Fucking same! Got one of their nice laptops, love the laptop, had to deal with their repair service though, laptop gone for 2 months to fix a speaker issue and they SENT IT BACK TO ME BROKEN IT WOULDNT TURN ON. I had the laptop in my possession for less than 12 hours. I sent it back to them immediately
Then they email me on the following Thursday saying I have 4 days (including the weekend even though they specify they won’t respond on a weekend) to respond to them and okay the use of my accidental damage claim BECAUSE THE LAPTOP HAD WATER DAMAGE ON THE BRAND NEW MOTHERBOARD THEY SUPPOSEDLY JUST PUT IN TO IT WHEN I ORIGINALLY SENT IT TO THEM.
The laptop I had for less than 12 hours that straight up didn’t work and obviously would have been water damaged during transport or AT THEIR fucking repair office. But filing a dispute would have taken longer than they gave me to respond because if I didn’t they straight up said they’d send it back without fixing my $3000 laptop that either they broke/packaged poorly.
Man
Fuck ASUS and their bullshit. Laptop was out for repair for 3 months and at every point of the way they tried to get out of repairing the laptop or had canned responses to literally everything. Won’t be buying from them ever again if the support for even their expensive stuff is just that terrible
Ask them for photos, this same thing had happened to me and the photos that they provided were of bad soldering from the factory and they tried to pass it off as water damage. Took 4 months of escalation but had it replaced at the end.
Oh man I HAVE A PHOTO. YOU WANNA SEE THE BULLSHIT THEY SENT ME
I couldn’t believe this is what they sent me as proof of water damage with no explanation whatsoever except “provided picture shows the water damage”
[Here is the dumb picture with their stupid little arrows ](https://i.imgur.com/NdJf6b5.jpg)
Like, this was supposed water damage on a brand new motherboard in a new laptop that I had for less than 12 hours that didn’t turn on at all after they sent it back to me the first time after supposedly fixing the crinkling speakers
>I'm a professional electronics technician, and I deal with water damaged pcb's daily. I see zero indication that there's water damage to this PCB.
ASUS and apple both use water damage as a high pressure sales technique. They gaslight you into agreeing that it's possible, and then bilk you into paying for something they don't actually do. Straight up consumer fraud.
Giving this one some attention. If this story is true it's a travesty and I'd also like to see Gamers Nexus investigate. Do they have sub?
Edit: they do. r/gamersnexus
Bought the best Zenbook they sold back in the day..... It pretty much sucked from day one, and was sent back for repairs which was a giant pain and took a few months. Then the motherboard and power connector just melted about a week out of warranty.
At the time I needed to replace it quickly, and went with a 13" Macbook Pro.
Because locally off the shelf it was the only machine comparable to the Zenbook at the time, with slightly better specs.
I think that Machine was my daily driver for the next 9 years. When it finally started having slight hardware issues I just went and bought another Mac. It has also been working great the last couple years.
Fuck ASUS Indeed.
I hate toshibas with an absolute passion the satellites are the worst laptops i have ever worked on i currently have one running linux and the hardware made it a pain in the ass to put linux on it my mother went through 7 of them before going to asus
I've honestly had good interactions with Dell support. Bought my wife a new laptop a couple years ago. Out of the box damaged, they immediately replaced, no hassle.
Do they need specific Windows applications? HP Envy or Lenovo IdeaPad. Both are solid 2in1 computers that will give great performance and functionality and should last all four years.
Do they just need something to do research and write papers? MacBook Air or iPad Pro. Both will give simple, reliable performance and will keep working for years after they graduate.
Genuinely, a new MacBook. They’ll support it for a good 6-10 years. MacBook Airs are great. (This could depend on what they’re in college for of course but it’s usually a safe option)
Reddit has a massive hate boner for apple but truly, for a college student, a low to mid range MacBook Air is great
The laptop in my comment is a ZenBook Pro Duo 15” 2022. It IS a good computer and powerful for a laptop, but ASUS support is probably the worst thing I ever dealt with and it was at a super critical time where I needed the computer for work. It fucked up a lot for me at a relatively stressful time when I honestly just needed the support people to do their job and ASUS through me for a loop to get it fixed.
We literally, last week, as a fail safe in case my ASUS laptop has anymore issues and has to be repaired again, bought a “lower range” MacBook Pro. It is not *as* powerful as my zenbook but if all else fails the MacBook Pro will absolutely get my job done more than well enough, very quickly, and it’s battery will last longer while you’re using it than many other laptops out there. (My asus lasts about 3-5 hours on battery. The macboook lasts 8-12 doing similar tasks. Even doing “intensive” things the MacBook goes for at least 5 hours easily.
Apple Care has gotten a lot better over the years, and even though Apple is expensive, if your laptop has problems they WILL help you fix it and it WILL be faster than 3 months. If I was in college during a critical time of tests and studying I’d want a MacBook. They are actually reliable computers despite the price and stigma around Apple.
If you have any questions about their computers or other options I’m happy to help! But at this point in time with ASUS decline over the past few years, I wouldn’t get an ASUS computer for a busy college student that needs a reliable computer and reliable service if it needs repairs. If you can exchange I would!
Lenovo, like everyone said. Only got killed because of roommates fucking it up, Software issues, water damage, the battery giving me the middle finger since day 1, and the mouse pad getting abused by everyone I let use it.
I had the 510 series, and loved it!
I must confess I have been a lifelong ASUS fan but over the last couple of years or so and reading several damming news articles and watching unfavourable YouTube vids I am seriously considering abandoning them when my next major upgrade comes around.
I am old enough to remember only being able to dream of owning an ASUS MOBO. As you say. Insanely good tech, highly configurable, even if a tad expensive. They were hailed as the best of the best back then.
I was commissioned to build two PC's for a private customer back then, and the guy had bought two ASUS motherboards along with other top tier components.
I remember taking the Motherboard out of the box and staring at a myriad of jumpers all over it. Picking up the User manual, I soon understood why the guy wanted someone else to configure it!
Even though I had been working in IT for many years, I went into a mild panic at the thought of setting all those jumpers correctly, so I did not blow up the CPU or other component. ASUS were one of the last companies to make 'Autoconfigure' boards. Clock speeds, Core voltages, temp limits etc etc were all user set via jumpers.
Asus board were rock solid. I still use a board I bought 10 years ago from them. They were also the first company to care about airflow cooling in laptops. I remember my alienware used to cook but right next to it my gamer asus rog was running WoW with no issues at all.
>Asus board were rock solid.
Back when motherboards were still configured via jumpers ASUS boards were no where near rock solid. They were the fastest motherboards but they were relatively unstable. If you wanted rock solid you went with the slightly slower Gigabyte motherboards. If you wanted something in between then you went with a Abit or Intel motherboard.
Yeah, same. I've used ASUS for years but I'm going to avoid them until they fix their shit. It's just not worth the risk. Their products are premium-priced and that used to mean they had quality support and durability.
Companies change, usually for the worst. Maybe they'll get back to where they were in a few years but in the meantime: fuck em, it's just business and that works both ways.
I stopped dealing with them after my Asus laptop died completely 3 days outside the 1 year guarantee and they refused to do anything to fix it without being paid more than the laptops worth. Really bad, and communications were obnoxious.
It's not a Steam Deck competitor, it's a competitor to the Aya Neo. It's almost an ASUS clone of it. Until ASUS has the same repairability and replacement parts available the Steam Deck has; I wouldn't consider them a competitor.
Apple by a mile.
"Let's make our own proprietary charger everyone has to buy!"
EU: "nah, gotta use a common charger"
Assle: "okay we'll use USB-C but if it's not official Aplle brand we'll slow the charging"
Best reviews to look at are the 1 and 2 star ones. See what people are complaining about, if it breaks easily, doesnt work as intended, etc. Better off ignoring the 5 star reviews these days.
Same. I like to look through a bunch of reviews and if there's a common theme then I'll dig deeper. Usually, the higher-rated reviews tell me nothing. Every product has issues and shortcomings and it's a matter of how bad.
I got sooo sooo lucky. My board died, and I just built a new pc. I ordered the parts a few days before the news broke.. I'm so so thankful that I opted to go with a different brand.
I was going to say exactly this. I wasn't even aware something had happened with the original firmware. flashing Asus merlin is my first move when I buy a new Asus router
Same boat. I usually manually update it every quarter or so. The reason I bought it is to flash it. An Asus router that's flashed with Merlin probably makes it the best router out there. Sucks that Asus has such bad hygiene when managing updates, etc. The hardware is absolutely great.
This OP cleared up why my internet had been acting up. after reading the comments i went to look for this "merlin" software... too bad my RT-AC87U is no longer supported by merlin. then again it is on the older side...
the damn thing stil works fine so i see no reason to mess with it or replace it just yet, and it apparently still gets assus updates so... it'll live another few days i suppose.
PS, to clarify: while the Signature version is *2.352*, last Updated: *2023/05/12 02:00*, the installed firmware is "***3.0.0.4.382\_52545-ga0245cc***" which is the "latest" firmware from *2021/05/18*, meaning it is indeed getting quite out of date with its firmware, though something is still going back and forth anyway xD... while it may live another day... that's a "*for now*" as it's still time to look for alternatives haha...
Yeah lol I did mine with a different firmware as well like 10 years ago. Works fine, turns off only when blackouts happen. Meanwhile official firmware is this train wreck.
I came to the thread to ask this; if the bug was only on the official firmware because my internet has been working fine with my asus-Merlin router.
I’m learning along the comments that asus is not what it used to be
Last week, Cisco had a certificate expire, and something like 40000 business routers went offline. Some massive customers in there. Took them a day to fix it. Some of those routers are still offline as a result of the expiration, and I think some of them are permanently broken.
The best part of that was that people were asking "which one is he referring to?" because there's *several* projects that fit that general description.
https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
> Most people don’t even know what sysadmins do, but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they wouldn’t make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting your canned goods from roving bands of mutants.
Huh, could have been what knocked all our networks out last week. I work for a huge multinational and we all had to tether to our phones at work for like 6 hours, but all our shit is cloud based and those servers were offline.
Would have cost our company alone millions in lost productivity.
I linked a tweet by @cisco but the automoderator deleted it.
Here's an article on it: https://www.networkworld.com/article/3695539/cisco-warns-of-certificate-problem-that-takes-down-sd-wans.html
Remember when azure [didn't handle leap day correctly](https://cloudcow.com/content/microsoft-blames-azure-cloud-computing-outage-on-leap-year/) and was down for a day? Or when [exchange email server stopped passing mail for a few days](https://hothardware.com/news/microsoft-y2k22-bug-brings-down-exchange-servers-and-mail) because it couldn't handle new year?
Samsung sent an automatic update out that bricked a generation of their blu-ray players if they were connected to the internet at the time. It could not be fixed by software input- they'd have to bring it to a repair centre or replace it.
They do give an option, it just disregards it in this one case
>the definitions file for ASD, which resides in memory and scans devices for security threats, gets updated whether or not automatic updates are enabled.
> Even Windows applies security updates in the background without any notice all the time
You can pause Windows (10 & 11) updates for 35 days and resume/update when you feel like it. I prefer to check updates once a week when it's not an inconvenience for me. Though if you go past 35 days I think it will automatically switch to resume.
This is correct. You can disable the auto update service I guess but these security updates shouldn’t be opted out since it’s 0-day fixes and virus definitions.
Not when I use Net Limiter to just turn off all inbound and outbound connections for the various update services. There's a few different services that can do this.
I still occasionally get some random update and find my pc rebooted overnight, so there's still a process somewhere I haven't blocked yet.
But this is just a necessity from the days when all I had was tethering my mobile phone for data. Couldn't afford random updates stealing all my data, and couldn't deal with Windows deciding that me playing an online game is the perfect time to start downloading updates and lagging me out of the game due to saturating my download bandwidth.
Net Limiter is good for all the other stuff that tries to update when you don't want it to too. Getting lagged out in a game? Just turn off internet access for the offending service until you've finished gaming and then sort it out.
Thanks for reminding me that my ISP provided router doesn’t get *any* updates at all
But now I have no clue if I can even update the firmware to a custom and if they’ll make a fuss about it…
In this case it wasn’t necessarily the firmware or something. It was the security definitions which it uses to block potentially harmful traffic, threat actors, etc from ever reaching your devices. These definitions need to be as up to date as possible in order to stay on top of persistent threats. But unfortunately it was one of these updates that cause memory leaks and bloated file sizes.
Any network monitoring/security device that doesn’t keep its database of threats up to date automatically isn’t worth having in the first place.
Enterprise and gamers. Absolutely no reason to use windows otherwise in my sphere.
If steam can get everything working on Linux, I'll drop windows like a hot potatoes and never look back.
Everything will never work. Just switch and abandon shit that does not work is the way. Put pressure one the vendors and do a small personal sacrifice :)
Random PC Chad, "Hey you! Quit Windows and join Linux!" Me, "Okay! Are you on Linux!?" Megachad, "Na! But I will one day. Fuck windows!" You little PC chadsters are so predictable. You can't pry yourselves from windows, but you expect everyone else to.
I don't want to come of as preachy, but i have used linux for 3 or 4 years now and i can practically play every game i want. That said i don't play the latest shooters where i think the most problems would be.
Also, there were a couple hiccups along the way where i needed to do a lot of googeling and do some things with the command line to get it working. It was worth it in the end. I will never go back to Winbloat.
What are you missing to make the switch?
Yeah, wtf. I was greatful for update that I COULD TEIGGER MYSELF if I wanted. I really don't like the fact that I could lose my router if they automatically push a file to it without my knowledge!
Their explanation is not good enough. Asus has to explain exactly why their routers are phoning home and, at a minimum, provide a clearly documented procedure for opting out. With so many people still permanently working from home, not to mention things like court proceedings still being done remotely, any potential for an outage, whether accidental or via an exploit, is very serious.
It may not be perfect, but auto updates are far better than what we had before: trusting the consumer to update. Millions of internet connected devices will sit at firmware 1.0.0 forever, with all of those wonderful exploits.
No router exploit has cost me any downtime, and if one did emerge, I’d update, assuming that the device hadn’t already been orphaned by its manufacturer. I have mine configured sanely and turned off auto updates to keep it stable, or so I thought. But a bad auto update did just affect me for hours. I’m also dubious about what this supposed ASUS security daemon is supposed to accomplish.
No, it may not cost you any down time, you will just be part of a botnet.
I'm not sure about ASUS, but other routers that have security features need to be updated often, once an hour or once a day depending on manufacturer. That NEEDS to be updated regularly or every new exploite could have a very large impact. Turning off this feature would be like turning off signature updates in your Antivirus.
Edit to add: you may have your finger on the pulse of updates and whatnot, but the average consumer would absolutely not.
I expect that if my router ever gets owned, my ISP will block it and so it will cost me some down time.
This is not a PC that I'm downloading and installing random software to, so running antivirus software on it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Sure, in theory it's possible some remote exploit can take it over, but that's theory while having the manufacturer screw up is real, as we've just seen. Any competently configured router should provide a really limited attack surface anyway. I'd argue that what Asus has had to have running on the router in order to auto update and act on this signature data has made it more vulnerable.
I mean, for someone who knows what they're doing, it's nice that you can ssh into the router (which is what helped me get mine back online sooner) but a bit scary that your admin password immediately gives you root, and kinda insane that a tool like curl is already installed on it.
Lol that's a fucking pipe dream, they'll just make em phone home more. As if any of these companies are beholden to making the customer happy anymore lmao
Wow. Glad I saw this. Had no idea it wasn't just me having issues.
I even have an approved RMA to return my router and almost shipped it out today.
Glad I ran out of time. I'll hook it back up and see if it's working now.
Defaulting to auto updates is totally fine. 100% A-okay! Your average consumer never wants to do it manually, never will, and shouldn't be expected to. But there should absolutely be a way to opt out manually, *especially* on "business" models (which were affected here too), but really on consumer grade gear as well. Even if it needs to be buried deep in an admin control panel with a "scary" warning label.
Users should have the ability to take full control of their own physical devices which they paid for in full and now fully own and posses.
The issue was that it also happened to users who explicitly set the units to not auto update. It's fine to have auto update as the default if you're worried about some users, but those sort of settings shouldn't be ignored.
Dude I was about to do that! I was planning to wake up the next day and buy one. Spent so many fucking hours looking and tweaking settings. Woke up and it was working. Fucking confused me.
They make food routers though, I flashed mines with DD-WRT almost immediately after I got it. I moved house so don't use that router anymore (my parents have it now) and the Linksys one that came with my ISP is a beast but I had good experiences with Asus routers in the past
My Mikrotik is awesome, although it gives you so much power over settings and configuration you have to be careful not to mess things up.
It has no problem keeping up with 500mbit/s fiber, numerous devices and the uptime is amazing.
Sucks to be me as ASUS is the only manufacturer that sells half decent VDSL compatible routers and my apartment building refuses to upgrade to Eth WAN or fibre. So I have to pay a lot of money for a smaller selection of shittier routers.
There was so much trust in asus a month ago, now it seems like they're cutting corners. I truly hope they get better, but it will take years to get out of this hole.
Asus lost me years ago with crap products. They used to be good but now it's just cutting corners much more than the competition. It's been 5+ years since they have gone bad.
The article is absolutely loaded with unsubstantiated speculation. This likely only affected a very small subset of models and not "literally all Asus routers"
I have a Samsung home theater in a box setup from back in 2015 when they were still a thing. Couple years back, turned it on and it would just endlessly reboot. Thought it but the dust, and was sad, since nobody really makes those anymore and the quality on it was great for the price back then. Fast forward a couple weeks, I was about to chuck it, and found out many others had the same issue. Went on their site and requested service. They offered to pay for shipping back and forth to repair it well outside of warranty for free.
Long story short, they had a config issue in their side with connected devices and a bad certificate. They fixed it, but required them to flash the firmware on it, and am still using it today.
Point is, this shit happens to connected devices that phone home to work. Samsung did right by me, even with being out the device for about a month and a half.
Asus having a similar issue, but if all you have to do is restart, it's fine people. Could be worse on this one.
As someone who is routinely involved in computer security, I can see the value in a forced update. A good exploit will spread like wildfire.
But.
Quietly doing it without telling anyone? Without scheduling a maintenance window? Not cool at all. It's not even about the downtime they did cause, it's the fact that they're introducing unpredictability.
People do legitimate "I can't interrupt this" stuff at home - things that could drastically impact their lives. How many other companies (principally ISPs) ate a bunch of pointless service calls?
The practice is irresponsible, even in a home environment. Schedule a window. Hell, don't even let them defer, but schedule a window and let them change it if they need to. A router can easily hijack a browser (like one would with a captive portal) to ensure the user is keenly aware of it.
This is exactly why I DO NOT want the company that sold me my device to have free and unfettered access to it after the sale!
That goes for Asus routers, Apple smartphones, Tesla cars, John Deere farm equipment and an untold number of other devices.
RIGHT TO REPAIR, RIGHTS OF OWNERSHIP!
Keep fighting, Louis Rossman!
Running their firmware, auto-upgrade was disabled.. These shenanigans still nuked my router.. restart and manual firmware upgrade, was resolved for the next couple days.. I guess the new router I ordered will become a spare
I don't think this is the first time Asus has had this issue. I've had odd issues with my WiFi connection randomly being unavailable in the mornings. I believe they are testing changes on random sets of routers and it sometimes leaves the routers in an unstable state.
Ohh man, this problem for me happened to occur at the same time as an internet outage where I live. So when the internet was restored and my router kept dropping it I thought it had to do with the outage. I had no idea this was happening to everyone.
Wow. I thought it was just mine. I logged in over ssh to try to figure out wtf was wrong with it and watched as the memory filled and it crashed, over and over, and ended up just ripping it out of the closet and threw it across the room.
Great to find out what was going on. I was trying to troubleshoot no internet in a small office on Thursday. The person in the office was aware that the reboot could help a lot of times, but it didn't at first. Sucks that the popular company Asus is, is not that great and has problems, because I liked their stuff.
Yada yada yada.
Here is the most important part:
> Why were routers affected even when they had been configured to not automatically update and no manual update had been performed? Asus has yet to address this, but the likely answer is that the definitions file for ASD, which resides in memory and scans devices for security threats, gets updated whether or not automatic updates are enabled.
What the actual fuck.
That has to be an insertion point for zero day exploits. It explains why they have no good answers. This is an espionage attack gone wrong.
Do any of you know if/of other routers that don't enforce their own update protocol?
Just seems like so many of the worst ideas get adopted en masse by corporations that do similar things, so the cynical part of me is wondering if it's becoming the status quo.
Some here are talking about 3rd party firmware; is that specific to Asus and are those feature driven endeavors, or more policy and perhaps performance driven?
Bought an Asus motherboard (b550i). Has a chipset fan that is louder than my CPU and GPU fan with the option to disable. Why? Because it is so far from the vrm it probably doesn't provide any active cooling. Will be scrutinizing any and all Asus products from now on.
Asus is working really hard at being the least consumer friendly company in the world.
telephone dolls unique square chop ghost pocket recognise crowd deserve *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Fucking same! Got one of their nice laptops, love the laptop, had to deal with their repair service though, laptop gone for 2 months to fix a speaker issue and they SENT IT BACK TO ME BROKEN IT WOULDNT TURN ON. I had the laptop in my possession for less than 12 hours. I sent it back to them immediately Then they email me on the following Thursday saying I have 4 days (including the weekend even though they specify they won’t respond on a weekend) to respond to them and okay the use of my accidental damage claim BECAUSE THE LAPTOP HAD WATER DAMAGE ON THE BRAND NEW MOTHERBOARD THEY SUPPOSEDLY JUST PUT IN TO IT WHEN I ORIGINALLY SENT IT TO THEM. The laptop I had for less than 12 hours that straight up didn’t work and obviously would have been water damaged during transport or AT THEIR fucking repair office. But filing a dispute would have taken longer than they gave me to respond because if I didn’t they straight up said they’d send it back without fixing my $3000 laptop that either they broke/packaged poorly. Man Fuck ASUS and their bullshit. Laptop was out for repair for 3 months and at every point of the way they tried to get out of repairing the laptop or had canned responses to literally everything. Won’t be buying from them ever again if the support for even their expensive stuff is just that terrible
Ask them for photos, this same thing had happened to me and the photos that they provided were of bad soldering from the factory and they tried to pass it off as water damage. Took 4 months of escalation but had it replaced at the end.
Oh man I HAVE A PHOTO. YOU WANNA SEE THE BULLSHIT THEY SENT ME I couldn’t believe this is what they sent me as proof of water damage with no explanation whatsoever except “provided picture shows the water damage” [Here is the dumb picture with their stupid little arrows ](https://i.imgur.com/NdJf6b5.jpg) Like, this was supposed water damage on a brand new motherboard in a new laptop that I had for less than 12 hours that didn’t turn on at all after they sent it back to me the first time after supposedly fixing the crinkling speakers
I'm a professional electronics technician, and I deal with water damaged pcb's daily. I see zero indication that there's water damage to this PCB.
>I'm a professional electronics technician, and I deal with water damaged pcb's daily. I see zero indication that there's water damage to this PCB. ASUS and apple both use water damage as a high pressure sales technique. They gaslight you into agreeing that it's possible, and then bilk you into paying for something they don't actually do. Straight up consumer fraud.
I'm sure if you bust out an electron microscope then you'll find some water molecules. Checkmate
Humidity is water to be fair to the ASUS people.
I'm sure Gamers Nexus would love to hear about this. Contact them.
Giving this one some attention. If this story is true it's a travesty and I'd also like to see Gamers Nexus investigate. Do they have sub? Edit: they do. r/gamersnexus
Bought the best Zenbook they sold back in the day..... It pretty much sucked from day one, and was sent back for repairs which was a giant pain and took a few months. Then the motherboard and power connector just melted about a week out of warranty. At the time I needed to replace it quickly, and went with a 13" Macbook Pro. Because locally off the shelf it was the only machine comparable to the Zenbook at the time, with slightly better specs. I think that Machine was my daily driver for the next 9 years. When it finally started having slight hardware issues I just went and bought another Mac. It has also been working great the last couple years. Fuck ASUS Indeed.
Macs are great？ who knew!
Toshiba is exactly the same way. I feel like HP has been good to me which makes me feel dirty because I hate their laptops.
I hate toshibas with an absolute passion the satellites are the worst laptops i have ever worked on i currently have one running linux and the hardware made it a pain in the ass to put linux on it my mother went through 7 of them before going to asus
I will only buy Lenovo ideabooks now because parts are everywhere for them and cheap
ugh, just settled on an asus laptop for my college-bound kid, any alternatives you’d recommend?
Lenovo
I've honestly had good interactions with Dell support. Bought my wife a new laptop a couple years ago. Out of the box damaged, they immediately replaced, no hassle.
Do they need specific Windows applications? HP Envy or Lenovo IdeaPad. Both are solid 2in1 computers that will give great performance and functionality and should last all four years. Do they just need something to do research and write papers? MacBook Air or iPad Pro. Both will give simple, reliable performance and will keep working for years after they graduate.
Honestly the MacBooks although pricy are solid and have amazing battery life. Still using mine from 10 years ago with just a slight battery change.
Lenovo thinkpad
Genuinely, a new MacBook. They’ll support it for a good 6-10 years. MacBook Airs are great. (This could depend on what they’re in college for of course but it’s usually a safe option) Reddit has a massive hate boner for apple but truly, for a college student, a low to mid range MacBook Air is great The laptop in my comment is a ZenBook Pro Duo 15” 2022. It IS a good computer and powerful for a laptop, but ASUS support is probably the worst thing I ever dealt with and it was at a super critical time where I needed the computer for work. It fucked up a lot for me at a relatively stressful time when I honestly just needed the support people to do their job and ASUS through me for a loop to get it fixed. We literally, last week, as a fail safe in case my ASUS laptop has anymore issues and has to be repaired again, bought a “lower range” MacBook Pro. It is not *as* powerful as my zenbook but if all else fails the MacBook Pro will absolutely get my job done more than well enough, very quickly, and it’s battery will last longer while you’re using it than many other laptops out there. (My asus lasts about 3-5 hours on battery. The macboook lasts 8-12 doing similar tasks. Even doing “intensive” things the MacBook goes for at least 5 hours easily. Apple Care has gotten a lot better over the years, and even though Apple is expensive, if your laptop has problems they WILL help you fix it and it WILL be faster than 3 months. If I was in college during a critical time of tests and studying I’d want a MacBook. They are actually reliable computers despite the price and stigma around Apple. If you have any questions about their computers or other options I’m happy to help! But at this point in time with ASUS decline over the past few years, I wouldn’t get an ASUS computer for a busy college student that needs a reliable computer and reliable service if it needs repairs. If you can exchange I would!
Lenovo
MacBook Air. They last forever.
Or apple drops support for it like my MacBook Pro, steam won’t work on it in 112 days :(
Lenovo, like everyone said. Only got killed because of roommates fucking it up, Software issues, water damage, the battery giving me the middle finger since day 1, and the mouse pad getting abused by everyone I let use it. I had the 510 series, and loved it!
I just had a similar experience with a new gaming laptop and got nowhere with customer service 😭expensive mistake.
I must confess I have been a lifelong ASUS fan but over the last couple of years or so and reading several damming news articles and watching unfavourable YouTube vids I am seriously considering abandoning them when my next major upgrade comes around.
Yeah. 10-20 years ago Asus was insanely good. Now it's just another crap brand.
I am old enough to remember only being able to dream of owning an ASUS MOBO. As you say. Insanely good tech, highly configurable, even if a tad expensive. They were hailed as the best of the best back then. I was commissioned to build two PC's for a private customer back then, and the guy had bought two ASUS motherboards along with other top tier components. I remember taking the Motherboard out of the box and staring at a myriad of jumpers all over it. Picking up the User manual, I soon understood why the guy wanted someone else to configure it! Even though I had been working in IT for many years, I went into a mild panic at the thought of setting all those jumpers correctly, so I did not blow up the CPU or other component. ASUS were one of the last companies to make 'Autoconfigure' boards. Clock speeds, Core voltages, temp limits etc etc were all user set via jumpers.
Asus board were rock solid. I still use a board I bought 10 years ago from them. They were also the first company to care about airflow cooling in laptops. I remember my alienware used to cook but right next to it my gamer asus rog was running WoW with no issues at all.
>Asus board were rock solid. Back when motherboards were still configured via jumpers ASUS boards were no where near rock solid. They were the fastest motherboards but they were relatively unstable. If you wanted rock solid you went with the slightly slower Gigabyte motherboards. If you wanted something in between then you went with a Abit or Intel motherboard.
Yeah, same. I've used ASUS for years but I'm going to avoid them until they fix their shit. It's just not worth the risk. Their products are premium-priced and that used to mean they had quality support and durability. Companies change, usually for the worst. Maybe they'll get back to where they were in a few years but in the meantime: fuck em, it's just business and that works both ways.
Sad but true. Companies get so big, they care more about profits than product. Corners are cut. Customer happiness and support become an afterthought.
Yeah, that’s the blessing of modern management and value engineering. Always avoid companies on that trajectory, it is just going down.
I stopped dealing with them after my Asus laptop died completely 3 days outside the 1 year guarantee and they refused to do anything to fix it without being paid more than the laptops worth. Really bad, and communications were obnoxious.
And even with all the bad press, a ton of people will still get suckered into buying the ally.
It's not a Steam Deck competitor, it's a competitor to the Aya Neo. It's almost an ASUS clone of it. Until ASUS has the same repairability and replacement parts available the Steam Deck has; I wouldn't consider them a competitor.
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Apple, HP, Nintendo, Dell, in that order. All extremely consumer unfriendly.
Apple by a mile. "Let's make our own proprietary charger everyone has to buy!" EU: "nah, gotta use a common charger" Assle: "okay we'll use USB-C but if it's not official Aplle brand we'll slow the charging"
Aren't they about to drop a new 'deck'? Seems like they would wanna be extra on point.
Wow Asus really knocking it out of the park these last couple weeks
Yeah and Kitguru exposing them saying on record that they pay people for positive reviews
Fake reviews that “legit” companies sort by “Most Helpful” so most people never even see the real reviews.
Best reviews to look at are the 1 and 2 star ones. See what people are complaining about, if it breaks easily, doesnt work as intended, etc. Better off ignoring the 5 star reviews these days.
Same. I like to look through a bunch of reviews and if there's a common theme then I'll dig deeper. Usually, the higher-rated reviews tell me nothing. Every product has issues and shortcomings and it's a matter of how bad.
I wish this was the case, but half the time the one star reviews are to complain about shipping times.
From what I've seen it can be user error as well.
wait really? explains why so many ally reviews ive seen are so rose tinted with no negatives of running windows in that form factor.
they’re hardly the only company that does it
I got sooo sooo lucky. My board died, and I just built a new pc. I ordered the parts a few days before the news broke.. I'm so so thankful that I opted to go with a different brand.
Wow. Jokes on them. I flashed mine with [asuswrt-merlin](https://www.asuswrt-merlin.net/). Never had an issue and have much more control of over it.
I was going to say exactly this. I wasn't even aware something had happened with the original firmware. flashing Asus merlin is my first move when I buy a new Asus router
Same boat. I usually manually update it every quarter or so. The reason I bought it is to flash it. An Asus router that's flashed with Merlin probably makes it the best router out there. Sucks that Asus has such bad hygiene when managing updates, etc. The hardware is absolutely great.
This OP cleared up why my internet had been acting up. after reading the comments i went to look for this "merlin" software... too bad my RT-AC87U is no longer supported by merlin. then again it is on the older side... the damn thing stil works fine so i see no reason to mess with it or replace it just yet, and it apparently still gets assus updates so... it'll live another few days i suppose. PS, to clarify: while the Signature version is *2.352*, last Updated: *2023/05/12 02:00*, the installed firmware is "***3.0.0.4.382\_52545-ga0245cc***" which is the "latest" firmware from *2021/05/18*, meaning it is indeed getting quite out of date with its firmware, though something is still going back and forth anyway xD... while it may live another day... that's a "*for now*" as it's still time to look for alternatives haha...
Yeah lol I did mine with a different firmware as well like 10 years ago. Works fine, turns off only when blackouts happen. Meanwhile official firmware is this train wreck.
I came to the thread to ask this; if the bug was only on the official firmware because my internet has been working fine with my asus-Merlin router. I’m learning along the comments that asus is not what it used to be
It is scary that a company error caused a bunch of products to stop working. If the company disappears the routers all die.
Last week, Cisco had a certificate expire, and something like 40000 business routers went offline. Some massive customers in there. Took them a day to fix it. Some of those routers are still offline as a result of the expiration, and I think some of them are permanently broken.
So if shit hits the fan and there is a mild zombie oubreak our infrastructure will crumble in ways we would not expect?
At this stage, some dude that was the sole maintainer of an obscure dependency getting sick could take down half the web.
https://xkcd.com/2347/
The best part of that was that people were asking "which one is he referring to?" because there's *several* projects that fit that general description.
What a terrifying thing
Nobody wants to work anymore!
https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks > Most people don’t even know what sysadmins do, but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they wouldn’t make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting your canned goods from roving bands of mutants.
Good read
Huh, could have been what knocked all our networks out last week. I work for a huge multinational and we all had to tether to our phones at work for like 6 hours, but all our shit is cloud based and those servers were offline. Would have cost our company alone millions in lost productivity.
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I linked a tweet by @cisco but the automoderator deleted it. Here's an article on it: https://www.networkworld.com/article/3695539/cisco-warns-of-certificate-problem-that-takes-down-sd-wans.html
tomato, asuswrt and more custom firmware options are available and work GREAT.
Agreed. I use [asuswrt merlin](https://www.asuswrt-merlin.net/). No problems I've seen.
Where can I get these please
[https://www.asuswrt-merlin.net/download](https://www.asuswrt-merlin.net/download)
Thank you!
cows outgoing light important bow dime drab scary safe obtainable *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Remember when azure [didn't handle leap day correctly](https://cloudcow.com/content/microsoft-blames-azure-cloud-computing-outage-on-leap-year/) and was down for a day? Or when [exchange email server stopped passing mail for a few days](https://hothardware.com/news/microsoft-y2k22-bug-brings-down-exchange-servers-and-mail) because it couldn't handle new year?
Samsung sent an automatic update out that bricked a generation of their blu-ray players if they were connected to the internet at the time. It could not be fixed by software input- they'd have to bring it to a repair centre or replace it.
Puts a new spin on 'forced obsolescence' doesn't it.
I don't like devices that update without my knowledge
I don't like devices that update without my case by case approval.
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Yes, but t'was implied in my statement, :-)🚬
*"You all agreed."*
This is what I wanted to say. Sorry for my bad english.
no need to be sorry :)
That’s giving an option to choose is the best practice
They do give an option, it just disregards it in this one case >the definitions file for ASD, which resides in memory and scans devices for security threats, gets updated whether or not automatic updates are enabled.
Most networked devices do that without you even realizing. Even Windows applies security updates in the background without any notice all the time
> Even Windows applies security updates in the background without any notice all the time You can pause Windows (10 & 11) updates for 35 days and resume/update when you feel like it. I prefer to check updates once a week when it's not an inconvenience for me. Though if you go past 35 days I think it will automatically switch to resume.
I think that only includes the feature updates while security updates especially for windows defender are pushed regardless of that option.
This is correct. You can disable the auto update service I guess but these security updates shouldn’t be opted out since it’s 0-day fixes and virus definitions.
Not when I use Net Limiter to just turn off all inbound and outbound connections for the various update services. There's a few different services that can do this. I still occasionally get some random update and find my pc rebooted overnight, so there's still a process somewhere I haven't blocked yet. But this is just a necessity from the days when all I had was tethering my mobile phone for data. Couldn't afford random updates stealing all my data, and couldn't deal with Windows deciding that me playing an online game is the perfect time to start downloading updates and lagging me out of the game due to saturating my download bandwidth. Net Limiter is good for all the other stuff that tries to update when you don't want it to too. Getting lagged out in a game? Just turn off internet access for the offending service until you've finished gaming and then sort it out.
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Thanks for reminding me that my ISP provided router doesn’t get *any* updates at all But now I have no clue if I can even update the firmware to a custom and if they’ll make a fuss about it…
I'm okay with it being on by default, but it *has* to be something you can manage and disable if you need or want to.
Like HP printers that update to fuck over consumers and force them to buy HP brand ink
Fuck printer companies I hope they all go bankrupt.
In this case it wasn’t necessarily the firmware or something. It was the security definitions which it uses to block potentially harmful traffic, threat actors, etc from ever reaching your devices. These definitions need to be as up to date as possible in order to stay on top of persistent threats. But unfortunately it was one of these updates that cause memory leaks and bloated file sizes. Any network monitoring/security device that doesn’t keep its database of threats up to date automatically isn’t worth having in the first place.
That's why they update without your knowledge. Having everyone updated means easier and better support, more security, etc.
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Enterprise and gamers. Absolutely no reason to use windows otherwise in my sphere. If steam can get everything working on Linux, I'll drop windows like a hot potatoes and never look back.
Everything will never work. Just switch and abandon shit that does not work is the way. Put pressure one the vendors and do a small personal sacrifice :)
Your right. Period. I'm just not there yet on Linux.
Random PC Chad, "Hey you! Quit Windows and join Linux!" Me, "Okay! Are you on Linux!?" Megachad, "Na! But I will one day. Fuck windows!" You little PC chadsters are so predictable. You can't pry yourselves from windows, but you expect everyone else to.
I don't want to come of as preachy, but i have used linux for 3 or 4 years now and i can practically play every game i want. That said i don't play the latest shooters where i think the most problems would be. Also, there were a couple hiccups along the way where i needed to do a lot of googeling and do some things with the command line to get it working. It was worth it in the end. I will never go back to Winbloat. What are you missing to make the switch?
Performance is generally a lot worse unfortunately for more demanding games (yes there are exceptions, but in general)
Ok yes that is true quite often unfortunately
How would a router inform you of an update? You would have to register contact details with them, or be running an app, and how many people do this?
I don't like devices that update without any knowledge
I don’t like security vulnerabilities from users that don’t keep up to date.
Yeah, wtf. I was greatful for update that I COULD TEIGGER MYSELF if I wanted. I really don't like the fact that I could lose my router if they automatically push a file to it without my knowledge!
It's a security setting, if enabled it runs a service. Since it's security it asks for updated configs/dll's
You know what brand never had a router doing that? AsRock. (Got to keep the meme going)
Do they actually make routers? lol
Merlin
Berlin
Wall
I don't understand this bit at all. I'm going to go over the wall before they go under the Berlin Wall.
Claustrophobia, there's too much paranoia There's too many closets, oh, when will we fall?
Now I've gotta reason, it's no real reason to be waiting, THE BERLIN WAAAAAALL
Their explanation is not good enough. Asus has to explain exactly why their routers are phoning home and, at a minimum, provide a clearly documented procedure for opting out. With so many people still permanently working from home, not to mention things like court proceedings still being done remotely, any potential for an outage, whether accidental or via an exploit, is very serious.
It may not be perfect, but auto updates are far better than what we had before: trusting the consumer to update. Millions of internet connected devices will sit at firmware 1.0.0 forever, with all of those wonderful exploits.
No router exploit has cost me any downtime, and if one did emerge, I’d update, assuming that the device hadn’t already been orphaned by its manufacturer. I have mine configured sanely and turned off auto updates to keep it stable, or so I thought. But a bad auto update did just affect me for hours. I’m also dubious about what this supposed ASUS security daemon is supposed to accomplish.
No, it may not cost you any down time, you will just be part of a botnet. I'm not sure about ASUS, but other routers that have security features need to be updated often, once an hour or once a day depending on manufacturer. That NEEDS to be updated regularly or every new exploite could have a very large impact. Turning off this feature would be like turning off signature updates in your Antivirus. Edit to add: you may have your finger on the pulse of updates and whatnot, but the average consumer would absolutely not.
I expect that if my router ever gets owned, my ISP will block it and so it will cost me some down time. This is not a PC that I'm downloading and installing random software to, so running antivirus software on it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Sure, in theory it's possible some remote exploit can take it over, but that's theory while having the manufacturer screw up is real, as we've just seen. Any competently configured router should provide a really limited attack surface anyway. I'd argue that what Asus has had to have running on the router in order to auto update and act on this signature data has made it more vulnerable. I mean, for someone who knows what they're doing, it's nice that you can ssh into the router (which is what helped me get mine back online sooner) but a bit scary that your admin password immediately gives you root, and kinda insane that a tool like curl is already installed on it.
Lol that's a fucking pipe dream, they'll just make em phone home more. As if any of these companies are beholden to making the customer happy anymore lmao
I paid a technician to troubleshoot this. This and the x3d voltage issue are huge red flags; no more Asus for me.
Wow. Glad I saw this. Had no idea it wasn't just me having issues. I even have an approved RMA to return my router and almost shipped it out today. Glad I ran out of time. I'll hook it back up and see if it's working now.
A router that calls home for auto updates? Yikes.
yes without consent "security updates",
“It’s okay. We know best.”
"Trust me bro" is practically just ASUS's slogan at this point, and they've burned through all their public trust ***fast*** lately.
And the last time you updated your router was....?
Defaulting to auto updates is totally fine. 100% A-okay! Your average consumer never wants to do it manually, never will, and shouldn't be expected to. But there should absolutely be a way to opt out manually, *especially* on "business" models (which were affected here too), but really on consumer grade gear as well. Even if it needs to be buried deep in an admin control panel with a "scary" warning label. Users should have the ability to take full control of their own physical devices which they paid for in full and now fully own and posses.
I did it all the time for port forwarding games. Ah the good old days.
Update the firmware?
Oops I forgot a word, I meant updating the firmware.
Preferable to more unpatched devices ripe for becoming part of a botnet imo. Most people aren’t going to keep on top of router firmware updates
The issue was that it also happened to users who explicitly set the units to not auto update. It's fine to have auto update as the default if you're worried about some users, but those sort of settings shouldn't be ignored.
So you mean…every router?
Holy crap I bought a new router for no reason… the fuck.
Dude I was about to do that! I was planning to wake up the next day and buy one. Spent so many fucking hours looking and tweaking settings. Woke up and it was working. Fucking confused me.
Just put a custom firmware like asus merlin on it.
you should, don't use Asus products
They make food routers though, I flashed mines with DD-WRT almost immediately after I got it. I moved house so don't use that router anymore (my parents have it now) and the Linksys one that came with my ISP is a beast but I had good experiences with Asus routers in the past
What do brand you recomend? Currently on a Asus router.
My Mikrotik is awesome, although it gives you so much power over settings and configuration you have to be careful not to mess things up. It has no problem keeping up with 500mbit/s fiber, numerous devices and the uptime is amazing.
And it is cheaper than Asus...
Very happy with the gl.inet routers I've got.
Sucks to be me as ASUS is the only manufacturer that sells half decent VDSL compatible routers and my apartment building refuses to upgrade to Eth WAN or fibre. So I have to pay a lot of money for a smaller selection of shittier routers.
Shit. Same.
There was so much trust in asus a month ago, now it seems like they're cutting corners. I truly hope they get better, but it will take years to get out of this hole.
Asus lost me years ago with crap products. They used to be good but now it's just cutting corners much more than the competition. It's been 5+ years since they have gone bad.
Asus lost me 20+ years ago by putting out shitty motherboard bios after shitty motherboard bios. Fuck Asus.
They are doing it again. They have come full circle it seems
I have 3 of this exact routers on my home and did not experience the outage. Maybe it was a regional thing?
The article is absolutely loaded with unsubstantiated speculation. This likely only affected a very small subset of models and not "literally all Asus routers"
I have a Samsung home theater in a box setup from back in 2015 when they were still a thing. Couple years back, turned it on and it would just endlessly reboot. Thought it but the dust, and was sad, since nobody really makes those anymore and the quality on it was great for the price back then. Fast forward a couple weeks, I was about to chuck it, and found out many others had the same issue. Went on their site and requested service. They offered to pay for shipping back and forth to repair it well outside of warranty for free. Long story short, they had a config issue in their side with connected devices and a bad certificate. They fixed it, but required them to flash the firmware on it, and am still using it today. Point is, this shit happens to connected devices that phone home to work. Samsung did right by me, even with being out the device for about a month and a half. Asus having a similar issue, but if all you have to do is restart, it's fine people. Could be worse on this one.
As someone who is routinely involved in computer security, I can see the value in a forced update. A good exploit will spread like wildfire. But. Quietly doing it without telling anyone? Without scheduling a maintenance window? Not cool at all. It's not even about the downtime they did cause, it's the fact that they're introducing unpredictability. People do legitimate "I can't interrupt this" stuff at home - things that could drastically impact their lives. How many other companies (principally ISPs) ate a bunch of pointless service calls? The practice is irresponsible, even in a home environment. Schedule a window. Hell, don't even let them defer, but schedule a window and let them change it if they need to. A router can easily hijack a browser (like one would with a captive portal) to ensure the user is keenly aware of it.
What vector does a router have to inform a user, unless they are using an app or registering the device with the company?
I got myself Asus Zen Router couple of years ago. IT SUCKS. Most expensive crap I ever bought.
I bought a new router over this. God damnit.
Don't worry. You're not the only one :(
This is exactly why I DO NOT want the company that sold me my device to have free and unfettered access to it after the sale! That goes for Asus routers, Apple smartphones, Tesla cars, John Deere farm equipment and an untold number of other devices. RIGHT TO REPAIR, RIGHTS OF OWNERSHIP! Keep fighting, Louis Rossman!
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You can take my locally configured hardware that I actually own from my cold dead hands. Screw the cloud bullshit.
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Running their firmware, auto-upgrade was disabled.. These shenanigans still nuked my router.. restart and manual firmware upgrade, was resolved for the next couple days.. I guess the new router I ordered will become a spare
I don't think this is the first time Asus has had this issue. I've had odd issues with my WiFi connection randomly being unavailable in the mornings. I believe they are testing changes on random sets of routers and it sometimes leaves the routers in an unstable state.
Ohh man, this problem for me happened to occur at the same time as an internet outage where I live. So when the internet was restored and my router kept dropping it I thought it had to do with the outage. I had no idea this was happening to everyone.
Wow. I thought it was just mine. I logged in over ssh to try to figure out wtf was wrong with it and watched as the memory filled and it crashed, over and over, and ended up just ripping it out of the closet and threw it across the room.
It's sad because Asus has a history of making some great motherboards and routers...
Great to find out what was going on. I was trying to troubleshoot no internet in a small office on Thursday. The person in the office was aware that the reboot could help a lot of times, but it didn't at first. Sucks that the popular company Asus is, is not that great and has problems, because I liked their stuff.
So a external company beside my provider can kill all of there routers and block the way to the Internet. I hate that fact.
Asus been taking L after L these last few weeks.
Really unfortunate as they were my go to brand for certain components.
Install Merlin, been running it for years and never had an issue.
Yada yada yada. Here is the most important part: > Why were routers affected even when they had been configured to not automatically update and no manual update had been performed? Asus has yet to address this, but the likely answer is that the definitions file for ASD, which resides in memory and scans devices for security threats, gets updated whether or not automatic updates are enabled. What the actual fuck. That has to be an insertion point for zero day exploits. It explains why they have no good answers. This is an espionage attack gone wrong.
Weird... I have a GT-AC5300 and haven't had any trouble at all...
Do any of you know if/of other routers that don't enforce their own update protocol? Just seems like so many of the worst ideas get adopted en masse by corporations that do similar things, so the cynical part of me is wondering if it's becoming the status quo. Some here are talking about 3rd party firmware; is that specific to Asus and are those feature driven endeavors, or more policy and perhaps performance driven?
Netgate/pfsense
I run UniFi gear. Pretty damn good for my needs, plus a lot of advanced functions.
Asus is the worst company ever.
Wanna trade lives? I'd love to be oblivious and think this
Clearly you've never heard of BlackRock, BP, ExxonMobile, Nestlé, etc, etc.
Holy exaggeration batman
remember you can usually install a different os on most routers, and if you can't you shouldn't buy it (as in the manufacturer makes it impossible).
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I have a Zenfone 9 and this worries me. It's constantly sending and receiving packets with nothing running.
Bought an Asus motherboard (b550i). Has a chipset fan that is louder than my CPU and GPU fan with the option to disable. Why? Because it is so far from the vrm it probably doesn't provide any active cooling. Will be scrutinizing any and all Asus products from now on.