13. Graphics Drivers: Substandard Internet Support

The A7J comes with the pretty old graphics driver version 8.183 for the ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics processor. The support area on the Asus Web site makes the somewhat newer version 8.204 available for download. But we were unable to download this file successfully by the time we started our testing. There's no dedicated support server available for Europe, and the Global and US areas deliver transfer rates of only about 5 kB/s (with only 3 kB/s from the China server). At these lame download speeds, the 65 MB file would take 5 to 8 hours to download. This is an unacceptable time frame.

And again, there's no reference driver available through the ATI home page. In fact, there's no support available there either for the Radeon X1x00 graphics processors or for products from Asus.

Alas, the factory installed driver isn't current enough to support Spellforce 2. The game menus are all inaccessible. You can't even get into 3D game play. Before the game finishes loading, Windows crashes with a blue screen and the notebook restarts itself.