ASUS U30JC Battery |
Posted: October 17, 2014 |
The touchpad buttons are silver and are very easy to press, the sound of pressing them is rather loud and somewhat annoying, but they are easy to use. The G2P emblem is in between the touchpad button and glows a nice red color. I did not find it to be a problem, being in the middle of the buttons.When using headphones, you won’t believe how well games sound. I am using Sennheiser MX400 earphones and love how games sound, everything is very crisp and clear.When playing music on earphones the sound is excellent, treble is excellent and the bass is quite good. When playing music on the speakers, once again the sound is very loud, the bass is somewhat little but still better than most laptop out there.When playing movies the sound quality is great on both earphones and speakers, the treble and bass are reasonable for watching movies.The sound card is a Realtek HD Audio and I am very pleased with its performance and quality. There are 16 levels of sound and I feel very comfortable using 3/16, any higher and you can support a small house party with just a laptop! Note one thing, install Laptopvideo2Go‘s modified 92.91 drivers at your own risk, you might get a Blue Screen of Death at the end of the installation. I did, but after the restart suprisingly LV2Go’s drivers were installed, games ran fine and benchmark scores were the ones achieved above.An Asus-branded 6-cell 4800mAh battery is used, which is by now a month old and achieves the following results (in practical situations): With full charge, the notebook ran for two 1:30hr lectures with NHC set to "Max Battery" and in the end 15% battery remained. I never had the chance to fully drain the battery, but a guesstimate would be up to 3:30 with low load.I am pleased with the array of ports offered on the U6S. It has four USB ports and an HDMI port. Asus is very good at putting enough features on their notebooks to fit any users needs. That, and giving you nice accessories included with the notebook like a bag and mouse.The U6S comes with the standard 802.11a/g type signals and the new draft N is optional. I had no problems connecting to secured and unsecured networks. Range was good compared to my R1 tablet; the U6S picked up networks my notebook didn’t even see. If you need better Internet connectivity options, you can always get 3G/3.5G Antenna support, which is optional.It comes standard with integrated Bluetooth 2.0. I tested it out with one of my Logitech Bluetooth mice and it worked as expected. I had no problems connecting the mouse or using it. I actually liked it better then the touchpad. The overall feel is snappy thanks to the 1 GB of RAM, only the 5400RPM Seagate SATA HDD was feeling a little left in the dust compared to my desktop’s 250GB 7200rpm Seagate 7200.8 HDD. For some strange reason, Firefox 2.0 temporarily hangs once in while, but maybe thats the fault of the OS. After pressing the power button, startup takes 38 seconds to get to the login screen and another 30 seconds for the notebook to become fully usable.You can usually get a pretty good impresion of a laptop’s build quality when you first touch it. If it doesn’t crackle under its own weight (like when held from one side) or if doesn’t just feels flimsy, chances are the build quality is decent. The first thing I checked was the quality of the plastics, which turned out to be pretty good. They’re rigid and there’s no noticeable wobble in areas where the plastic covers gaps inside the notebook, which are prone to more stress when handling the notebook. Also, the palm rests, at each side of the touchpad are firm enough to sustain even a heavy hand such as mine without bending a milimeter.
The Radeon Mobility X1600 is currently consdered as being part of ATi’s performance segment, and should be enough for anyone who plans on using this laptop for everything less than a full time gaming system. The card can run anything you can currently throw at it including games that require Shader Model 3.0 as a minimum, because the RV530 mobility is a fully compliant DX 9.0c graphics card.The U6S has a sharp design. It is sleek, lightweight and great to travel with. If you do travel a lot make sure you get the bigger battery though because the standard battery will have you plugged in to the wall all the time. The LED backlit screen is soft on the eyes and easy to read. The leather palm rest is comfortable and a nice touch of flare. The U6S maintains that sophisticated look, but with a knock-off price tag, which we like. It isn’t a rugged notebook by any means, but has a solid chassis and can take a few bumps and bruises of your daily grind. Overall, I was impressed and would recommend it for anyone looking for a notebook for work or school. It’s not to expensive and has great features.The ASUS K42J is the latest in the K series of affordable laptops. This 14-inch notebook features a high-performance Intel Core i5 processor, discrete graphics with Nvidia Optimus technology, and a starting price below $900. Is this the ideal back-to-school laptop? Read on to find out. The K42J has a traditional notebook design and shape similar to the previous generation ASUS K40IN. In other words, it looks like a fairly boring coffee brown notebook without much flare. The notebook features a mixture of matte black, semi-gloss brown and black and glossy brown and black plastics. All of the corners and edges are rounded to give the laptop a smoother look, and the textured touchpad and palm rests give the K42J a nice feel. The glossy screen lid features a subtle imprinted design that replicates the pattern used on the palm rests, but overall we’re talking about a very clean, simple laptop design.In many ways the gamble paid off. In others…not so much. The F9Dc is much like an Ewok. It’s small, adorable, but can only be enjoyed for about two hours, when the movie (battery) ends (dies).There’s a lot of computer here for under a grand, and it performs like it. I bought an additional 1GB stick of DDR2 and brought it up to 2GB maybe days after I received the notebook. For the price, a corner had to get cut somewhere, and the memory seems to have been it, but at least ASUS was graceful enough to leave a slot free to make it easy to upgrade to dual channel.It comes with a Targus carrying case and a Logitech USB notebook mouse! Nice inclusions that really spruce up the notebook and push the value for the price way over the edge. The F9Dc also comes with a one year accidental damage warranty on top of two years standard parts and labor. At this price, that’s incredibly good, and I think it speaks well for them.On the other hand, driver availability for the F9Dc on their site is strangely…not so good. Vista only and minimal support there. Disappointing.For regular customer service, though, I’ve been really happy with ASUS.Recently, I installed Windows Vista RC2, which ran fine but the Geforce Go’s driver support was seriously lacking so I promptly recovered back to Windows XP using the bundled recovery disks. Complete recovery time was close to an hour, if not more. If you’re on a low budget and don’t want to compromise on build quality or weaker components, then you may just find a sweet spot for an Asus F3 series notebook. The F3Jc has everything I want and has awesome value for the money paid, you’ll even get a free carry bag and optical Asus-branded Logitech notebook mouse. It does have some weaker points, such as noise and infrequent minor technical glitches, but otherwise well worth the buy.The Asus G2P is a new gaming series 17” notebook. The G2P offers an array of interesting and cool design features. The Asus G2P reviewed here comes with a Core 2 Duo T7200, a 17” screen with a native resolution of 1440×900 (WXGA+) and an ATI Radeon X1700 512mb graphics card. The Asus G1 notebook is closely related to the G2, but is of a smaller 15.4" screen size. Following is a full review of the G2.The size of the notebook is quite big and bulky. The dimensions are, 16" (length) x 12.5" (width) x 2.63" (height). The weight of the laptop is 9.7lbs and yes this is heavy, this is something I would not want to carry around on my back, but for sure for LAN parties and occasionally to work. The power brick weighs 500-grams which is equivalent to 1 pound. The dimensions of the power brick are, 5” x 1” x 1”, I find this size to be just normal like some of the other laptops out there.When I first plugged the laptop into the AC adapter, I heard an interesting gust of wind sound, the heat out of the rear vent is warm, not hot but warm when gaming.The palm rest are cool, the aluminum part of the palm rest is cold for the first 4-5 hours of use, and then it starts to get slightly warmer. The plastic portion of the palm rest is cool but will start to get Luke warm after hours of gaming.The notebook is geared towards people looking for an excellent screen, and good CPU performance and average graphical power. It is a desktop replacement for midrange performance and those who wouldn’t mind using a relatively low native resolution. In the end the notebook did meet all my needs in a 17” notebook, except for graphics. Like many we would want something much more powerful like a 7900GS or GTX or an ATI comparable solution. The price is also a bit steep for what you are getting when considering the GPU can be improved. Look forward to other 17” gaming laptops, and possibly the rumored Asus G3.The ASUS Eee PC 901 is the new update to the Eee PC … the affordable mini notebook that shook up the notebook market in 2007. This $550 mobile companion features the new Intel Atom processor, but is it the best choice for your next travel laptop? We took an in-depth look at the Eee PC 901 to find out if this mini notebook has enough performance and features to take the top spot in the popular budget ultraportable category. Like the original Eee PC, the designers at ASUS had no easy task creating an attractive ultraportable notebook while also making it cheap to produce. Customers also indicated that they wanted a larger screen and a larger touchpad, so both of these features had to be incorporated into a very small footprint.Lifting the display cover you find the same amazingly small keyboard surface found on the original Eee PC. In short, the build quality is quite high despite the low cost.The design of the original Eee PC was something truly unique in the market. Weighing in at just two pounds and delivering a performance level similar to a full-featured budget notebook, the only notebook that came close to "directly" competing with the Eee PC in 2007 was the Fujitsu LifeBook U810 tablet PC … which retailed for more than $1,000 last year. After the success of the original Eee PC, other manufacturers have started to flood the market with low cost mini notebooks. The Eee PC isn’t the only kid on the block anymore, which is why Asus is trying to raise the bar with the Eee PC 900. The Eee PC 901 (like the Eee PC 900) features a nice 8.9-inch display with 1024 x 600 resolution. While this might not be the most impressive resolution we’ve seen, it’s much nicer than the native 800 x 480 resolution on the original Eee PC 4G. Still, many owners of the original Eee PC 4G use modified display drivers to scale 1000 x 600 or higher resolutions on the original Eee PC … so this higher resolution screen isn’t as impressive as it could be.Unlike the original Eee PC, this configuration of the Eee PC 901 doesn’t come with Linux. This notebook comes pre-installed with Windows XP. While XP might not be the most modern operating system on the market, XP is still one of the most robust and stable versions of the Windows OS. Most importantly, Windows XP doesn’t have massive system requirements … so it still runs fast on a relatively under-powered notebook like the Eee PC 901.ASUS also includeed several hotkeys for quick access to functions such asbuilt-in screen off, screen resolution, power mode (power saving, auto high performance, high performance, and super performance), and Skype.Overall, the Eee PC 901 is a snappy little budget notebook. The new Intel Atom 1.60GHz ultra-low voltage processor doesn’t have the performance of a modern Core 2 Duo processor but provides a nice browsing experience. The flash-based storage drives on the Eee PC 901 help with performance since they provide virtually instant data access times.
One odd issue that we encountered with our review unit was that the Eee PC 901 produced a remarkably low PCMark05 synthetic benchmark. PCMark05 generally provides an accurate indication of overall system performance, but the Eee PC 901 produced a score much lower than its "real world" performance. It’s also worth mentioning that the last Atom-based notebook we reviewed in our office (the MSI Wind) was unable to run PCMark05 at all. Synthetic benchmark issues aside, the Eee PC 901 provides plenty of performance for travel and short-term use, but this mini notebook isn’t designed to be a primary computing workhorse.Even with the low voltage processor and SSD drives, the ASUS Eee PC 901 produced an incredible amount of heat. While the temperatures didn’t get as hot as some mini notebooks we’ve reviewed, the 901 did produce hotter temperatures than the MSI Wind. The bottom of the notebook got quite hot even under normal use. Fan noise was among the quietest we’ve heard. The only way to tell the fan is blowing is to put your hand next to the air vent to feel the warm air blow past.
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