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What Do You Think of ASUS Laptops?
Dan Guisinger asks: "I'm looking at replacing a laptop that was recently stolen and came across ASUS's new B1000 series laptop. It seams to have everything one could want, dual FireWire ports, DVD, CDRW, 15" screen, upgradable Pentium III cpu using mPGA2 sockets...it even has finger print security. My only problem while looking at the specs is the measly 1024x768 XGA resolution it supports. I am unable to find reviews on this laptop, nor most other ASUS laptops. Can anyone speak of the quality of their laptops overall? How about this particular model, has anyone seen or used the B1000?"
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It seems like it would be all but useless to have much more than 1024x768 on a laptop screen (well, maybe a little larger would be nice). 1600x1200 would be too small to be useful for me I would think. If you want a higher resolution you should probably just hook it up to an external CRT.
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I used to have an ASUS L-7200 , I've never had any problem with it, everything was working perfectly, except I had to use the X Frame Buffered server under linux because the graphic card wasn't supported at all.
The only problem was that I made the mistake to buy it with a 12"1 screen (800*600), which was too small for the use I had to make with it later.
Now I have a Compaq Presario 1801-EA, that I bought because of its screen 15", 1400*1050. Everything's working perfectly either under under Linux and Windows.
Anyway, all that depends of what you have to do with it.
I can also tell you that if I've a compaq now, it's mainly due to the fact ASUS doesn't sell any screen bigger than 14", as far as I know.
The only thing that I would worry about personally is the savage video card, I would *personally* be looking for a Geforce 2go based laptop or wait until the new NVidia mobile chipset has found its way in to a notebook. This could take a while and also depends on your needs, I fly model helicopters and like to use a PC based sim while on the road to practice so the more polygon pushing power a laptop has the better.
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The specs looked great, except for the 1024x768 resolution and this little gem "Weight ~3.3kg (w/ 15" LCD, 9.5mm HDD, 24X CD-ROM and 9 cells Li-Ion battery pack)". At 7.3 LBS, it's just a brick with nice colours...
Jean-Sebastien Morisset, Sr. UNIX Administrator
I've got one, too.
Mine is Asus L8460K, p3/1Ghz, 20gb hd, 256mb ram. Linux runs very well on it (I'm using Slackware, but I've also had OpenBSD, Redmond Linux and Mandrake running on it, just trying other distributions and OSes).
Product quality is very good, though I've seen better LCD displays (e.g. on Compaq) and tech support isn't as good as the notebook itself (had some problems with tv-out but solved them by myself, in 6 weeks they haven't answred my e-mail). I'm Italian, so maybe tech support is different in other countries.
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I worked for a place who sold and fixed these things in 1997-1999. Overall, they were as good as TI, Dell, NEC. Better than Apple but worse than Compaq / Toshiba. This is purely from a sturdiness standpoint.
Parts were pretty easy to get too.
I'd stick with a Toshiba, IBM, or Compaq though.. They usually don't cost much more, and are just built better and are easier to get parts.
Your numbers are only valid for the standalone lcd market. There are many notebooks with very special lcd panels. There are notebooks with a14,1" and 15" TFT with a resolutions of 1400x1050 or 1600x1200. And for subnotebooks you can find 10,4" and 12,1" XGA displays. Also you shouldn't forget the Ti Powerbook that has a widescreen TFT with a resolution of something like 1186x768.
Jan
you just described most of the current ultra-portable notebooks in existence. Try these:
Dell Inspiron
Compaq EVO
Sony VAIO R505 series
You'll have some trouble finding a notebook that is completely devoid of those features you mentioned. All three of these come with the standard legacy and PS/2 connectors, but none of them have any internal floppy or optical drives, which saves a great deal of weight and battery life. And they're all about $1400...not too bad if you ask me. We use the Dells here at my place of employment, and they work great. It's not mentioned on Dell's website, but you can order any of their laptops without an operating system at a $100 discount.
The iBook isn't titanium: that's the G4 laptop. It's polycarbonate plastic, and probably more durable than a TiBook. (My TiBook is beautiful, but feels a bit fragile.)
As far as CPU speed for OSX, my G4-500 TiBook and OSX are ok. The iBook has a G3 but that's not a major speed loss unless you really need Altivec. OSX wants memory, lots and lots of memory. I had 256MB: it's not enough for OSX running Classic and heavy OSX apps. 512 seems more reasonable.
Don't bother with a used machine, PC or Mac. You can get a nice iBook for $1300 or the 600MHz model for $1500 and you can do as well with a new Dell.
Eric
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At our company we've used ASUS laptops for nearly three years now, and I've been through two of the flagships (L8400 and the older F8400 (i think)) and they've been top notch quality, especially considering we've taken them along for demos, used them on long flights. Even now, we have one at Comdex. A guy at work uses it for linux work and he's very happy. The most severe problem we ever had with one was the spring to the powerbutton giving out, but thats it. Compared to the Compaq's I used at my old work (which had a tendency to lack good drivers and also had serious problems with the screen going berzerk/garbled), these rock.
;)
If I had to say something bad about them, its that they lack GeForce2Go, so my "leet skillz" in Unreal Tournament really suffers from playing on them
Knowing the processor socket is a good thing
(unless intel deprecates it too early).
Another good thing is the MAP, Mobile AGP Package, which can make it possible for some upgradability of the graphics too (like some people succeded in upgrading their Dell PC's to Geforce2Go).
Read about Nvidias cool 64 Mb MAP package.
Maybe someone knows when you can expect mobiles with this option on the market so you can buy one without having to wait for the good graphics chips to be available.
Also, there's talk about intel working for more standards in modular mobiles, any examples? I'd love a MiniPCI with both Firewire and 100 MBps networking, that socket is just to good for a measly modem.