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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

For the Asus Zenbook UX305LA, how flexible is it ? Can you open and change the battery by yourself, for example ?

You mentioned the battery life is not great, can you share some numbers on Ubuntu ? How much time do you get on a full charge?

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I have the UX305LA. I had a clicky trackpad[1], so I opened it up and fixed it. It was too good in other aspects, so I couldn't bother sending it back. Battery is replaceable.

Still though, with Asus you never know whether your laptop will be perfect out of the box or not. That's what sucks about PCs in general - if you want a hassle-free laptop, you either have to pay extra or invest a lot of time into research. I had to send 2 laptops back before I got the Zenbook, but even that had the clicky trackpad problem.

This is why I'm thinking that when I have to buy a new laptop, I'll first be looking at the Apple lines. I've never had a Mac (since they're pricy), but I'm done with doing hours and hours of research. I just need a laptop that works.

The Zenbook is great though. Love it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un6TSK0RCxQ

How did you fix it? I just mapped caps-lock as left mouse button :| I hate clickpads.

One thing Apple does very well is simply not shipping crap products. It's forgivable from Asus since they started out as a budget brand, but the premium PC brands like Sony have really dropped the ball.

Yeah...I primarily use a desktop for anything demanding but at one point, I needed a laptop for occasional multimedia dj/vj stuff (nothing paid or professional, more personal or artistic endeavors) and I spent some time doing price comparisons.

There were a few things I specifically wanted: fast processor (preferably i7 due to the occasional 3d rendering stuff I was going to be doing), at least 16gb of RAM, a decent, discrete GPU, and minimum 1920x1080 resolution.

Other stuff wasn't as important. I could do without the latest "retina" screen since I was mostly just going to be looking at DJ/VJ software interfaces and hooking it up to projection. SSD wasn't absolutely necessary but I wouldn't mind one (this was a few years ago when they were considerably more expensive).

I had it down to an Asus (non-ultrabook) and a Macbook Pro. The Macbook had a nicer display, slightly more solid hardware (the Asus was only aluminum on top and on the top of the keyboard side, not the underside of the laptop), and may have offered a faster storage drive (can't remember the details now).

On the flip side, the GPU options were all lower-end than the Asus. Also, the MBP in a configuration closest to what I needed cost around $2499. The Asus was $999.

The Apple had some other features like early Thunderbolt support but those weren't relevant to my uses. As much as I liked the display on the Apple and the somewhat stronger build, I couldn't justify paying more than double the cost.

If this was going to be my sole/main computer then I would've weighted stuff like viewing angles and storage drive speed higher but as a secondary computer, I was mainly looking to get certain specs/features without spending too much dough.

So yeah, it's a "budget" brand to me. I could get the major specs and decent build for a lot less but I gave up some things that would've been a lot more important if it was my main computer. To this day, my only real beef with the Asus is that the display's viewing angles suck. It's not one of those awful 1366x768 displays that OEMs were slapping into cheap laptops for so long and it's not a glossy mess but you really need to look at it dead-on if you want a decent image. For techie art projects it's great but if I had to look at it every day for 8-12 hours I would go insane.

I own a UX305LA and have owned two previous models in the UX line. Glad to see it mentioned, I like them all very much.

The battery is proprietary but easily replaced. My main issue with my previous UX31 was with the SSD. It died within a year and was no longer readable. It was a piece of proprietary SanDisk crap. Googling around about it yields various complaints about it (http://www.pcper.com/news/Mobile/Be-careful-which-ASUS-Zenbo...).

Battery life: I run Arch Linux with LXQt and get about 6 hours on a full charge. It's not great but IIRC I was getting better on Windows so it might be a software issue.

> It was a piece of proprietary SanDisk crap.

you mean it was not a standard SSD ?

It wasn't, no. The UX is too thin for 2.5in SSDs. I had to find a special adapter to attempt reading it when it died.

This is what it looks like:

http://www.pcper.com/files/news/2012-03-12/SSDR_Sandisk-SSD....

FWIU they went with a different brand on their newer models, might be better.

That looks like an M.2 PCIe connection. Is it something less standard than that?

It's hard to say since I mostly use it for heavy-drain stuff. Streaming movies on Netflix, building apps in Android Studio, etc. Always have Chrome running with a ton of tabs.

I'd say 6h of use in Ubuntu. The reviews I read say that the battery is better using it with Windows 10 (closer to 10h) but I just can't get my work done in Windows.

Overall the battery is not disappointing. Not sure if I can change the battery by myself but for $750 I don't intend to invest much in repairs. I'll just ride it until it dies.

6 hours is not bad at all. (on Linux!) :) I'd be pretty happy with that.

I also have UX305 and I easily get at least 6 hours under moderate loads. Eight or nine with light web-browsing (avoiding javascript pages that spike cpu usage), ten or more with lighter use (text editor).

I installed Ubuntu 14.x and i3 window manager. I have dual boot with original Windows install and power use is comparable between Windows and Linux. It's a pleasure to use. Only power management tweak I made in Ubuntu was to install the TLP power management tool and (I think) make simple change from its defaults: http://linrunner.de/en/tlp/tlp.html

I have been trying TLP but I failed to notice any significant difference in battery life... is it absolutely needed to tweak its default settings?

I don't remember. I would check power usage with powertop and make sure you've got no 'bad' indicators on the 'Tunables' tab (actually I think I still have one bad). On the 'Device Stats' tab you should be able to get 'system baseline power usage' under 5 watts under light loads. I run mine with display brightness fairly low, 20% or 30%, but it's still has comparable brightness to my other main laptop's (Lenovo x220) full brightness.

I actually have a Lenovo x220 as one of my machines, and with 70-80% brightness I get about 4 hours of battery life (wifi included) on a 9 cells battery. Does it sound reasonable or am I not getting what I should?

Sounds about right, I have 6 cell in my x220 (with Win7) and I'd guess its life is around 2.5 hours with those settings. It's short enough that I don't feel comfortable using it on the go, keep x220 at home almost always plugged in to AC. The battery difference between it and the UX305 is huge.

Thanks, good to know I'm in the average then. I wonder if the newer Lenovo (x250 for example) have much better battery life (on Linux) than the x220.

Hmm. My X220 has a 6-cell battery (almost new though) and I get 4+ hours easily with 70% brightness and medium workload (software dev).

The x250 has great battery life. The keyboard is a little better than the X240, but not as good as the X220 or even the X230. Some of the keys are not full size. The function keys are garbage by default, but there's a persistent Fn lock (might be a BIOS setting, don't recall).

Performance wise it's very nice. Screen is decent, too. My only complaint is the that the keyboard has a bunch of non-full size keys. End and Insert are on a single key. Someone should be shot for that.

I have the x220 with a used 9-cell battery (last full charge was 75%) and I'm easily able to get just under 6 hours of standard use (browsing, WiFi, watching movies, coding) and screen brightness at around 60%.

Which UX305? The UX305LA has an i7 or i5, the UX305FA has an old core M, the UX305CA has the latest core M. Some have HD or QHD displays.

EDIT: Mine is a UX305FA, the one with less powerful Core M processor. It's slightly slower than my Thinkpad x220, which has an older i7. So it's not a powerful machine, and I assume less powerful processor means better battery life than the faster x305's that have come out since I got mine.

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