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[UX31A]Windows 8 feedback

Kris-I
Level 7
Hello,

Someone installed Windows 8 on Zenbook UX31A ? What at about drivers ?

Thanks,
56,130 Views
49 REPLIES 49

corbin
Level 7
I installed win8 today, windows 7 drivers from the asus site work ok

HiVizMan
Level 40
Thank you corbin for joining so that you could respond. 🙂
To help us help you - please provide as much information about your system and the problem as possible.

I had a slightly different experience. I installed Windows 8, and for the most part it worked. I had about 7 devices not detected under Device Manager... I tried to install some drivers from the ASUS website but got errors about the drivers having known compatibility issues with Windows 8, so that's about as far as I went. I noticed that although Windows 8 ran incredibly well (and I really like it!) that things like power management werent working well so I ended up reinstalling Windows 7. Corbin, did you just ignore the compatibility errors and install anyway? After a few days usage how are things going, like battery life for example? Thanks.

So I reinstalled Windows 8 again now I had a little more time on my hands. In the end, I did manage to get rid of all unknown devices in Device Manager.

Although I had trouble installing the following utilities:

Wireless Console 3
Intel Bluetooth Drivers
Power4GearHybrid utility (fails to install widget)
USB 3.0 Drivers
Intel ProSet Tools

I had issues with WiFi not switching on. Then, I for the second time (a number of reboots later) tried installing the Wireless Console 3, and this time it worked.. No error message about compatibility. And now WiFi works fine. Go figure! Although I have no unknown devices in dev mgr, I'm not sure if USB 3 is working. I dont have any USB 3 devices currently to test, so hopefully someone else can confirm. Cheers.

X-ROG
Level 15
Most notebook drivers and ASUS software are being launched when Windows 8 officially launches in October. The only Win 8 out now is the 90 day trial designed for developers not end users sorry.

MarshallR@ASUS wrote:
Most notebook drivers and ASUS software are being launched when Windows 8 officially launches in October. The only Win 8 out now is the 90 day trial designed for developers not end users sorry.


Uh, the RTM is out to manufacturers and MSDN subscribers now. But you are right, it is targetted at developers, not end users.
I am disturbed because I cannot break my system...found out there were others trying to cope! We have a support group on here, if your system will not break, please join!
http://rog.asus.com/forum/group.php?groupid=16
We now have 178 people whose systems will not break! Yippee! 🙂
LINUX Users, we have a group!
http://rog.asus.com/forum/group.php?groupid=23

I have an MSDN subscription. And this release is RTM, so it's targeted at everyone. There will be nothing different come October 26th. Except of course official drivers, which is of course the point of this whole thread: Sharing experiences with drivers.

I'm not 100% sure if InstantON is working.. It seems like it may be. I put the computer to sleep, and shortly thereafter the whole thing is switched off completely. It seems like it goes to RAM first, and then disk. The time period for this on Windows 7 was quite long, whereas now it seems very fast with no way of controlling it. Not necessarily a big deal. Overall things are working well.

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).

Update:

I'll have to apologise about my first point with regards to fast charging. I had my phone plugged into the left USB port, fast charging is only enabled on the right USB port, as signified with the tiny little lightning bolt logo.

With regards to Instant ON/Rapid Start, After draining my battery to about 5% Windows decided to suspend to RAM. After starting it back up and draining the batter to 2%, it did in fact hibernate to the special 4GB partition. Prior to this, I noticed I had a hiberfil.sys file in the root of C:, so I first disabled that with a powercfg -h off, and then rebooted. I verified the hiberfil.sys no longer existed before trying the above tests. Under normal operating conditions, data is moved from RAM to SSD hibernation partition after being asleep for 4 hours. Resume time from disk was about 5 seconds which I thought was pretty impressive.