So far I am on my 4th laptop, started with an old Hewlett Packard (2002-2005), then moved on to a Toshiba Satellite (2005-2006), after that a Gateway MX6959 (2007-2009), and since late 2009 up to now I've been using a Dell Studio XPS 1340 (Win 7 Ultimate 64 bits) that gave me nothing but head aches in the last few months... So now it's time for a change, I am looking into buying a brand new laptop, this time I was between an ASUS or an MSI laptop, as my black list of laptops consists in: HP, Toshiba, Dell :dammit: I really liked the ASUS G73JW-XA1 17.3" laptop, as it houses great power and comes at a good price ($1499 on Amazon). Specs: Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) Display: 17.3-inch LED-backlit Full HD display (1920 x 1080) Processor: Intel Core i7-740QM quad-core processor (1.73 GHz with Turbo Boost up to 2.93 GHz) Chipset: Intel HM55 Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460M 1.5GB GDDR5 VRAM WLAN: 802.11 b/g/n (@ 2.4GHz), Bluetooth v2.1 LAN: 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet Memory: 8GB DDR3 1333 MHz RAM, 4 x SODIMM (expandable to 8GB) Storage:750GB 7200RPM hard drive (1x HDD, 2x bays in total) Optical Drive: Super Multi DVD Camera: 2.0 megapixel Speakers: Altec Lansing speakers with EAX 4.0 sound Microphone: Digital Array Microphone Card Reader: 8-in-1 card reader (MMC/SD/Mini-SD/XD/Memory stick/MS Pro/MS-Duo/MS-Pro Duo) Input / Output: 1 x Mic-in, 1 x Headphone-out, 1 x VGA port/Mini D-Sub 15-pin for external monitor, 3 x USB 2.0 ports, 1 x USB 3.0 port, 1 x Gigabit LAN, 1 x HDMI, 1 x Kensington Lock Battery: 8 cell Dimensions: 16.6 x 12.8 x 0.08 ~ 2.3 –inches Weight: 8 lbs (with 8 cell battery) Color: Black So, anyone had any experiences with ASUS branded laptops? I've only heard good things but wanted to check with you guys to have some more feedback before making my decision. I will use it for studying/working (desktop apps coding & web-developing) and gaming (mostly Oblivion, Fallout 3 / New Vegas, Starcraft 2). Any comments are welcome
I have a HP Envy 15 with almost the same specs as that, except for a slightly slower CPU. I'll be honest it is very fast and powerful, but the build quality is below par... Scratched bezel, broken key, and irritating phone support. On the other hand I've only heard good things about Asus, I have a few products including graphics cards etc.. Very reliable, high quality. Just need someone with experience of their support.. But I think it's Asus all the way. I would if I had my money again.
I can only say bad things about asus : i got a high end asus motherboard on my computer and i had to try 100 different brands of ram until i found one that booted the computer at the first time allways without issues. I used pcs for so long, until my vaio notebook died, so i decided to purchase an unibody macbook just to try it. Well, it ended being my daily work computer, i got vmware fusion with xp virtual machine and fedora vm, it really does the job for me. Never had a single computer crash in 3 years, and i rarelly power off the computer. I agree that unibody macbooks are low profile computers compared with those specs asus, dell or hp do offer today, but built quality is much higher on macbooks. My advice : get a macbook if you are tired about problems, you can still use windows on a virtual machine as i do (there are things you cant still get rid of)
Interesting, didn't know about these laptop barebone kits... Yeah, later HPs build quality is horrible... they break just by being looked at... It's not like the old Hewlett Packard laptops... This ASUS looks like a beast, houses incredible power for a nice price. Well that's a bit different, as in my case I shouldn't have any of those problems as being a laptop comes with everything packed in, different story would be if I were after a desktop PC. I like Macs, but I don't know... feel like it would be a waste to buy one to use a virtual machine with Windows, and it wouldn't cater to my gaming needs as a PC would
But then he'd have a shit laptop and be a douchebag. Go for an ASUS laptop. There build quality has never faltered. I have one from 4 years or so ago that minus the battery being long gone and a few scratches is still just like it came out of the factory aswell as one I bought earlier this year and there both the exact same quality.
Given that except for Samsung (makes 100% of it's notebooks in South Korea), not one company makes their own notebooks (well Sony make 20% of theirs and Toshiba make about 3%). Most farm out the work to Taiwanese companies who have factories in China to churn them out. Asus notebooks are made by Pegatron (company spun off Asus to do notebook manufacturing), Foxconn, Compal and Quanta. Acer notebooks are made by Wistron (company spun off Acer to do notebook manufacturing), Pegatron, Compal and Quanta. Lenovo (ex IBM) have notebooks made by the same people as Acer. Dell and HP by Quanta, Compal, Wistron, Foxconn, Inventec and Flextronics. As stated before Sony and Toshiba do make some inhouse (in Japan, and these tend to be the most expensive) but most are made by Quanta and Inventec respectively. Can you see the pattern here? If you look at say Netbooks you might notice lots of them have exactly the same spec, a large number of them even have the ports in the same place and it's not surprising that they have the same OEM motherboard. Recently most notebooks have been realiable, I have two Acers which I choose because of the nice keyboard (at the time) and by the fact they have an international warrenty, which I have not used. I also had HP before this for the same reason, although I did have to use it twice on two different machines and both were repaired quickly and effectively, even getting a larger hard disc on one of the machines :] So basically you get what you pay for and if machines break they do tend to do it within the first few months or near the end of their useful life (I replace my notebook about once every two years, but I take mine around the world and it gets heavy use). So I buy machines on keyboard, warrenty and how good customer support is (some are really bad but most are good).
I think Sager/Clevo make 90% of the laptops out there. Also Asus actually makes their laptops, it doesnt oursource.
Nowadays everything is rebranded, and often it is more a matter of luck than anything else. You will find that a model by a brand works reliably and that another model by the same brand works very badly. In this world of cheap and very easily broken electronics it is quite hard to find something working really reliably. I have a 2004 Gericom-brand laptop among others, and Gericom is considered one of the worst Austrian brands with a return rate higher than 40%. That laptop has never given me real problems, except for the keyboard which decided to die on itself a day. (I use an USB keyboard on it just fine, though). I have a 2003-ish Gateway laptop of the same model of some laptops used by the U.S. Army and it gets very hot and its video card decided to die on itself (likely due to bad soldering on the manufacturer's part). Certainly nothing military-grade. I am now using an HP Compaq 6720s laptop from late 2007 as my main machine, and apart from the cheap keyboard and no possibility of disabling the touchpad from the bios (lol) it's running fine. The worst laptop I have had is a Packard Bell. If there is a brand to avoid Packard Bell is it. Its motherboard was made by Hannstar. ASUS stuff isn't all roses and flowers, and it has its share of "suckage" as well. Slot I era motherboards by ASUS often were already "defective" when they came out of the factories - they came without some capacitors they needed and so they crashed occasionally. A Slot I motherboard I have that was made by ASUS literally fried its ATX power-on section for who knows what reason. It is true that I bought it used at a pawn market, but I have never seen anything like that. I can still use due to an hack I did to the ATX PSU connecting the green and black wire together on the PSU, and the green and black wire together on the ATX connector which goes on the motherboard. There is nothing such as a "good brand" for laptops which cost less than 1100-1200$.
