ASUS Applications
Besides the sofftware that comes from Microsoft, ASUS has included a lot of custom built applications and other third-party software.

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The first software you’ll come across is called SmartLogin and is used for both the fingerprint scanner and web camera for login creditentials.  You can easily register you fingerprints with the software in a few minutes or you can choose to register your face to an account.  The face recognition software is pretty good and here you can see it recognizing my face and assigning it to the “pcper” account on the system. 

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ASUS has also included a DVD player for movie playback without the need to purchase any additional software.

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The ASUS Splendid application is used to adjust the color, brightness and contrast of the LCD to conform as nearly as possible to conventional standards. 

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The ASUS CopyProtect program is used to lock down and password protect the various drives on on the system – you can use this to limit access to the DVD burner, USB drives or network drives without having to resort to Window’s built-in permissions systems.

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The NB Probe application gives you basic informatoin about the CPU temperature, fan speed and and frequency.  In this screenshot you can see the CPU is running at normal temperatures at about 40% load.  The capacity and available room on the storage drives is listed as well.

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ASUS LiveUpdate is basically like Windows Update for the ASUS software installed on your system.

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The ASUS MyFrame application adds a new little icon the the title bar of every window on your system that enables the option to automatically move the window to a certain section on the screen.  You can select a corner, side, top or bottom.  While this could be useful on a high-resolution desktop monitor on something as small as this 12.1″ screen it’s very limited.

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Wireless connectivity with the 802.11a/b/g and BlueTooth is controlled with a small option box on the taskbar that allows to choose to enable them both, individually or turn them both all.

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On the keyboard you can easily switch between performance profiles using the Function key and the space bar.  There are four optoins including: High Performance, Quiet Office, Entertainment and Battery Saving.  The purpose of each profile should be pretty obvious based on its name and the application gives you good indication of which you are running with the icons above as well as being able to just hover over the battery icon on the task bar. 

The ASUS U6S also included a 90-day trial of both Symantec Norton  Anti-virus and Microsoft Office 2007.  You can use them for that trial period but after that prepare to shell out the dough or find other applications.

Overall, I found that ASUS’ application choices are fairly decent, though I still suspect that most people will either not being using the majority of them and/or uninstalling them.  The good news is that removing this applications didn’t cause any problems – nothing was dependent on them for the notebook to function.

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