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.

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.