Asus W7J 13.3 inch Portable Core Duo Notebook Review

BIOS and Security

The Asus W7J BIOS will look familiar to you if you’ve read our previous coverage of Asus laptops — not much has changed. There are five sections: Main, Advanced, Security, Power, and Boot.

Under Main you can see the summary of the CPU, memory, and BIOS version.

In the Advanced screen devices can be enabled and disabled, such as the pointing device.

In the Security screen, you can disable any form of I/O device on the laptop to protect you from users who may want to compromise security through an attached device (i.e. a portable drive). However, it’s a good idea to password protect the BIOS using the Supervisor password so that no one can disable any security options you implemented. The Asus W7J also supports Trusted Computing Management which is touted to be a big feature of Windows Vista. You can also specify a User password and restrict the user to simple BIOS activities like changing the date or just view BIOS options.

Sometimes the battery gauge is not accurate, under this circumstance you can Condition the battery using the option under the Power menu. There aren’t many other power options available aside from dimming the LCD and enabling/disabling the LAN power-on.

Security

Preloaded on the W7J is a trial version of Norton Security Suite that filters virus’, spam, and spyware. Norton is fairly good, but you may want to install your own combination of software.

Since the W7J is a small and light laptop, it will be a nice target for a thief. So to keep your laptop physically protected you can use the Kensington lock port and tie down the W7J to something. If that isn’t enough, you can use the bundled Asus Video Security software and have the integrated camera act as a security camera and report movements to you via the Internet.

The W7J also supports the Trusted Computing platform which is a DRM-like security measure that may be useful for businesses and potentially problematic for consumers. TPM will be supported in Windows Vista. Undoubtedly we will hear more about TPM closer to when Vista is to be released.