Blob blob?

Finally, after years of using a old Compaq Laptop (6yo), I finally get to buy a new laptop. After much thought, i finally opted for a performance laptop which was a bit heavier but manageable. I bought a ASUS Z99S Series at the recent PIKOM Fair. They bundled in an additional 1GB RAM and a RM600 rebate so at RM3.6K it was a sweet deal. The outstanding feature is the gorgeous 14"WXGA. 1280 x 800 res. The screen is a glossy type face, so it smudges easily, however, the great display makes up for it, perfect for my graphic designing with CS2. Build, it’s solid though with a plain exterior. Well, HPs are IMHO are more aesthetically pleasing with their scratch resistant glossy surfaces. Well, on the bright side, it’s not such a smudge magnet, though not a head turner like HPs. Mine a Core 2 DUO T7300 2.0GHZ, and equipped with a nVIDIA GeForce 8400M G with 128mb dedicated memory, great news as it doesn’t suck my RAM. This laptop is surprisingly fast for a Vista after a bit of tweaking, normally laptops that I’ve serviced with Vista  installed move like sludge. My guess is the RAM, mine’s a 2GB, and without anything running, the CPU meter will show a 49% Ram usage, means Vista sucks up at least a Gig of RAM. So, to all you thinking of getting a Vista, do get RAM of at least 2GB or more. Keyboard feels very tactile, it feels a bit stiff initially but you’ll get used to it. Perhaps to only really gripe i have with the laptop is the mid range audio frequencies resonates with the laptop plastic, producing a squeaky high pitch sound, really annoying if yo ask me. Granted, audio is it’s weakest point, a 5/10 if you ask me. However I’ve found that Winamp’s "Laptop speaker" equalizer preset actually clears the squeak! Bravo Winamp! However, I still need to find a video player to do the same for the squeak when watching movies, so for now i’m using headphones. Bloatware is minimum, thank God! All i needed to do was to throw out Norton and all is well. Pity Office 2007 wasn’t given, only a 2 month trial instead. So i installed OpenOffice, hope it suits my needs, fingers crossed. All in all, it’s a really good buy for such specs. Oh and did i mentioned it has 5USB ports? 2left 1right 2back. Perfect for ergonomics and power users. Good stuff! (^-^)   

This entry was posted on Friday, December 14th, 2007 at 5:11 am and is filed under Web/Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.