I had a similar experience with my Asus Zenbook Prime ultrabook.<p>I noticed that the very loud fan was running a lot faster and more frequently than it should. I checked the power settings and <i>minimum</i> processor state was 100%. I changed it to a more reasonable number and all was good. But 10-15 minutes later the fan would come back on full blast because that setting has been reverted back to 100%! Every time I reset it, some time later it go back to 100%.<p>I'm not one to leave something like that alone and after <i>a lot</i> of searching the internet and applying updates I found that someone else had discovered the cause. The stock trackpad driver was responsible for constantly changing that power setting!! I found a different version for another laptop and that fixed it.<p>But just imagine how many people that own this exact laptop and it's always hot and gets terrible battery life. All that power management technology and passive cooling <i>completely</i> wasted because of one driver.
Consider yourself lucky you even got windows 8 installed. My lenovo laptop, with a big fat windows 8 sticker on it and win 8 screaming all over the purchase page, came with windows 7 preinstalled. Win 8 came with a bunch of dvds inside the packaging, the laptop does not even have a dvd-player.
The funny thing is, a week ago I bought a 7.5"" 1200x800 tablet with just 2GB of RAM and 32 GB flash (see the similarity?), the difference is that mine is a even cheaper device (~$150) from an unknown Chinese brand, has an apparently slightly weaker Bay Trail CPU, and comes with Windows 8.1 - properly licensed as now Microsoft does it for free for small tablets, but it's by no means a "signature" device. The out-of-the-box experience was much, much, much better than the one from the article. The touchscreen not only worked, it still works fine, even for hitting small menu items or quickly typing on-screen. Sleep/resume (actually, InstantGo) doesn't have any problems, except you can't turn off the screen without desktop apps being suspended, which is annoying in the case of music players - but this is actually a problem with all devices supporting InstantGo.<p>There have been updates to fix early problems, which were already pre-installed on mine. I'm so happy with it, I don't think I'm buying an Android tablet so soon (having great multitasking alone is worth it). Another thing that surprised me, was that there wasn't any OEM bloatware.<p>Say what you will about Microsoft (and I usually say very bad things, and will keep saying), but it seems they really got Windows 8.1 right on tablets (the problem is desktops).<p>If an unknown brand can make a device with the same specs as the mentioned Asus, for a lower price, and still have the device work much, much better, why can't Asus? The "underpowered"/"underpriced" justification some people give here in the comments doesn't quite make it... I have had Windows 8 running on single-core 512 MB RAM VMs just fine, and these devices have four times the RAM and cores.
This may be a stupid question, but is it possible the blog author was given a refurbished device? These all sound like exactly the kind of problems you'd expect from a device that was pre-owned and sloppily reinstalled.<p>Either way, the proper course of action would be to return it to the store right away, especially when it refuses touch input.
I both buy laptops like this and build my own machines. It's always befuddled me that, when I'm building my own computers and once the hardware is all assembled, the clean OS install usually goes really smoothly and on first boot there's usually no problems and the machines run great.<p>Get the latest updates and now the computer is running like a Swiss watch.<p>But whenever I buy a laptop, there's <i>always</i> something wrong with the way the OS was installed. Weird stuff like the wifi adapter drops every 10 minutes, or the left side of the trackpad doesn't work.<p>Sure enough, I'll just nuke whatever the system came with and install the OS from scratch and it'll work like a charm. It's almost like the manufacturers are <i>trying</i> to fuck up the out of the box experience.<p>It would be better for them 95% of the time just to put together the hardware and install the shipped OS and put it out the door.
Year after year I keep reading pretty much the same complaints from the Windows ecosystem I've been hearing since the 90's.<p>It comes with the territory: OS and hardware may not always play nice, and how well they play nice out-of-the-box or after upgrade depends on a lot of factors.<p>This is not an incident, this is business as usual.<p>You like Windows, you should be prepared to deal with. You don't want to deal with this kind of thing, don't use Windows.<p>The only way to avoid this is to use "official" devices. Nexus for Android, Surface for Windows, everything Apple for OSX. Some niche products for certain Linux distro's even.<p>Everything else is rolling the dice, if not at your initial purchase then definitely when you want to upgrade.<p>After so many decades, bitching about it is like bitching about the weather.
There is so much stuff in Windows 8 that I have no idea how it got out of the building. Really incomprehensible. Clearly a cancerous culture in Microsoft ala BlackBerry letting small but insane design choices out the door
Nothing new unfortunately. Sluggish operation, Windows updates take forever. Updates fail, reverting changes, installing ~150 updates more after 8.1 upgrade. Random SDBUS BSOD, reboots, WiFi / 3G connectivity issues. It seems that everything is working badly and update installation failures and blue screens are quite random and common. Eventually after tens of reboots and installing all kind of stuff you'll get everything installed. If you're lucky. Then you'll install upgrades by the device manufacturer, which take long time and require multiple reboots etc.
Luckily I'm able to install these in volume as well as tasks are rarely urgent. So I can put tens of tables on table and run updates, after a few hours I'll revisit those, see what the situation is and continue. Yes, it's not consistent, some tables and laptops in the batch can be much slower to install and other faster, others fail and some won't etc. It's just basically absolutely horrible experience. I feel and know very well the feeling you described. Suddenly touch screen is totally unresponsive, or doesn't work at all. You'll need to use USB-keyboard and so on.
As well as the sleep mode (aka connected standby) sucks life out of the battery really quickly. Properly hibernating device automatically is made quite hard, but is doable after all.
This is really more of an Ausu issue than a Windows one. Asus makes great motherboards and video cards but the rest of their hardware is rubbish as far as quality control goes.
I rarely have any problems with Windows but this is exactly the reason I root for Microsoft to "lose" in the desktop space. They'll only improve when they're facing some real market pressure.<p>Also, I think having so many manufacturers makes things worse. Other than hardware specs, there really is veryt little to differentiate feature-wise between different PCs. Android is starting to run into this problem as well. The "customizations" and "improvements" aka bloated buggy shit layered on top of the vanilla OS completely messes up the user experience.
Yikes - if Microsoft would just focus on what they are doing right, and perfecting that (Windows, MSDN, etc) they might have a chance at avoiding these constant and public "fails." I understand every enterprise level business needs to try new things, but it really just seems as thought they need to leave mobile / tablets alone as hard as it may be for them to hear until they have an MVP that <i>murders it</i> and people can't wait for.
And then MS will form a committee to investigate why this is not selling, and will conclude that tablets needs a "clippy" helper for the user. Clippy crashes 5 min into power-up.<p>Really.<p>I would've taken into the store and returned it. MS costs a lot in wasted productivity.
To me the age of the software sounds a bit like channel-stuffing. Often manufacturers will report on devices as being sold once they've left the factory for the retail store, not when they are in a consumer's hands. Because there is great incentive to report good sales, manufacturers will often negotiate around inventory so that a warehouse somewhere gets filled with devices.<p>These devices then sometimes sit in the channel waiting to be sold (sometimes for quite some time, depreciating in value) but if the device flops then the seller writes it off as a loss and they go to the clearance rack.<p>That's why you can have amazing numbers for 'sales' and then 3 months later the thing is a well-known dud. Device manufacturers that sell directly to consumers tend to report sales when it's been shipped to the final buyer.
I wonder what the Surface experience is like, I can only hope it's better.<p>This also reminds me of when I got world of warcraft CDs and had to spend almost 48 hours just to patch up to the most recent version.
What did you expect from a $250 device? Or, what did you expect from an 8″ 1200x800 tablet with just 2gb ram and 32gb ssd which comes with a full Windows OS, instead of Win RT? Some phones have more powerful hardware than that.<p>It's not Microsoft's fault that Asus decided to sell a cheap, untested, poorly-built device. It's your fault, as a tech-savvy customer, to buy it.