I will take a look at acpid.

Since I don't have and am not familiar with ASUS, I don't have any good advice, other than:

1. Look to Linux-- they're way ahead of the OSX scene.
2. I think you are right. They way to solve this beast is a general solution, like Linux has tried to do, with laptop/desktop-specific code in libraries that use the general solution. All too often this is solved by very laptop/desktop-sepcific code. The Dell Mini guys have completely hacked ApplePS2Keyboard.cpp, fixing bugs that plague other computers, but making it so Dell Mini-specific, it's useless for others.
3. Perhaps if we can get a small group of developers together that have different laptops/desktops, we can do a generic ACPI/WMI device that can be customized by different plugins, and/or user-space GUIs.

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MacBook Pro - have allergy to nickel in the aluminum casing. So my kid gets an expensive toy!

Gateway MX 8738 - Retail, vanilla Snow Leopard 10.6.2 (thanks kizwan!) with Chameleon RC4, modified DSDT. Upgraded to Core 2 CPU (easy to do). Upgraded to 640GB drive. Everything but SD card working. Minor niggles. GMA950 with QE/CI and *no* artifacts.

iMac (luxo/lamp) G4 with Tiger.