Asus Zenbook Prime UX51V Random Crash / Random Shutdown in Windows 8 [* SOLUTION *]

*** UPDATE 1/23/2014 ***
I have been able to resolve this issue by replacing the battery in this laptop. This is the battery I purchased
After replacing the battery in the laptop, I have not had the random shutdown on battery power since. Here are the instructions to replacing the battery in this unit.

1. First you need to get the right screwdriver for the screws in the bottom of the laptop. They look like tiny little stars. I found this Kobalt screwdriver set at home depot that had the correct bit. It's the smallest one of the star bits. Here is the picture..

2. There are 12 screws in the bottom of the ASUS UX51V. 2 of them are hiding under the black plastic feet in the rear of the laptop. Use a knife to pry off the rubber feet. You can glue them back on later if needed.

3. After unscrewing, the bottom plate removes easily. At this point the battery is exposed and there are a number of screws holding it in. Be sure to remember the position of these screws after you've unscrewed them as some of them vary in size.

4. Before removing the battery you have to disconnect it from the main board. Simply LIFT UP on the little tag that is attached to the connector piece and it will disconnect easily. Be sure not to pull towards you or away from you. The connection disconnects in an upward fashion.

5. Simply replace the battery, make sure it is seated under the lip and that the peg/notches are in place and then screw it back in. Replace the bottom plate and screw it back in.

6. That's all!
------------------------------------ ORIGINAL POST BELOW ------------------------------------

I love my Asus Zenbook UX51V, I even left a solid 5 star review on Newegg for it. However, after a few months of owning it there is a BIG problem which protential buyers need to know about.

The UX51V will randomly shutdown ( not BSOD, BlueScreen or Error). It seems to happen ONLY when I'm running off battery and almost always when I'm streaming some video from youtube or another site. Please note this is not a battery running out of power issue, the laptop shut's down with plenty of battery life left. I can turn it back on without a problem most of the time. Sometimes I have to wait a few minutes before it wil let me turn it back on without crashing and shutting down instantly again. If you have this laptop and you are experiencing this problem you may notice you are getting a Critical level (Kernel-Power) error in your Windows/System event log. (Accessible via Computer Management). "The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly."

As far as I know there are no known fixes yet or any official statement from Asus acknowledging this problem, despite their being numerous reports of it from other customers..

http://meieden.hubpages.com/hub/A-Zenbook-Users-Experiences-with-Asus-Laptop-Customer-Support-and-RMA-Service

http://technologicaltheologian.blogspot.com/2012/10/zenbook-prime-and-unexpected-shutdown.html

http://www.techsupportforum.com/forums/f299/asus-zenbook-crashes-on-battery-windows-8-a-685977.html

Some notable possible work-arounds posted by others include the following:

FYI if you have the problem that the computer shuts down when you unplug the charger you should try the latest driver for the Intel GPU. It has a crash fix for exactly that.

I have disabled VT-d in the BIOS, along with Intel’s shutdown power management. I have not yet seen the shutdown problem. Note that you don’t need VT-d, as it is a virtualization technology, and it is doubtful that most people will use that on an ultrabook with 4GB of RAM.

Good luck! Please comment if you are also having this problem and have any insight/frustrations to share.

Thanks for reading.

FIX - Slow SQL Connection in Windows 8 & Windows 7 (MSSQL) (Solution)

So far, the two most useful tweaks i've learned for Windows 7 & Windows 8 to address the issue of horribly slow SQL connection performance to a Microsoft SQL Server from a Windows 8 or Windows 7 machine are as follows:

1. In cmd run this command:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

2. Disable LLMNR in gpedit.msc

After you run the first command you will have to restart the application that is experiencing the bottleneck in order to get the effects.

Processing.org, Insertion Sort

So, I recently been getting into messing around with Processing.org. If you haven't heard of it yet definitely check it out if you are into doing any kind of animation and graphics programming. The default language is JAVA so the syntax is really easy and its all OO.

On a whim I wrote a small program that shows a step-by-step insertion sort routine running on a randomized array. Here is the code for that..

int[] unSorted = new int[10];
int iter = 1;
int holePos = 0;
int val = 0;
PGraphics pg;
void setup(){
 size(500,400);
 pg = createGraphics(500,400); 
 background(255);
 frameRate(1);
 initialize();
 debug();
 
}
void initialize() {
 for(int x=0;x<10;x++) {
  unSorted[x] = int(random(10)); 
 }
}
void sort() {
    print("Iter=" + iter + "\n");
    val = unSorted[iter];
    holePos = iter;
    while(holePos > 0 && val < unSorted[holePos - 1]) {
     unSorted[holePos] = unSorted[holePos - 1];
     holePos = holePos -1; 
    }
    unSorted[holePos] = val;
    show();
    debug();
    
}
void debug() {
 for(int x=0;x<10;x++) {
  print("[" + unSorted[x] + "]");
 }
  print("\n"); 
}
void show(){
 pg.clear();
 pg.beginDraw();
 pg.stroke(100,200,30);
 float yPos = 500/2;
 float xPos = 400/2 - (0.5 * 160);
 float offset = 0;
 for(int x=0;x<10;x++){
  pg.fill(0,0,0);
  pg.rect(xPos + 20 * (x + 1) + offset,yPos - (10 * float(unSorted[x])),20, 10 * float(unSorted[x]));
  pg.endDraw();
  image(pg,0,0);
  offset = offset + 4;
 }  
}
void draw() {
  if(iter > 9) {
   noLoop();
  } else {
  background(255); 
  sort();
  iter = iter + 1;
  }
}

Intel(R) Centrino(R) Advanced-N 6235 Lag Spikes

This post is about troubleshooting the Intel Centrino Advanced N-6235 wireless adapter in Windows 8. There is a problem with this wireless card that is beginning to show up for a lot of people.


So, I decided a good use of this blog will be to post solutions to problems I encounter in the course of my dealings with new hardware, programming challenges, or otherwise anything related to technology. I know how annoying it is when I google a problem and I can't find any answers anywhere. I'm always happy when I see someone who has had a similar problem as me and posted their solution online. So now that will became one of the main focuses of this blog.

I bought a new Windows 8 laptop, the ASUS Zenbook UX51V.  This model comes with a Intel(R) Centrino(R) Advanced-N 6235 wireless network card. Everthing about his laptop is fine except that I was getting really high lag spikes that lasted about 2-4 seconds every minute or so. I thouht it had to be something with the wireless polling, ping times were high and correlated with the lag spikes in m video game (heroes of newerth).

Some people have had a lot of success using WLAN Optimizer to disable wireless background scanning to fix high ping intervals. (http://www.martin-majowski.de/wlanoptimizer/) However for me it did not seem to make a difference for Windows 8. Perhaps they will release a new version for W8.

What did seem to work and suggested by some other people here is turning on 802.11n mode and switching the Wireless Mode to 802.11g in the advanced config. That is the only thing that dramatically reduces the re-occuring high latency issues.

More on the workarounds here:
http://communities.intel.com/thread/31090

and here:
http://communities.intel.com/message/178418

I do not consider this a permanent solution. I believe INTEL needs to come out and address this issue and release a driver fix.

Encrypted Networking Class for VB.NET

This is something i've been working on for a little bit. It provides transparent encryption functionality similar to SSL/TLS in easy to use event driven networking objects. Features are:

• RSA 1024bit Public Key Exchange
• AES (CFB) Symmetric encryption 
• HMACMD5 Hash authentication for every message
• Auto Ping with Latency update on the client side
• Negotiation timeout variable
• All encryption is handled transparently behind the scenes.

Download Source: http://www.tunnelbarrel.com/V2Networking.rar

Download Binary (.dll): http://www.tunnelbarrel.com/V2Networking.dll

How to use:

Private WithEvents Client as New Phoenix.EncryptedClient

Private WithEvents Server as New Phoenix.EncryptedServer

Automatically fading buttons in VB.NET

I often find myself obsessing over the finer parts of interface design with my applications. I always thought buttons that innocuously faded from their mouseover color back to their default background color was something really nice and not *too* flashy. Since I couldn't find any material for replicating this in VB.NET I did what all programmers do, I wrote one myself. I hope this code helps anyone attempting to do something similar. Improve upon it if you wish, I am just posting the basic code, it will works best if you encapsulate it in a UserControl...

Public Class Form1

Friend WithEvents btnTimer As New Timer

Dim RedValue As Integer

Dim GreenValue As Integer

Dim BlueValue As Integer

Dim RAdd As Integer = 0

Dim Gadd As Integer = 0

Dim Badd As Integer = 0

Dim MyBackColor As Color

Private Sub Form1_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load

btnTimer.Stop()

MyBackColor = Button1.BackColor

End Sub

Private Sub Button1_MouseLeave(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button1.MouseLeave

RedValue = CInt(MyBackColor.R) - CInt(Button1.FlatAppearance.MouseOverBackColor.R)

GreenValue = CInt(MyBackColor.G) - CInt(Button1.FlatAppearance.MouseOverBackColor.G)

BlueValue = CInt(MyBackColor.B) - CInt(Button1.FlatAppearance.MouseOverBackColor.B)

RAdd = 0

Gadd = 0

Badd = 0

btnTimer.Interval = 1

btnTimer.Start()

End Sub

Private Sub btnTimer_Tick(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles btnTimer.Tick

Select Case RedValue

Case Is <>

RAdd = RAdd - 1

RedValue = RedValue + 1

Case Is > 0

RAdd = RAdd + 1

RedValue = RedValue - 1

Case Is = 0

RAdd = RAdd + 0

End Select

Select Case GreenValue

Case Is <>

Gadd = Gadd - 1

GreenValue = GreenValue + 1

Case Is > 0

Gadd = Gadd + 1

GreenValue = GreenValue - 1

Case Is = 0

Gadd = Gadd + 0

End Select

Select Case BlueValue

Case Is <>

Badd = Badd - 1

BlueValue = BlueValue + 1

Case Is > 0

Badd = Badd + 1

BlueValue = BlueValue - 1

Case Is = 0

Badd = Badd + 0

End Select

Button1.BackColor = Color.FromArgb(CInt(Button1.FlatAppearance.MouseOverBackColor.R) + RAdd, CInt(Button1.FlatAppearance.MouseOverBackColor.G) + Gadd, CInt(Button1.FlatAppearance.MouseOverBackColor.B) + Badd)

If BlueValue = 0 And RedValue = 0 And GreenValue = 0 Then

btnTimer.Stop()

End If

Access 2003 Using DateDiff for "Business Days" or Weekdays without using outside module

I see this problem alot among developers and I just thought id share some info. If you are using a very simple DBMS like Access 2003 and can't extend functionality to your standalone application, because access 2003 doesn't let you use UDF (User defined functions) outside of itself. Here is how I came up with determing the amount of WEEKDAYS (M-F) between two dates without having to create a UDF in the DB.

SELECT  * FROM tblExample WHERE datediff('ww',[fldDate],Date(),2) + datediff('ww',[fldDate],date(),3) + datediff('ww',[fldDate],Date(),4) + datediff('ww',[fldDate],Date(),5) + datediff('ww',[fldDate],Date(),6) >= 5

That will return all records where fldDate and Date() are greater than or equal to 5 weekdays. Of course if you can use custom functions in your DBMS, then you wont need this.