MyT91.info

Many T91 users aren’t satisfied with the fact that IntelliWriting (palm rejection) only works on two very limited programs (Journal and Sticky Notes). Since releasing the T91MT, ASUS has not updated its touch utilities to include support for more programs.

MyT91.info reader Ihab has created an online petition asking ASUS if it’s possible to continue development of their touch drivers and utilities to include global IntelliWriting support.

The petition is located at http://www.PetitionOnline.com/AsusT91/petition.html

Buy.com has the T91MT (black) for $469.95 with free shipping. They are even including a free 4GB USB drive. Get one while you can at a bargain price.

MyT91.info has no affiliation with buy.com, I just thought this was a great deal considering I paid about $520 for mine not too long ago. Prices are probably dropping because ASUS will soon be releasing the bigger and faster T101MT.

After reading some articles about the technology of Solid-State Drives (also referred to as Solid-State Disks, SSD) I was interested in the features and capabilities of the T91MT’s internal SSD.

ASUS chose the model “pSSD-P2″ with 32 GB capacity manufactured by SanDisk. Especially I wanted to know, if that model supports the ATA TRIM command. Consulting the product homepage and the product brief I did not find any hints. Searching for a tool to show the SSD’s supported features I found CrystalDiskInfo. It revealed, that the “pSSD-P2″ neither supports TRIM nor NCQ.

It is a little bit pity, but it does not bother me very much. I did not expect the disk to be very feature-rich. I like the T91MT, because is equipped with an SSD – and not with a traditional HDD – at all. Shock-resistance and noiseless operation are the most important features to me. Some more sophisticated features like TRIM and NCQ would have been nice, of course. But probably the costs where another argument for ASUS to choose that model.

In case you notice a sensible performance degradation after some time you may be interested in an article about restoring your drive to peak performance which is part of “The SSD Anthology” published on AnandTech. If you like to have a choice concerning the needed tools the procedure also seems to be possible with hdparm. Bear in mind, that performing the ATA Secure Erase mentioned in the articles completely clears the disk – you need to reinstall the operating system afterwards!

Editors note:

The BIOS sees the SSD as the SATA PM-ASUS-JM S41 SSD, a name we’ve seen before on previous SSD-equipped Eee models.  The SSD controller is the slightly outdated JMicron JMF601, a single chip with Serial ATA Gen II and USB 2.0 combo to NAND flash interface. The SSD uses four 8GB Samsung K9HCG08UIM NAND flash chips, which have been very popular in various MLC SSDs- not just limited to the netbook market. Altogether, performance is a little less than that of a traditional 5400RPM 2.5″ hard drive.

Minimum: 34.1 MB/s
Maximum: 57.8 MB/s
Average: 49.4 MB/s
Access Time: 0.4 ms

In case you want to reset your T91MT to factory defaults, ASUS included a bootable DVD for recovery. But the T91MT does not have an optical drive. Thus, I asked myself two questions:
a) Is it possible to convert/transfer the content of the DVD to a bootable USB-stick?
b) If it’s possible: Can I do it with the DVD drive in my desktop PC running Debian GNU/Linux 5.0?

After searching the web I tried out some suggestions and made my own tests. Here are my two favourites:

a) Novicorp published a tool called Win2Flash, which exactly does the job in a very comfortable way. The software is still beta – the most recent version as of now is 0.5.0013 beta and can be downloaded from various sources. The tool offers several task types. I selected “Transfer WinPE Vista/2008/7 to USB drive”. Nice: Obviously you can even convert WinPE-CDs like BartPE-CDs into a bootable USB-stick!

b) A thread on serverfault.com demonstrates a solution, which does not need any third party tools running on Windows. This solution basically consists of two steps: 1) Prepare an USB-stick with diskpart.exe and 2) copy the files from the Recovery-DVD to the USB-stick. The preparation can be done on the T91MT. You need diskpart from Vista or higher – the version included in XP is not sufficient, because it can not cope with USB-sticks!

To copy the files I decided to create a network-share using Samba on my Linux PC. I mapped the share on my T91MT and robocopy.exe did the rest. Another possibility is to mount the USB-stick after preparation directly on the Linux PC and to use the NTFS-driver provided by ntfs-3g to copy the files. Both packages (Samba and ntfs-3g) are currently available in Debian.

Hint: The thread on serverfault.com mentions a tool published by Microsoft. It is called “Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool” and seems to work only with “original” Windows-7-ISOs provided by Microsoft. An ISO I made out of the T91MT-Recovery-DVD, which includes not only Windows 7 but additional software from ASUS for the T91MT, was rejected by the tool (“The selected file is not a valid ISO file. Please select a valid ISO file and try again.”). Besides, the tool has an interesting history…

Anyway, in the end a was able to boot my T91MT from the USB-stick. I pressed ESC directly after switching on the device to open the boot selection menu. After selecting my USB-stick it first appeared, as if the recovery was going well…

… but a few clicks later I ended up seeing the following picture…

Well, actually it is possible to create a bootable USB-stick for recovery. Thus, my two questions can be answered with “Yes”. But at the moment the stick is not really useful: Obviously some program running during the recovery still tries to reach a “real” DVD – not realizing, that all needed data is close at hand. I contacted ASUS support – maybe they can offer a solution. For now the backup, that comes as close as possible to the factory defaults is the image I took using clonezilla directly after the initial setup of my T91MT.

Intel (or should we say Tungsten Graphics, the company Intel outsourced GMA 500 driver development to) released a new driver, 5.2.1, for Windows 7 that addresses dozens of issues. The most relevant problems for T91 users that were fixed:

• System hangs while playing certain H.264 videos.
• Windows Media Player / Windows Media Center wasn’t hardware accelerating H.264 video.
• Multiple black screen issues.

And last, but certainly not least, 5.2.1 brings Hardware Acceleration for Adobe Flash. Way to go  Tungsten Graphics! Only one slight problem: At last check, Adobe decided to remove GMA 500 support from Flash 10.1 beta 2 due to the driver not being ready. So now that the driver is ready, expect support to come back with beta 3.

Expect ASUS to release their own package soon on their driver page. In the meantime, get it straight from Intel.

Thanks to reader Christian for keeping us updated!

ASUS says the T91MTs big brother, the T101MT, is to arrive sometime this year. It has already been through the FCCs testing, so there’s not much apart from ASUS logistics preventing it from arriving in the North American market. The specs include:

• Intel Atom N450 @ 1.66GHz
• Intel NM10 Chipset with GMA 3150 Graphics
• 10.1″ LED Backlit 1024×600 Resistive Multitouch Display
• 6.5 Hour 35Wh Internal Lithium Polymer battery
• 802.11b/g/n (2.4GHz only) with Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
• Chiclet keyboard

Starter Edition includes:

• Windows 7 Starter Edition
• 1GB RAM
• 160GB HDD

Premium Edition includes:

• Windows 7 Home Premium Edition
• 2GB RAM
• 320GB HDD

As it has been previously mentioned, while the T91MT is much less powerful than the T101MT, the T91MT’s GMA500 is capable of hardware video decoding. With the right codecs and tweaks, the T91MT can playback 1080p content with no dropped frames. It is unlikely the T101MT, even with its more powerful processor, can handle HD content with GMA3150 graphics. But apart from how they handle HD content, the T101MT looks like it should impress.

Liliputing

Shortly before Christmas, the FCC got its hands on the ASUS Eee PC T101MT. Proving to the world that they put taxpayers dollars to good use, they immediately opened MSPaint and released this obviously rushed label-location image (actually, that was probably ASUS’s doings).

Joking aside, there are few details as far as specifications go. Sorry, no usual FCC pictures. ASUS filed a confidentiality request, which means the FCC won’t be posting a dozen photos and specs prior to its release. But here’s what we know for sure from the FCC files:

-2.4GHz 802.11 b/g/n
-Bluetooth

Yep, that’s it.  But we can still speculate:

We can almost certainly expect the Atom N450 @ 1.66GHz. There are no major performance changes compared to previous-generation netbooks (early reviews suggest it trails behind the N280 in some tests, but beats it in others), but you should see a major energy efficiency boost.

Along with the N450 comes the new NM10 Chipset with GMA3150 Graphics. GMA3150 is slightly faster than the G31-based GMA3100, which is a minor improvement over GMA950. It should be noted that GMA3100 (and thus possibly GMA3150) does not support MPEG-2, VC1, or AVC hardware decoding. GMA500 on the T91 does. So it’s possible we may see an increase in gaming performance, but a decrease in HD playback performance.

“MT” in the name obviously means multitouch, so you can expect the same type of touchscreen as found on the T91MT. We can also expect a 10.1″ LED backlit LCD at 1024×600.

We should also expect to see Windows 7 Home Premium since this is a tablet netbook, so no need to worry about “Starter” edition, which seems to be catching on with a few netbook models.

If this all becomes a reality, and if ASUS can bring it to the market at around $600 or less, the T101MT should prove to be a very good tablet-netbook option for those still on the fence about the T91MT. With an increase in size and weight and some HD playback issues, the T101MT might not please everyone. But at least you won’t be stuck with the Z520 (hopefully).

Update: The T91MT in the European market does feature a DVB-T tuner. No word of a tuner-equipped or 3G equipped model in North America yet.

ASUS has posted a BIOS update (0601) for the T91MT designed to “improve hot key function in Express Gate”. Several other updates have also been posted, including a few TV tuner updates and an updated touchpad driver.

BIOS (0601)

Touchpad (14.0.10)

DTV Tuner Driver (86.1.910.2009)

CyberLink TV-Enhance (2.0.7013.1451)

A TV tuner and 3G equipped version of the T91 was originally promised, but nothing yet has been delivered to any market. The case and motherboard on both the T91SA and T91MT have room for a TV tuner and antenna (currently filled with a rubber plug).

The TV tuner driver and application appear to be designed for DVB-T, which begs the question, will the European market finally see a TV tuner-equipped T91MT? If so, what about the North American market (ATSC-M/H)? There is good reason to expect a new version of the T91MT coming out soon- at least for those in Europe.

Thanks go out to Andrea for keeping us updated!

The initial instructions for disassembling the T91 were kind of thrown together from memory. Complete and (hopefully) easy to understand instructions for disassembling the T91 are now posted here. Photos are a work in progress since the first batch came out a little blurry, but the instructions will be updated over the next few days with lots of helpful photos shortly.

If you have any tips or questions, feel free to leave some comments.