ASUS Z63A Whitebook Laptop Review

[smartadze]

3. Poor man’s 108-mbps super-wireless? Now that you have Intel A-B-G wireless, you should look into the 'A' band. The commercial wireless-A stuff got really robust before it was superceded by the superior marketing of Wireless-G. The later 5.2 GHz ‘A’ gear works great (better range for me than G or Super-G), is way cheap ($29 shipped),

http://store.yahoo.com/justdeals/wab102nar.html

and won’t interfere with (or by) your cordless phone (2.4 or 5 GHz), microwave, or baby monitor. No hackers lurking on the ‘A’ frequency, either.

[smartadze]

4. Many thanks to Nathan for donation of the components that made Q’s PPK notebook possible.

I had planned to build it for my wife, but I immediately stole it for my own. I have to say I don't miss the extra screen size of my 15.4 widescreen.

[pseudomind]

You said that this computer works great on all but the newest games(hl2,d3, and farcry). I'm just stricken with curiousity on the whole topic. However, my concern is that if i put a flavor of linux on there that i will loose this fantastic aspect of the computer. I'm going to look into it, because im quite anti-microsoft, but this really does sound like a fantastic laptop.
If anybody knows of somebody who has gotten dri or glx enabled under this video chipset using linux or even a bsd variant, please leave a post so that i dont loose any sleep at night.

[smartadze]

Forum for Linux issues on the Z63a

http://z63a.koneko.org/

[JDub]

Great review! In part based on your comments I went ahead and purchased the Z63A, added a 1.7 Pent M, 100GB HD, 2GB Ram, the A/B/G wireless card, DVD CDRW... all the good stuff.

I have a couple questions after a couple days use:
1) So is there just no way to add Bluetooth? I'm half tempted to crack the case and peak inside... the slot has got to be in there somewhere...

2) Regarding the 2 banks of 5 hotkeys... is there anyway to reassign them? I've searched and come up empty. I'd like to remap, for example the Play button to something other than the DVD player, or the Pad on/off to an email program...

Thanks guys. I look forward to your responses!

[infinitevalence]

1. i have not found a way to add bluetooth, i think there may be a wireless card that also has bluetooth on it maybe.

2. i cant find a way to do this either sorry.

[smartadze]

I never came across any Bluetooth in my search for Z63a options. There aren't any other slots, at least according to the manual (and my assembly).

You could always use one of the cheap USB or cardbus Bluetooth adapters.

Not aware of any way to remap the hotkeys.

[JDub]

Thanks for the replies guys.

It just seems like there has got to be a slot, somewhere on this thing. It just doesn't make sense to me that a MFG would remove the slot and yet leave the lights, and button.

The hotkey thing is a bigger bummer in my mind. I was really hoping to find a way of remapping these guys.

Thanks again guys.