I'm on my second Asus Ultrabook UX301LA-DH71T because I can't get a stable Windows 8.1 installation. I want to love this laptop - there's nothing quite equivalent in the market right now. But I need to not have to be restoring to a working state.

The common activity that leads to the symptoms seems to be that when I open the laptop after it's been asleep, a number of aspects of the installation are changed or corrupt / broken. It's possible that another precipitating factor (besides being put to sleep) is unplugging the A/C adapter while it's asleep, but that's not as clear at this point.

The thing that seems to always change when coming out of sleep is the DPI magnification (not the resolution). All windows and fonts are significantly smaller, across the board, when I come out of sleep. A reboot seems to fix that. Obviously, that shouldn't happen nor should a reboot be required.

The really bad problems are the aspects of Windows 8.1 that seem corrupted. The effect isn't always the same, but it's some combination of: Windows Update doesn't work (checking for updates hangs, as one example); Windows Store doesn't work, or App Updates doesn't (hangs); the group policy client pops up a tool tray window (gpsvc isn't running - and no, all the articles and videos on how to fix that don't work - the system already has the requisite registry settings, etc.); other services have errors in the event viewer (BITS is a common one, ShellHWDetection, Multimedia Class Scheduler - dumps hundreds of event log entries in the space of just a few seconds, some Distributed COM errors); etc.

I have an Acronis TrueImage backup of just after 8.1 is fully installed, all updates applied, and some other basic settings configured. No 3rd party software installed. My installation was extremely methodical, including installing all Asus driver updates for 8.1, etc. I can restore to that backup, and things behave perfectly well - until I close the lid and let it sleep. If it matters, a lot of informational event log entries are generated while it's asleep - more than when it's open/awake but sitting doing nothing.

I guess two related questions, then:

1) Is this a known issue with Windows 8.1 generally? If so, is there something that can be done to actually fix it so that it never recurs (versus work around it somehow)? There don't seem to be enough of this particular laptop model in the wild to find if this is a systemic issue with it, though it happening on the second one I've received doesn't bode well.

2) Failing that, any general guidelines on making the decision to just give up on this model? As I said, I love the unit. But for almost $2K, it really ought to work.

Thanks much, and sorry for the lengthy post.

Donnie