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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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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.
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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