As a owner of Asus UL30A I have been looking for ways to make it more responsive. Upgrade to SSD seems like good choice.
Over the years there has been lot of reports about BIOS not compatible with SSD, so I have postponed this task until now. But as Windows 10 free upgrade is going to end one day I decided to solve all issues it one go.
First: seems like for success you will need the latest bios version 212
Second: I decided to go for Samsung EVO 850 500GB. Samsung has nice free software for disc cloning called Data Migration Software. Sticked new SSD into external usb HDD dock, installed Samsung’s software and in less that 2 hours process was completed. Probably USB is the speed limiter. For using this software target must be Samsung’s disk.
Third: Replaced current HDD with new SSD, closed panel, powered up and current Windows 7 started without any issues.
Fourth: Started Windows 10 upgrade. It took some time to download and prepare. Some software was uninstalled as incompatible. But then upgrade stuck on Daemon Disk Tools to be uninstalled manually. Did not found it in programs list. Seems like upgrade uninstalled it but not fully. There are several articles in web how to reinstall it and use thirtparty uninstaller. But what worked for me was this – download current Daemon Tools 10 , start installation an it will give option to uninstall current version. This was sufficient for Windows 10 updater to continue. After some wait and reboots my Asus UL30A has now SSD and Windows 10. For upgrade I left notebook on overnight , at at morning it was warm, but nothing near to temperature it used to be with HDD.
All went very smoothly. Boot time (battery powered without power adapter) was from pushing power button to login screen about 19 seconds and with full login (includes password instert) about 40 seconds. Shutdown from logged in state took about 16 seconds.
PS. If you can’t figure how to verify current BIOS version then there are the shortcuts available for Asus :
Asus UL30A Function Key Combinations (Notebook)
| F2 | Key on boot up to enter BIOS. |
| Fn + F1 | Puts the notebook into suspend mode (Save-to-RAM or Save-to-Disk depending on sleep button setting in power management setup). |
| Fn + F2 | Switch Wireless devices or Bluetooth(on selected models) on/off. |
| Fn + F5 | Decrease display brightness. |
| Fn + F6 | Increases display brightness. |
| Fn + F7 | Turns the display backlight on/off. |
| Fn + F8 | Switch between laptop screen and external display. |
| Fn + F9 | Switch touchpad on/off. |
| Fn + F10 | Switch built-in speaker on/off. |
| Fn + F11 | Decrease built-in speaker volume. |
| Fn + F12 | Increase built-in speaker volume. |
| Fn + C | Switch the “Splendid Video Intellient Technology” function on/off. This allows switching between different display colour enchancement modes to improve contrast, brightness, skin tone and colour for red, green and blue. |
| Fn + V | Toggles “Life Frame” camera utility. |
| Fn + Space | Switch among various power saving modes. |
| Fn + Down Arrow | Play/Pause media file. |
| Fn + Up Arrow | Stop media file. |
| Fn + Left Arrow | Rewind to previous track/movie chapter. |
| Fn + Right Arrow | Fast Forward to next track/movie chapter. |