Nice little “portable” is almost as good as a complete computer
My old laptop died recently … well, the video card died, and it is not able to be replaced, so I’m stuck with software rendering low-res only, which makes it virtually unusable. And I needed something fast to fill the void in my “mobility” of life.I thought getting a high-end laptop … an Alienware, for example. I still think I will eventually, because this little thing is not so capable. But money is tight for now, and portability was an issue as well, and this unit is a great stop-gap measure until I can get a “monster” laptop.
In fact, the capabilities of this little thing is much bigger than my old laptop, on the whole … with the main drawbacks being the lower resolution, smaller screen, and speakers quite poor. Otherwise, it’s a great little unit.
I bought this with an external DVD-writer (a unit of Samsung) and I’m using the same Logitech wireless mouse I’m using all along. Yes, you will need an optical drive if you ever want to install anything from the disk, of course, and it is not provided.
There is also no physical support provided to “restore” the system. (You can buy a recovery disk from Asus, but this disc will cost you $ 50 or more.) There is a “recovery partition” on the hard drive, apparently.
I heard stories about the touchpad goes haywire occasionally. But I am one of those people who hate the keyboards, so I usually just turn it off anyway. I have a small handheld mobile trackball (plane / train / car) use, and my nice mouse for use in hotel rooms and more. I only use the touchpad in rare cases, and so far I have had no problems with it.
So … what have we here? Well, we have a nice display, though small. My old laptop had 1600×1400 resolution, while this is 1388×768, and half of the screen real estate. We have speakers poor, but if you use your headset, you will have beautiful, if not impressive sound reproduction 2.0 (typical for Realtek audio quality, which is what this laptop has). We have a pretty nice keyboard, if not as beautiful as a full keyboard with a full depth of strikes, and I mistyped on it more than once (something I never do on a full keyboard, as I now use).
What I am impressed with this machine that will run the software, I never thought he could run, and can it work well. I just run Far Cry with almost zero hickups, and a pretty good pace.
The Atom dual-core CPU is not the fastest on the planet, by a long shot, but it works better than I expected. The second generation of graphics chips ION did a great job, a little better than the Geforce 4 in my old laptop.
In other words, while it is not a play station, it is far, far better than I ever expected, and works something I never expected it to be able to handle ( and my old laptop could not handle).
The machine comes with two RAM slots populated by both 1GB sticks. You can replace those with sticks of 2 GB to get up to 4 GB of total memory … and I think I’ll do it, since the machine is often hit the ceiling of his memory installed now (which is my main performance problem, I think).
It comes with a 500GB hard drive. This drive is partitions … a small “restore” partition is hidden, a 100GB “C:” partition and a ~ 350GB “D” partition. I would rather just have one system partition, but I do not want to risk the loss of data due to partition-patch, because I do not currently have a recovery CD. Suffice it to say, when the portable 1TB drives become commonplace, I will transfer this disc, in proportion to a larger drive, like my two partitions are in the top right 2 / 3 full now.
This device comes with Windows 7 64-bit “Home Premium”, which is nice (most of the “netbooks” come with “starter” edition). I plan to upgrade this to “Ultimate” at some point in the future, as there are some features I’m used to having what I did not on that machine right now.
There is a pitfall of Windows 7 (which also came into play with Vista) … the “WinSxS” directory grows in size very quickly ridiculous. It is “windows side by side” and is a tool for building Windows Vista, which has the advantage of supposely to access any application in progress, or more different versions of the installed system operating files. Well, every time you pass a Windows Update, the directory grows … now, “WinSxS” is about five times larger than my “Windows” directory installation and three times great that my “program files” and “Program Files (x32)” directories combined. At this rate, it will consume my entire hard drive, there’s no doubt! But it’s a Microsoft problem. At least with this system with a good-sized disk, there are some buffers before it consumes my entire hard drive!
So that’s my summary of the system. I am very happy together … more than I expected to be. I’ll eventually buy a “notebook monster” but for now, it is meet my needs better than I expected!
The main disadvantages of this system are the main advantages … small size of the keyboard means clumsy and small screen, and small (and “tinny”) speakers as well.
But for a traveler … this thing has an HDMI output … connect to a TV in your hotel room and you can get the output 1920×1080 on a giant screen. Use a nice wireless mouse (the touchpad on and off) and it is easy to use. Get a cheap keyboard so if you want the equivalent of a full keyboard, but I do not plan to. It is almost a “desktop replacement mid-range”, which is far from the netbooks just a couple of years, is not it?
Source : http://www.bestnetbooksbuy.com
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