Since there are basically no threads about this on the internet, I thought I would try and keep this one going.
After doing some further testing, I can confirm a couple of things aren't working:
*Tested*
- Rapid Charging. No matter what I do, I get NO power supplied to the USB ports whether plugged in or on battery, despite what settings I choose in ASUS USB Charger Plus.
- I connected a USB 3.0 External HDD Dock and plugged in a 320GB WD Caviar Blue. Maximum transfer speed was about 300Mbps, or 3/4 of USB 2.0's theoretical maximum. The Intel USB 3.0 driver is blocked from installation, instead you have the Microsoft USB 3.0 driver out of the box. I only have this USB 3.0 device above to test, but I would have thought the HDD was capable of reading and writing faster than that, and since the copy was so consistent in terms of speed, it looks like the bottleneck is not the HDD. On top of that in Device Manager, USB 3.0 devices list as being connected to the 'Generic USB Hub' which reports its state as being 'High Speed', not 'Super Speed'. So all signs point to USB 3.0 being broken. Would be interested in someone's experience who has other USB 3.0 devices to try.
- Intel BlueTooth Drivers refuse to install
- Intel WiFi drivers refuse to install, although I did find an updated driver on a driver site which did update the version of the out-of-the-box Centrino driver, but that seemed to make WiFi a little worse so I uninstalled it.
- The FN + F keys seem to have some kind of wierd delay. After installing the ATK Package from ASUS's website, most things seem to work, but all of a sudden you might do Fn + F5 to reduce brightness, tap it a couple of times, but only the first tap is registered. Then 20 seconds later the second tap is registered...
*Untested*
- Intel Rapid Start/Instant On. OK so the suspend to RAM part is fine, and it does 'resume' in 2 seconds. I created the 4GB special partition and installed the Intel Driver which appeared to work fine. So what is supposed to happen is that when you run out battery whilst you are suspended to RAM, the data is moved to the 4GB partition instead, thus enabling you to resume your session 'months later'. I am still testing if that part works.
If there's anyone else out there running this config, then please, share your experiences. Thanks very much.
p.s. Incidentally, although ASUS have taken down the Windows 8 x64 drivers section for the UX31a from their support website, the manual links under the Windows 7 area actually link to manuals written for Windows 8 (at least the English manual anyway).