Introduction

I just bought the Asus R1E Tablet PC, and I'll write my thoughts, problems and their solutions I find in here.

[This text is just a draft so far!]

Specifications

First of all: The correct R1E specification doesn't seem to be available anywhere. ASUS Germany seem to have no idea what they're selling, and the retailers don't even try to get reliable info. Here's what I found out so far:

• The R1E is based on the Santa Rosa "Centrino Pro" platform. FSB is 800 MHz, it can switch to 400 MHz.
• Display: 1280x800
• Processor: Intel T7500 (Merom 2,2GHz) in Europe, Intel T7700 (Merom 2,4GHz) in the US.
• RAM: 2GB [tools show 667 MHz, but shouldn't it be 800? I'll try to check that later.]
• Graphics: Integrated GMA965 - NOT 950 as stated by many retailers and ASUS Germany
• 1 Express Card 54mm slot. IT IS 54mm, with the notch cut out! Retailers stating otherwise are mistaken.

Unpacking

The package once again reminds me why I like buying from ASUS. First, there's a notebook bag included! Then, there's a box, which contains the R1E itself, packaged in a small brown protecting bag, which I find really nice and usually pack it with now. The next box has the battery, manual, a Bluetooth mouse, the travel drawer (a low-weight module-bay add-in, which can also [info missing]), an LCD cleaning cloth, all the packaged software, including Nero Burning ROM, cable ties, the pen, a few adapters [maybe list] etc.

I am happy to see that my pixel-measurements of the ExpressCard slot in images online were correct: It is an ExpressCard/54 slot, compatible with both 34mm and 54mm ExpressCard add-ins.

[I will be adding my experiences here as I go on with the installation.]

Re-installing the R1E

Since all the pre-installed Software is starting to annoy me, and I can't figure out which driver does what, I'm going for a clean installation of Windows Vista.

The installation of Windows itself doesn't seem to be much of a problem. I united the two visible partitions, leaving the recovery partition as it was, and installed Vista Ultimate. Afterwards, everything worked well enough to start with the driver installation.

As always, I then begin with the graphics driver. Get Intel Graphics accelerator 965 (NOT 950 as European retailers claim!) from the Intel Download Center.

After the installation, I got a warning every reboot, asking me whether it's OK to run the files igfxtray.exe, hkcmd.exe and igfxpers.exe—unblocking the files was impossible. They're located in the Windows/System32 folder. The solution is to move them out (to the desktop or somewhere else), unblock them, and move them in again. Ridiculous behaviour, but whatever. Probably an error in Windows.

Next is the driver for the Intel Turbo Memory. (Also from the Intel Download Center.) It installs without problems. I didn't find any way to test it yet though.

WLAN Driver is also available from Intel. Works flawlessly.

The ATK_Hotkey driver from the ASUS Support center enables automatic screen rotation and the on-screen hotkeys. (For some reason, It stopped working after some time later on and I had to reinstall it.)

To enable the fingerprint reader, I got the driver from the ASUS Support site. It also worked without problems. (The pre-installed version locked up once on me.)

For the pressure-sensitive pen, I seem to need the Wacom driver. Get it from the Wacom homepage, there's a "Tablet PC driver" selectable. Also no problems here.

There's some kind of PCI driver still missing, possibly for E-SATA or ExpressCard. [I need to test them and write more here.]

Now the R1E has its basic functionality. Don't forget to install some basic software, like AntiVirus, an unRAR program, video codecs, etc.

Intel ME

There is a BIOS Extension, accessible with Ctrl+P on bootup, that asks for a password. The password is "admin". To change anything, you must enter a new password, which must be at least 8 characters long and have at least one number, upper- and lowercase letter and symbol.

In the package, there is no information about this topic—nothing is mentioned. You need to use the Internet and search. I find this unbelievable. Intel proves here that their quality checking is pretty much nonexistent.

About the topic on Tom's Hardware: http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/04/26/command_and_conquer/page2.html

[ToDo] Power & Battery Life Setup

ODCM: http://paulsiu.wordpress.com/2007/06/23/does-on-demand-clock-modulation-...

Switching off BlueTooth causes weird symptoms...?

Okay, I've been observing weird behavior of the R1E when switching off BlueTooth. Look at this:

Monitor Madness

I turned OFF BlueTooth halfway through. History Graphs of both CPUs look similar.

The image was taken from the current RM Clock beta CPU management utility, which should be capable of handling and monitoring the FSB switching of the Santa Rosa platform. I had set it to high performance, which was FID 11 without SuperFLM (so it should stay at 2.2 GHz clock, which is full CPU speed and full FSB, but no IDA mode).

Now there are two things happening in these graphs:

The obvious is the load on the CPUs, but not on the OS. So the task manager, Process Explorer and most other tools will NOT see that load, not even as Interrupt or anything. I can't confirm the CPU getting hot or drawing more power because of this. In fact, one test seemed to show a very slight cooldown with bluetooth off. However, since the whole device is disables by ATK, the cooldown could be caused by something else, like the coolers inside being connected. Or it was just a misreading on my side.

Then, there is the CPU cooldown, jumping FID and clock rate. (The latter is for some reason not visible in the graph—I believe the RM Clock beta doesn't take FSB switching into account for painting the upper graph yet. The numbers did show it though—see it showing a core clock of 1200!)

What exactly is happening here? So the voltage remains constant and the multiplier falls to 6? But then, why would RM Clock's ancient CPU clock graph show wrong readings?! I find it likely that something is heavily misreading or mismanaging here, as all of this makes little sense.

Noise

A high noise in intervals is audible when this happens. It originates from somewhere around the left speaker, power switch, escape key. It seems to be louder when I'm using high performance setting—I haven't found out yet which part of these settings causes that.

Cause?

These things appear when the ATK driver shuts down BlueTooth. I can use the Wireless utility, hardware switch or Fn+F2 combination to trigger it.

What exactly is happening here ... I don't know. Ideas and comments very appreciated! If you have even the slightest guess of what this could be, or just want me to test/answer something, add a comment please.

Also, could someone with an R1E please check whether these symptoms apply to his R1E as well?

[Again, this is a draft. Questions and comments are appreciated. :)]