Aug 6 2007, 02:33 PM, updated 19y ago
It's nice that it came with a free targus notebook bag that fits well, plus a usb travel mouse. It came with loads of freebies in pcfair, which are mostly pretty useless to me, things like a usb hub, another mouse (wth?), cooler pad a headset, kensington lock, screen cleaner and a sleeve that's too big for it. From the brochure, it seems like it came originally with 1GB ram, (single 1gb chip), with a free upgrade to 2gb.
Have been using it for 2 days now and here's a quick review. Sorry for the messy writing..
Build
Overall build quality is quite good, but definitely not as good as the thinkpads. There is slight flex over the if you press hard in a few areas, especially on the right of the keyboard, but wouldn't be a problem. The hinges are tight, and the screen feels quite sturdy. The lcd does flex a little, but there are no ripples on the screen when I tried applying pressure on the centre of the screen, which is impressive.. The full size keyboard is comfortable to use with a generous amount of travel. My only complain is that the few keys on the upper right hand side of the keyboard, mainly Del, Backspace, Home, PageUp, etc, are a bit mushy. The surrounding keys sink a tiny bit when u press it. The rest of the keyboard feels solid.
The size is quite large for a 12 incher. Take an A4 paper, add 1cm to its length and 1cm to it's with, and that's roughly the size of it. It's uniformly 3.6cm thick with the lid closed, and the lid itself it about 1cm thick. Not really an ultraportable, i'd say. The frame around the LCD is very thick, and i think could accomodate a 13.3" screen. Reminds me of the old Dell XPS M1330. But hey, it's almost a good RM1.5k cheaper than the W7S with the 13.3 inch screen. One thing that i'm quite unhappy about is that the supplied 6 cell's battery sticks out about 2.7cm at the rear. There's also a bulge at the top of the lcd for the 1.3 megapixel swivel camera. When closed, the battery sticking out at the rear, and the camera in front makes it somehow awkward to carry if you move around alot. It's also a bit on the heavy side, approaching nearly 2kgs with the 6 cell battery.
The matte black finish looks stylish, without being too striking or plasticky. Though to some might think it looks a little boring. I think they have silver too but it's out of stock at the moment. It comes with loads of stickers all over the palm rest. I immediately peeled them off when I reached home. I mean what's the whole purpose of advertising something you've already bought?
Unlike most other notebooks out there, it doesn't come with any media buttons. In fact, there's just a power on button, a Power4Gear button to switch between performance, power saving modes, etc, and a wireless on off switch. No fancy touch sensitive glow in the dark flashy buttons. That's good enough for me, though a dedicated volume button would be a great addition. There's also a fingerprint scanner on the right of the palm rest. On the left, there's a VGA port, HDMI port, a USB port, a card reader and an express card slot. The main air vent is also located here. The rear is dominated by the battery jutting out like a sore thumb, with the power input and lock port on the left, two USB ports on the right. On the right hand side there's the DVD burner tray, the ethernet port and modem port, and the audio in / audio out jacks. The speakers are located beside the hinge below the LCD screen. 3 USB ports is the minimum for any notebook, in my opinion. On the other hand, the touchpad is at the same level with the body of the notebook, and have the same colour and texture. The size is pretty standard, but the buttons depress very slightly when pressed, providing little feedback.
Screen
Light leakage is quite evident, but not as bad as some other notebooks. The LCD display is very bright and if it weren't for the reflections, would be very usable under sunlight. The glare is unavoidable in all glossy screens. The screen itself is vibrant and sharp, no complains about it so far. As expected, there were no dead pixels. Side viewing angles are very good, maybe even too good if privacy is important to you. Vertical viewing angles aren't that great though, but still pretty acceptable. My only wish is, well, if only it's a 13.3"...
Usage
After 20 minutes of usage, the notebook warms up considerably. Depending on the usage, the air vent on the left hand side may get very hot, with hot air blowing out as the fans kick in. The rest of the notebook remains slightly warm, which is quite acceptable. The base does get warm, but not uncomfortably so. I guess all the heat is effectively channeled out through the vents. I haven't tested the processor and GPU temp yet. Under normal operations, it's reasonably silent and barely audible in normal indoor conditions. In a silent room though, the fan and hard drive can be heard, but not too distracting.
Power / Battery
The size and weight of the power brick is unacceptable. For a notebook that weighs 4 pounds, the power brick weighs a freaking pound! If I'm not mistaken, it's the same one that ASUS is using for their larger 15.4 inch notebooks. Battery life is about average on this notebook. A full charge will lasted about 2 and a half hours with wifi on, bluetooth off, in power saving mode and about 25% brightness, doing normal web browsing. A 3-4 hour battery life would be much better, but it's a sacrifice that has to be paid for the dedicated graphics. Salespeople who claim a 4 hour battery life have no idea what they're talking about.
Performance
Vista took about a minute to boot, and continues loading stuff for another minute or so. I wanted a fresh installation, so I popped in the recovery DVD, and manually reinstalled windows, and repartitioned the hard drive. This removed all the bloat and trial software, which frankly isn't that much to begin with. Booting up to the login screen takes a little more than 40secs with a clean installation, and another 30 secs after that to load everything else. I had a bit of trouble with the fingerprint scanner in the beginning, sometimes needing two or three swipes before it could be recognized. So far, everything seemed quite responsive even when multitasking, but I haven't tried other processor intensive tasks like encoding video while running a virus scan that kinda thing.
The great thing about this notebook is that it comes with a dedicated Dx10 Nvidia GeForce 8400M G graphics card though it's the slowest version of the 8400 series. I haven't tested out any games on this notebook yet, but judging from reviews of other similarly specced notebooks, it should be slightly faster than the previous generation 7400 card. Older games like HL2, WoW, should run well at high settings. Games like Civilization IV, Rome: Total War should run fine too. Newer games like NFS:C, Oblivion, FEAR, C&C should run in low / med settings. Forget about Crysis, Lost Planet, etc..Get a 8700gt or a desktop instead. But hopefully it can run starcraft 2 when it hits the shelves.
I haven't run any benchmarks yet, probably later if anyone's interested.. But I think the T7300 2.0GHz processor coupled with 2 gigs of ram should be more than enough for daily tasks.
Multimedia
The videos taken using ASUS's LifeFrame software didn't seem that clear, certainly not as clear as Macbook's. It appears to be slightly choppy. Might require some tweaking and I'll work on that. There's a LED flash thingy on the camera beside the lens, and I couldn't seem to get it to fire. I thought it would be great if I could somehow get it to light up at night to illuminate the keyboard. Swivelling the webcam can be useful to record lectures, but otherwise, a cheap digicam can take much better video. In a quiet room, the speakers were quite loud, but very lacking in bass. A decent pair of headphones (not the free ones) or a pair of speakers are a must for gaming / movies / audio playback.
Networking
No problems connecting to my wireless G network, but I haven't really tested out the range yet. Bluetooth worked and I had no trouble connecting to my axim.
Overall, I'm quite satisfied with the notebook. I don't think there's any other notebook out there that can pack so much in so little space and deliver so much at this price range.
Pros:
1. Nice free bag
2. Great price for its specs
3. Dedicated graphics
4. Great display
5. HDMI port
6. 2 year international warranty
7. Spacious HDD
Cons:
1. Big, heavy, ugly, bulky charger
2. 6-cell battery that sticks out
3. Thick frame around LCD
4. 2.5 hr battery life
5. Poor webcam quality (??will confirm this)
This post has been edited by genotypic: Aug 6 2007, 02:36 PM
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