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Today, I went to Staples to check out some stuff. Right at the entrance, they have put large ASUS banners. I was surprised and rushed into the store to see what ASUS products they are selling. I saw that they have the ASUS F8SN-X1, M51SN-X1, as well as the Eee PC 4G version available for display.

The F8SN-X1is a 14″ laptop with 3GB of RAM, 320GB of hard drive, running with Intel Core 2 Duo T5450 CPU. It is selling for $1079 at Staples. The M51SN-X1 has a very similar specification as F8SN-X1, it’s just that it is 15″ wide screen and selling for $1097. The Eee PC is selling at the stand price at $399.

Marketing Strategy

With Staples selling ASUS branded laptops, I can see that ASUS is really pushing its brand to fight for the market share against other big brands such as HP, Dell and Acer. The prices of the systems above are very competitive. When I was having my own computer retail business, ASUS has been always the most aggressive company to promote their products. Every month, we received their promotional materials such as catalogues, banners, stickers, display boxes,and so on. From time to time, their sales representative would come to our store to explain their newest products and help us in promoting ASUS products. No other companies have done such marketing strategy with us.

I still remember over a year ago that ASUS was talking with Gigabyte about the possibility of a merge. The outcome of that would be the lost of the ASUS brand. However, it now doesn’t seem that ASUS is thinking merging again.

Why ASUS?

Why do I like ASUS so much? You may want to check out my reasons here. Another reason I want to add is that ASUS is now providing one-year accidental damage warranty. So if you have spilled your coffee on your ASUS laptop, or dropped it on the ground, ASUS will replace a new one for you.

More ASUS

I can foresee that ASUS will be a major laptop brand in the next couple years. We maybe able to see more ASUS branded products selling in large electronic stores in Canada such as Staples and Futureshop. Another possibility is that we may have an ASUS store in the near future, just like the Sony store.

One of my client had a problem where he couldn’t visit www.hotmail.com and www.yahoo.com. Both sites were timed out after waiting for a long time. He tried loading both sites in Firefox and Internet Explorer and both didn’t work. Other websites loaded fine though. There were other user accounts on his computer and he tried using them. Other accounts were able to load hotmail.com and yahoo.com without a problem. At first, I told him to try clearing the temporary internet files in both browsers but the problem remained.

Flush DNS Cache

Another possible solution was to clear the DNS cache in Windows. So I typed “ipconfig /flushdns” without the quotes in command prompt to flush the cached DNS entries. However, it didn’t stop the problem. Upon further testing with trace route, I found out that the DNS resolution was not a problem. The trace route tests were able to complete successfully. Therefore, the cached DNS entries should be correct.

Double Virus Scanning

As a last resort, I decided to take the hard drive out and scan it with NOD32. Right away, it found about 30 threats and deleted them. I then put the hard drive back and tried visiting www.hotmail.com again with the problematic user account. This time, hotmail.com loaded fine in both Firefox and Internet Explorer. However, yahoo.com was still unavailable. Then I installed avast! 4 Home Edition on the computer and performed another virus scan. It detected a trojan still running in the memory and suggested to restart the computer to do a startup scan. I followed and it removed a couple of trojans. After that, yahoo.com was able to load too.

If your computer has a similar problem where you are not able to access some big sites such as Yahoo, MSN and Google, then it could be affected by a virus or trojan. You should perform virus scan using a few anti-virus software. A last note to make here is that my client already have the AVG Home Edition installed but it didn’t catch the virus or trojan.

Have you mounted your Home directory to a separate partition from the root? If you have not, then I strongly recommend you to do that because if you happen to format you Linux or change to a different Linux distro, then you can keep all your files in Home without formatting it. It is similar to creating a separate partition in Windows just for storing your data. When you format your C: drive, the data in your D: drive can be saved.

If you already have a separate partition for your Home folder, then there is a trick you can do before switching distro. This will avoid messing up the settings in your new Linux such as the position of the task bar, the theme, desktop icons, and so on. This is especially necessary when switching from a Gnome distro to a KDE distro.

The Trick

Before installing a different Linux on your computer, you should go to your Home directory. Then you need to be able to see the hidden files and folders. To do this in Gnome, click on “View”, then click on “Show Hidden Files” in your file browser. You will then see files and folders with names that begin with a period. Those are the hidden files and folders in Linux. You will need to delete them all except for the ones that you need. For example, I know I want to keep my Tomboy Notes, so I will not delete the “.tomboy” folder. Also, I want to keep my virtual machines that I have created in VirtualBox, so I will keep the folder “.VirtualBox”. After you have deleted all those hidden folders and files, you can restart your computer and install your new Linux distro. This way, your new Linux distro will not be messed up.

My Linux Mint was messed up the first time I installed it over my Ubuntu. Linux Mint has its own customized theme with a single task bar at the bottom of the screen. But it turned out to have top and bottom task bars, just like Ubuntu. After deleting the hidden files and folder in Home and reinstalling Linux Mint, the customized theme is back.

My client has an external hard drive and it has 2 partitions, one is FAT32 and the other one is NTFS. My client pulled the USB plug before the drive was finished writing data. The NTFS partition was then corrupted. When plugging the hard drive to a computer, Windows could detect both partitions and assign a drive letter to them. However, the NTFS drive could not be opened to view its files. The size of the drive was reported as -1MB.

I tried to perform a scan disk on the corrupted drive but Windows reported an error saying that the drive could not be scanned. Then I tried to use the Pandora Recovery, which I have discussed about it here. However, because the drive was not accessible, Pandora Recovery was not able to scan it for deleted files.

GetDataBack

After doing some research on the Internet, I have came across with GetDataBack for NTFS from Runtime Software. It says it can

“recover your data if the hard drive’s partition table, boot record, FAT/MFT or root directory are lost or damaged, data was lost due to a virus attack, the drive was formatted, fdisk has been run, a power failure has caused a system crash, files were lost due to a software failure, files were accidentally deleted…”

I downloaded its demo and installed it. Then I used it to scan the damaged drive. It took a couple hours to scan but the result is brilliant. The lost files were found, so I paid $79 USD for the software to recover all the files for my client. After confirming with my client, most of the files were recovered successfully.

GetDataBack is quite easy to use. With just 3 steps, it will be able to recover your data. However, as you may have already noticed, the version I used is for NTFS only. If you are recovering a FAT drive, then you will have to purchase GetDataBack for FAT which is $69 USD. Maybe because of this specialization, the rate of successfully recovering data is higher than the competitors. If the data is critical, then it is worth to pay for it if the free software doesn’t work for you.

Recently, I have been trying out the Linux Mint operating system which caught my attention in DistroWatch.com. It currently ranks 5^th in the Page Hit Ranking, trailing Fedora by a very small margin. My first impression with Linux Mint is that it is for those who want to play MP3 songs and DVD movies out of the box. Those are two common missing functions most wanted by most users. A lot of the big name distro, such as Ubuntu and Fedora, do not include those functionality by default.

Linux Mint is a variant of Ubuntu with integrated media codecs. After using Linux Mint for a few hours, I can immediately see that it is trying to get the good things all together in one place. First, it has a very flexible application menu, very similar to the one in OpenSUSE. You can drag applications to the “Favourites” section of the menu so that you can find them easily. You can also hide certain sections of the menu, which is divided into Places, System, and Applications.

Another thing it has is what it calls the Software Portal (or mintinstall). The Software Portal is very similar to OpenSUSE’s One-Click-Install system which I have described in here. By just clicking the install button on the Software Portal site, you can install some popular software such as Google Earth, VirtualBox, Second Life, Microsoft Fonts and more. One point worth mentioning is that when I installed VirtualBox, I didn’t have to go through all the steps that I went through in Ubuntu (steps here). It just works. However, I am finding the number of software you can install through the portal site is still limited.

Another thing that surprised me is the Ndiswrapper driver installation tool which they called it “Windows Wireless Drivers”. I used a D-Link DWL-G132 Wireless USB Adapter to test it. I downloaded the Windows driver and found the .inf file. I used the Ndiswrapper driver installation tool to install the .inf file. Right away, Linux Mint detected my wireless USB adapter and I am able to connect to my wireless network.

If you are looking for a Linux distro that fills the gap of missing codecs out-of-the-box, then you may want to give Linux Mint a try. I will be testing Linux Mint on my MSI S262 Megabook to see if the compatibility is any better. Results will be coming soon.