Review: Asus Q526 Laptop
My best laptop is still running XP, so it was clearly time for a new one. I went to Best Buy and selected an Asus Q526 on the basis of features and price. It’s a well-equipped lappy, with an I7 processor, 16GB RAM, two hard drives (a 128GB unit for the OS and a 1TB unit for data), and a regular screen. I cannot abide 4k screens; I run a lot of old software. 1920 x 1080 is plenty of resolution for my old eyes.
I was told (erroneously, it turns out) by the salesman that it had no recovery partition. So, my first job was to back up the windows partition as it existed, prior to running the OS’s setup program. Here I began to run into problems.
I plugged in a USB DVD burner (the laptop has no DVD drive) with a copy of CloneZilla and went to work. Since the lappy has two HDs, I expected to have an easy time imaging the one drive to the other. But, when I hit <Esc> to activate the boot menu and chose the USB drive, I got told my access to it was denied. OK, just whose laptop is this, anyhow?
I went into setup and turned off a feature (?) called Secure Boot. After doing this and changing the boot order so the USB drive would boot first, I was able to run CloneZilla.
I imaged the drive as expected and rebooted. Then I installed some software. I wanted to boot to Hiren’s boot CD, just to make sure it could, but when I hit <Esc> the next time, the USB DVD had disappeared from the list of choices.
I went into setup and tried to fix this, but no amount of fiddling produced the expected result. Worse, when I called Asus support and quizzed them about the issue, I was told it was a BIOS problem and they don’t support that!
I simply cannot have a computer that won’t boot via USB. I suspect there is an answer to this problem but all of the suggestions I found on the internet did not work, usually because the expected part of the BIOS could not be found.
So, I’m going to have to return it. Dang, I liked the computer otherwise. But, knowing now how Asus support treats such problems, I’ll never buy another Asus computer so long as I shall live.