Thoughts of ASUS A8He Budget Notebook.

Right in front of me is my almost two year old laptop, the ASUS A8He which I bought with a free awesome ASUS backpack. This is not my first laptop but this boasts all the power that I need to do almost everything (Except for extreme gaming of course). I was on a tight budget so I was planning to buy a Celeron instead. But after thorough thinking I decided to buy something in the middle of the top and low class. The prices of notebooks dropped since the Intel Core2Duo was launched this had given advantage to consumers.

It has an Intel Pentium Dual-Core Processor (T2130 to be exact) 1.8GHz, 2GB of RAM, 80GB of hard disk space, 14" of pixel real estate, has Wifi, DVD writer, and all the stuff you seldom see in a mainstream notebook. The video card is built-in so you won't expect too much gaming experience with this. But I'm telling you that this rig made me win two consecutive videos that I created as an entry for a company Christmas Party Presentation.

ASUS have excellent after sales service. I have replaced my LCD thrice and my keyboard once. It's warranty is longer compared to other vendors which only give 1 year to their products. Aside from that, they consider replacing the LCD if there is a single bright dot or what is usually called a dead pixel. I salute you ASUS!

This laptop did not came with an operating system so it's free for any qualifying OS that's out there. I had tried installing Ubuntu (Linux) on it. At first I had trouble with the audio on the version 7.x and consulted one of my Linux expert friend and gave me a solution. And when the version 8.x came out I no longer had trouble with the sound. One thing I like about the Linux OS, aside from the fact that it is free, is that you don't have to worry about computer viruses since most of the computer viruses are made for Microsoft Windows. But after all the hype of Linux, it still lacks most of the things I need to give it a go as a permanent OS. Although it has "Wine"(a windows program emulator) it still cannot display windows programs correctly most especially my Lotus Notes. I have problems with forms and fonts. Although Linux is completely free, most of my favorite applications run on Windows. That is why I opted to use Windows XP. I also considered installing Vista but it seems that most of my friend's laptops run sluggish on Vista even if their hardware are higher than mine. With XP my tasks run smoother and I can install all the applications that I mostly use. But XP cannot maintain its stability in the long run. It somehow gets sluggish after some time. That is why I again switched to another Operating System --Windows 7. I have heard that this OS takes much lesser resources compared to Vista so that's why I was excited to hear that there is already a Release Candidate 1 and one major thing that excites me is that it was free to download. Today I am writing this blog using the Windows 7 software and as far as I can say this OS is awesome. It runs like XP but with some 3d features that Vista has. The aero interface works smoothly and I have not experienced any lags yet. I already encoutered errors with Explorer but only once when I failed to comply of not turning off the PC while installing updates. But the error never appeared again so I just thought its probably just an isolated case. So far, the only trouble that's left is the microphone. It won't function during a phone call from a contact from Yahoo! Messenger.

So far, this baby has satisfied me more than my old IBM Thinkpad did. Although being a mainstream laptop it is enough to fulfill my needs and does the job done pretty well.