Four Loveable Laptops from Asus (1)

Leave a commentAsus is best known for Eee PCs and quality Laptop Battery desktop PC components, but they have some nice notebooks too. We look at some great choices for under $1000, gaming, desktop replacement, business, and fashion notebooks.

Asus Makes A Good Laptop

Asus wants to sell more notebooks, and we think their product line is definitely able to compete with better know names. Here are our four favourites, each representing a different laptop category. One reason Asus buyers tend to become fans are the goodies they include with their hardware products. They don’t skimp on their notebooks either.

Everything we are looking at today (except the G50, which only has the latter 3) comes with a carry bag, optical mouse, and dust cloth, as well as ABGN WLAN, Bluetooth, and built Acer Laptop Battery in webcam. While webcams are pretty common, Asus includes a SmartLogon feature for facial recognition enhanced security. They also include Norton Internet Security 2008, Nero Essentials, and Vista Home Premium, or, for the U6, Vista Business. All Asus notebooks (except from some retailers and for barebones notebooks) carry a 2 year parts and labour warranty and a one year accidental damage warranty that covers drops, spills, and fire. You even get 30 days to swap it with Asus if you discover any bright dots (pixels that stay lit all the time) on the screen.

A Lot of BTP-58A1 Laptop battery for a Thousand Dollars

The Asus N50Vn-A1B, at $949.99 barely squeezes into this category, but it is absolutely loaded at that price. A 2 Ghz Core 2 Duo processor, 4 GB of Ram, and dedicated 9650M GT graphics, with a whole gig of memory just for the graphics, are a lot to jam into a 1000 dollar notebook.

And you get more than parts that perform well. The N50 line includes features like a fingerprint reader and Asus ExpressGate. ExpressGate is a tiny Linux implementation with a few critical apps (IM tools, web browser, so on) that live in solid state storage on the motherboard. It can boot up in as little as 8 seconds. This allows you to rent a car online with the laptop balanced in one hand riding an airport conveyer belt, while your colleague is still waiting for Windows to finish loading. He’s also used up way more battery power firing up his whole laptop; your drives didn’t even TravelMate 220 battery turn on.

The N50 also has a great complement of ports on it. You’ve got all the basics: express card, 8-1 card reader, audio in/out, VGA, 3 USB ports, and an Ethernet port. But DVI is replaced with HDMI, the audio out is S/PDIF, there’s an IEEE 1394 and even an eSATA port. That eSATA point might be a big plus, since this machine is stuck with a 250GB hard drive.

Other than the smallish hard drive, another problem is the bloatware. Unfortunately, to keep the price down, manufactures accept money from software publishers to put trial versions of all kinds of software on their products. The problem is: the trial versions are so limited in functionality, and aggressive in pushing you to upgrade, that it amounts to having a system full of adware. Plan on spending an hour getting this stuff of your new system.

That, and the less than big hard BTP-43D1 battery drive, can be overlooked given everything else this system includes for under a grand. And while this price point doesn’t get you leather or brushed aluminum, the N50s are sharp enough lookers. The vertical grain in the plastic is reminiscent of brushed metal, but without looking like it is a cheap attempt at faking it.

If you would rather save on weight and size, this 14.1 inch N80 is a pound lighter. It drops the eSATA port, but you get an extra 2 USB ports and a CIR for a remote control.

Working on the Road

While we spent more on a smaller laptop for our best business notebook from Asus selection, we’re still getting a lot for our $1605.99. The Asus U6V A1 M6091 battery is indeed saucy (pun intented) in performance and appearance. The 4 GB of RAM and 2.26Ghz CPU are nice, and the 9400M graphics are an outright rarity for ultraportables. The speed this little fella’ can keep up is really impressive.

You get the almost the same port setup as the N50, but the U6 drops IEEE 1934 for a fourth USB port. That might be inconvenient if you already have FireWire drives, but if you are buying a new drive, eSATA is a much better bet anyhow. The U6 also upgrades your A1148 battery included mouse to Bluetooth.

And you get some features that make this look like a more expensive notebook. The leather palm rest is usually seen only on very pricey kit. The Mocha brown with sparkle and blue flecks may not be for everyone, but it certainly stands out from everything else around the meeting table.