The ASUS Taichi, with bonus Windows 8.1 WTF



  • Continuing the discussion from Dell's downgrade suggestions:

    @trithne said:

    My only Win8 machine is an Asus Taichi, and if I upgrade it to 8.1 I break the entire reason for having it. That deserves a new thread.

    The ASUS Taichi is some manner of laptop/tablet hybrid that I bought last year while on holiday because I'm a fucking retard and didn't just get a Surface Pro. The gimmick is that it has a touchscreen in the top of the unit, and when you close it it becomes a tablet, and you can open it to be a laptop. The inner screen is not touch-capable.

    Recently, it wasn't swapping to tablet mode when I closed the lid, and I was getting annoyed trying to work out why. Turns out that I'm just stupid and forgot about the hardware lock on the side, but while looking around the internet I discovered the following:

    If you update the Windows 8 install on the Taichi to Windows 8.1, the driver package that 8.1 provides does not recognise the outer screen. Or acknowledge the existence of it at all. This has been the case for as long as 8.1 has been available, including RC.

    ASUS's solution, even today? Roll back the Intel drivers to the version that came with the Taichi originally.

    I have no idea how I'm going to get rid of this thing.



  • The joys of buying one-off hardware which vendors have no desire of supporting. I would think ASUS are the real fuckups here, this should have been an hardware based solution. I.e. it's two displays, when you close the lid, electronically in the hardware, one display should switch off and the other on. That way no custom driver bullshit is needed since it's then just a matter of redetection.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @trithne said:

    I have no idea how I'm going to get rid of this thing.

    Sorry man, I feel your pain :-(



  • This whole thread and the previous one pissed me off. What is with hardware companies and crappy software? I mean, I know it's not their thing, I'd accept slightly buggy stuff. But instead it feels like the entire company can't afford a single software QA team. Or just someone that has ever used a computer before, and can say "this thing is crap, you can't ship it".

    I used Asus Webstorage for a while, their "cloud storage and backup solution". The upload speed was ridiculously slow, taking full days to upload files over 1GB, the email messages they sent were obviously translated by someone who was not a native English speaker, and one day out of the blue it just stopped working. Why even make a product if you're not going to put any effort into it?

    And what's with their fucking obsession with custom widgets? I still haven't seen a single program made by HP or Dell or Asus that uses native widgets like a normal program. I think they just hate users and want to make their lives as miserable as possible.



  • Everything else aside they did actually fix this with a BIOS update a couple months ago. Working well for me since.
    TAICHI21 TAICHI31



  • From my observations dealing with such a problem...

    1. Hardware engineers in Asia are actually incredibly common and "cheap" .They can pump out designs no problem. Quality wise that's more difficult...Some really care and others just want the $$
    2. Software engineers in Asia have this epeen problem. they absolutely must create some abomination of software/interface design because there is no pride in reusing other peoples shit for them. Samsung being the biggest showcase of such attitude.
    3. Now management of these asian tech companies takes #2 to a whole different level. They take every concept you can think of and depend their workers do it all. Cloud storage services? check. Fancy tricked out widgets? Check. Heavily system update utilities that serve no other purpose? Check They must have their great genius epeen management be known. They don't care about the success, they just try and dogpile all their shit out so they are looked upon "favorably" by their peers.

    tl;dr Asians are compensating.


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    At least you can use dropbox. Whenever Dropbox tries to pull files down to my laptop (a Lenovo G480), I get a bluescreen: "Page-Fault-In-Nonpaged-Area".

    Nobody ever believes me the first time I tell them this. Hell, I didn't believe it at first myself, but it was 100% reproducible: using my phone to take a photo with dropbox sharing on resulted in my laptop crashing every single time. People have contacted Lenovo and there's no fix. I remember there being a bios setting fix someone found on a forum, but that thread seems to have been deleted.



  • Does your NIC driver have any sort of application prioritization feature? I had an issue with a NIC driver that tried to prioritize packets from certain applications. It worked in Win7, but caused BSODs in Win8 and 8.1. Turning off that feature solved my problem.


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