically as has come to be known, GAN or Generative Adversarial Networks). It seems like it is very in-style to complain about how it has made a real mess of things, it is displacing jobs, the product it creates lacks soul, it's going to get smart and kill us all, etc. etc. But I'm not here to do any of that. Rather I am going to remind everyone of how amazing a phenomenon it is to watch a disruptive technology becoming democratized From the time of its (seeming) introduction to the public at large, around November of 2022, to late 2023, the growth and adoption rate has been nothing short of explosive. It features the fastest adoption rate of any new technology ever, by a broad margin. To give a reference, the adoption rate for AI image and text generation, real-world uses, in just 12 months is comparable to all of that of the another disruptive technology, the World Wide Web, takin...

RANT TIME: Why do replies to a message I sent go to my spam folder?

Despite what one would think/hope, sending a message to a given address does not inherently give Google a high confidence that a reply from this address is expected (and, for example, that it should bypass spam checks). I have confirmed with Google's tech support that there is no way to automatically have this happen. The user can do the following: 1. Add the address to your contacts list in Gmail. 2. Check spam folder for replies, and mark it as "not spam" if something ends up there, which should influence the fate of future replies received. I can also approve an address at the domain level, i.e. if it is a big vendor or similar. I've had to do this with several of our Chinese vendors. I regularly ask engineering and purchasing to give me a list of the supplies we deal with, so I can approve them as a preventative measure. For what it's worth, all of the false positive instances of reply -> spam we have experienced have involved the sender's email server ...

Scamwagon

Search This Blog