Why Asus trackpad driver sets the CPU speed at maximum during scroll

In no way am I trying to incite Mac vs. PC, but after years of Apple laptops I grew bored with their aluminum fascism and decided (last year) to buy a top-of-the-line Thinkpad.<p>A couple of months later, taking a huge economic hit, I sold the Thinkpad and returned to Apple. I simply could not handle the trackpad (and I gave up on the weird Thinkpad nubbin back in the early 2000s). I quite literally felt like I had a degenerative neuromuscular disease when I used the trackpad, and since &quot;mousing&quot; is almost certainly the primary way I interact with a computer, the laptop itself begun to give me a strong, strange aversion to use.<p>I&#x27;m told Microsoft is working on improving trackpads in general, but they should really have every single engineer working on this issue. Forget about new features, let&#x27;s get the simple stuff right.

So, really, is there anything left to buy except MacBooks anymore? I&#x27;m not a big fan of Apple, and would have to go through all sorts of nuisances to install Linux on it anyway, but the longer I search for solid 13&quot; laptop, the more horrified I become. It cannot be that <i>nobody</i> makes nice laptops, can it?

Imagine: A Thinkpad x&#x2F;t&#x2F;w with the old non-chiclet Keyboard without their &quot;new&quot; Layout, old-sytle Trackpad&#x2F;Pointer with physical Buttons, a non-low-voltage Haswell with 2 RAM Slots, capable of containing at least 16 Gigs of Memory, a removable, non-integrated Battery, proper Intel-Chipsets and their LED-backlit Display in the old magesium-style Body with aluminium Hinges and the old mechanical display closing Mechanism. And the old, yellow Powerconnector. And the a Thinklight. And ..<p>I simply do not get why Lenovo has made these changes. My wildest guess would be that MS &amp; Intel has pushed&#x2F;forced Vendors into their &quot;Ultrabook&quot;-Model.<p>And yet, for all these Sonys, Samsungs and HPs, it could be this simple.

Asus are weird. I made the mistake of upgrading from Win 7 to Win 8 on my previous 2012 laptop. No Win 8 compatible drivers to be found. Contacted support, who informed me that there are no plans to ever ship any Win 8 compatible driver.<p>Relevant detail: On the product page of the laptop on Asus&#x27;s website, they have a banner recommending Windows 8.

I used to have this gaming laptop from Asus (I need fast graphics), and one of the things they did was deck it out with a lot of ridiculous lights (because gamers, apparently?).<p>One of the more mystifying things it did: the giant lights on the back of the screen would do this really distracting blink when the laptop was in sleep mode. I have no idea what the thought process there was -- why would anyone want their laptop to do that when they&#x27;re not using it? Not only was it a waste of battery, it was incredibly annoying. And keep in mind this wasn&#x27;t a small light, it was a light that ran a circuit around the entire screen. Luckily you could turn it off, but I have no idea why it was on in the first place.<p>They also had this bios screen that had a logo for the &quot;Republic of Gamers&quot; (seriously?) that would then explode. That was more amusing than problematic, but I wonder who comes up with these ideas.

And this kids, is why people buy Macs to serve as a $1500 facebook machine.

I bought an Asus Zenbook UX303LN 2 weeks ago after my 13&quot; MacBook Pro got stolen, and while there are things that I miss from the MacBook (essentially, the fantastic touchpad quality), I&#x27;m overall satisfied with my Zenbook. It&#x27;s a solid alternative to the MBP at a very attractive price. The only real issue is the touchpad. While it&#x27;s not bad, there are a lot of things that just don&#x27;t work as nicely as on the Mac. For example, if you try to rest your thumb on the touchpad the cursor will stop moving. Little things like that.

aaand this is why I don&#x27;t respond when friends ask me which PC laptop they should buy.

Ignoring the trackpad angle...the idea of ramping up the CPU on scroll does make some sense. If you think about smartphones...the first place people bitch about lag is scrolling. Thats likely what the engineer was thinking about when they linked trackpad to CPU like that.

Would this all be fixed by installing a linux distro on the laptop? A different trackpad driver - if it works ;) - would do different stuff, and remapping media keys is possible in most desktop environments.

The problem of smooth scrolling without much-increased CPU usage was solved long ago, in the era of 8-bit systems, by rendering slightly more lines to the framebuffer and simply changing the address in VRAM where the CRT controller started reading the data for a frame. The CPU could then render the additional scrolled-out lines in the background.<p>But it seems the common way to implement scrolling today is to either have the CPU or GPU actually move the data unnecessarily; there&#x27;s no easy way to do the equivalent of adjusting the pointer to the window&#x27;s data in memory so that the windowing system can scroll without having to perform any data movement.<p>Asus&#x27; trackpad driver may be at fault for turning the CPU up to 100%, but to me this is a sign of a deeper problem having to do with how inefficiently applications are doing their scrolling, and the APIs that encourage this inefficient way of doing it.

Seriously? Asus still have this problem? I remember fixing it by removing the touchpad driver on a friends asus almost two years ago. The fan was always on max because the driver set min cpu speed to 100% at every reboot.<p>I feel for the non tech savy people who don&#x27;t know how to fix this and think this is how the computer should be. No wonder normal people prefer ipads over pcs.

I&#x27;m using a Thinkpad (T440) at work and whenever I have to undock from my desk I have to bring my mouse because I find myself always clicking the wrong things.<p>Now I use an rMBP at home, and more often than not I actually play Diablo 3 using just the trackpad, maybe I&#x27;m just used to it, but I haven&#x27;t used a non-Apple laptop that has a usable trackpad.

Just put Linux on it. Seriously.<p>My sister and I have the same Zenbook, and while my trackpad runs like a dream in Elementary OS, her trackpad is among the worst I&#x27;ve ever had the displeasure of using on a laptop -- and this is solely due to the shitty Windows drivers.<p>She&#x27;s been nagging me to put Linux on her computer as well, and once Freyja is released, I will.

Honestly, this is the way Android went as well, with touches boosting processors as well. Everyone is scrambling to try to scroll as smooth as Apple, lol. The author seems kind of strange being against it, honestly. It is usually hailed as a feature, not a bug.

I have to give the CS rep some credit as he does seem to be trying to make things better. It&#x27;s more response than a lot of manufacturers would have given.

To be honest - I wonder if this support tech knows what he&#x27;s talking about. The emails are signed &quot;Asus Nordic&quot; - probably a support outstation that does no real product development work, only support. He&#x27;s trying to tell the customer someone in Taiwan told him this and&#x2F;or it got lost in translation.

FWIW, I have an Asus netbook running Linux, and the trackpad seems to work fine and not exhibit this behavior. Reading the article, this seems to be a Windows-specific issue (or, more accurately, an issue with the Asus Windows driver).<p>Oddly, I also don&#x27;t see the problem as described by the Asus engineers. Perhaps it&#x27;s because Linux power management is different enough that it doesn&#x27;t apply, or because it&#x27;s a different processor type (dual-core Atom).<p>One would think they could at least make this a configuration setting so users may choose whether to live with janky scrolling in order to not have gestures turn the laptop into a space heater.

Having just spent two days optimising the scrolling performance of my Mac app I understand the reasoning behind this. Fluid scrolling is hard. And while scrolling might be handled in part by the GPU, its still the CPU that renders the text that you&#x27;re scrolling. If you&#x27;re aiming for 60FPS, you probably have less than 10ms to render a screen when the user is scrolling quickly.

That&#x27;s typically the experience I got with all Asus product I owned: Disappointment !

The sheer insanity of this... Wow. Just wow.