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?"

Comments

I own one

[Breakfast Pants]

the Asus is a quality product, I can say that much. But the fingerprint security system you speak of just provides a false sense of security, anyone can just take your HD outta the box and plug it in elsewhere.

Re:I own one

[indigo78]

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.

Updated Link

[beavis_kc]

The poster's original link don't work for me, but This one does

Do you need more than that on an LCD?

[Sawbones]

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.

Re:Do you need more than that on an LCD?

[thing12]

Yes - XGA was introduced by IBM.. but it's commonly used these days to indicate flat panel resolution.... and yes it's silly, I know.

• QVGA = 320x240
• VGA = 640x480
• SVGA = 800x600
• XGA = 1024x768
• SXGA = 1280x1024 (sometimes 1400x1050)
• UXGA = 1600x1200

I think he meant to say is that he has UXGA.

I had an ASUS

[dda]

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.

Nice

[_ganja_]

I was very tempted by an Asus a while back but I needed a laptop for a new position and I couldn't get an Asus in time however, my brother did purchase one and is very happy with it. They seem to be one of the easier laptops to upgrade also but he has had to get it repair once as it wouldn't boot, no reason for the failure but was returned repaired under warrenty in less than 2 weeks.

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.

Re:Or hack off your finger...

[FatOldGoth]

Wouldn't that be "crack off your finger"?

Funny spec page

[morcheeba]

From the spec page:

Hard Disk Drive
2.5" 9.5mm IDE HDD with Ultra DMA66/100 supported
Supported capacities up to 30 GB
Bumping mechanic's design
Fixed type, easy for BTO

Some dancin' auto repair technicain desgined it! Also, the hard drive isn't broken because Bachman-Turner Overdrive would find that difficult to use.

Re:anyone else?

[turbine216]

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.

While we're on the subject

[Merk]

What would people consider a good, cheap laptop, and where would you get it?

My guess for minimal requirements would be:

• 1024x768 screen (maybe more? I've never owned a laptop so I don't know what's too hard to read
• 8 GB+ hard drive (I can store most stuff on a server, but I figure I want at least that much for mobility, sound reasonable?)
• 10 MB Ethernet access as a minimum, wireless as an option (I'm guessing both of these can be handled by PCMCIA cards, is there a reason to go for builtin?)
• Durable case (If I got a laptop it would travel in a bike courier bag sometimes, a duffel bag other times -- it would need to be somewhat durable)
• It would have to be able to run Linux (RedHat with KDE ideally)
• Relatively light -- I bike to/from work so the lighter the better
• ... Am I missing anything?

I could imagine using this machine to write code, but probably generally not to build major projects. The speed of the CPU wouldn't be a major issue, and as long as there was a decent amount of memory, (say 128 MB) that would be ok.

Would an Apple iBook be an option? I like the concept of OSX, and I hear X.1 is reasonably fast, but would it be on an iBook? Are they really durable or do they just look like it because of the titanium shell? Do PPC linux distros run on that hardware? Is it any less open than a typical PC-type laptop?

As for where to get it, I wouldn't mind getting a used laptop, I'm not looking for cutting-edge, state of the art. Is there anything to look out for in buying a used laptop? Is it reasonably easy to find good used laptops? How about good used Apple laptops?

Re:While we're on the subject

[edremy]

An iBook meets your requirements nicely. No PCMCIA, but everything is already built in- Ethernet, modem, USB, Airport and Firewire. YellowDog Linux runs on it already, or you can stick with OSX.

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

So now Ask Slashdot is for product reviews?

[AugstWest]

Can you say "Slow News Day?"