I am writing this review because I was agonizing over buying this and I couldn't find any reviews on it, which usually is not a good thing. It's been about two weeks of heavy use and I plan on updating this as time goes on. First, I searched for about two months and considered every conceivable configuration of laptop trying to find what I wanted. I concluded I wanted a light 12.1 inch laptop with an optical drive that had decent speed and battery life. I was fairly certain that configuration didn't exist and was about to buy the ul30 without the optical drive, when I stumbled on this bad boy.
Pros:
SIZE!! I really think this is the perfect size form factor for anyone who has to carry a computer on a daily basis; not so thin I am afraid I will snap it in half but not so think and heavy I break my arm carrying it to work (my old laptop was 6 lbs and this one is 4, soooo much better). It's about the size of two or three magazines stacked on top of each other. It slips right in my briefcase and I hardly notice it. The screen size is actually more than big enough, I absolutely love the size of this thing.
ASUS backing their product - ASUS offers a free 2 full years of warranty on this product plus a free year of accidental damage coverage. To buy this for an apple costs $200 at least. I know they're good for it because they offered to fix my computer when I had an issue (see support)
Light up keyboard - this wasn't even on my radar but now that I have it it's probably my favorite feature. It just looks good. I can type with ease at night while I'm watching TV or any dim light situation. You might think you wouldn't use it but I was surprised by how convenient it is. Also, when it's bright it automatically shuts itself off to save battery. I read a lot about this "keyboard flex" issue. I now see what people were talking about. There is a liner/spacer cutout which lays between the keys, when you type the thin sheet moves a little, I mean a tiny bit. I really don't know what these people are freaking out about, the keyboard is a joy to type on, good size and I like the chicklet keys, no complaints at all. Don't let this "flex" non issue worry you.
Mouse pad - I've found this to work really well, way better then my old one, it also lights up when you move your finger around but you can easily turn that feature off if it annoys you. It incorporates the multi touch functions I've seen on some friends Apple laptops (i.e. two fingers down scrolls the page down, three finger tap is right click) this has proved to be very useful and convenient.
Power Cable - Something I never thought about was the plug it comes with is about half as heavy as my old one, the block in the middle is really small and light and I never realized before how annoyingly heavy and bulky my old one was.
Battery - it gets about 5 solid hours on the high performance setting. I haven't tested it on battery saver because it works so well in high performance and I'm rarely away from power for more than 5 hours. ASUS offers a really nice utility called Power4Gear, which allows you to manage your battery by controlling your processor and screen output. I haven't used it that much yet though. The 9 cell battery is not currently available; ASUS doesn't know when it will be.
Utilities - the computer comes with 15 utilities of various usefulness, some are really nice some are kind of useless but the ones that are useful are very nice to have. Also these, Norton and office trial are the only bloatware on the computer which is nice.
Ports - this has all the ports I need and none of the ones I do not, 3 usb, hdmi, multi card, vga, gigabit - its perfect.
Camera works well, as does the mic, picture comes through clean. There is a little green light that comes on when the camera is in use which is nice.
Cons:
Price - ~$950 is a lot to spend on a computer these days. I got lucky and bought the discontinued U20A-B1 for a huge discount , the B1 is the same hardware just with Vista 32 bit, I then upgraded it to Win 7 Pro 64 bit. You might check and see if you can find the B1 for cheap as they are trying to get them out the door right now. Just beware of the upgrade to 64 bit as it caused me several headaches (see support below). Everything is solved now and I'm finally content with my operating system.
Fingerprints - Wow, seriously wow...it is as though this is made of some magical material which sucks the oils out of your skin and glues them to itself. This is my least favorite thing about it, if this was made with the aluminum case I really would say it is perfect. Just know you are going to have an oil caked finger print laden computer.
Screen - I had a really nice screen on my old computer and am still adjusting to this one. On its own it is a gorgeous display but the contrast in certain cases is not good. For example when excel is open you can't see the light lines separating the cells. I've found if you tilt the screen way down you can improve the contrast quite a bit. Again this is a minor issue but still a negative.
Hard drive - I don't know why but I have a pet peeve about hard drive noise, this one is constantly doing that muted click-reading noise that my computer in the 90's did, it drives me crazy, so much so I ponied up and bought a solid state drive to eliminate the issue. I doubt it would bother most people but it was really annoying to me.
Speakers are pretty weak but I wasn't really ever planning on using this as a stereo. They are functional for the occasional time I want to show someone a video.
Also:
Support - I've found the support people to be all around courteous and responsive individuals. Because I upgraded from 32 bit vista to 64 bit win 7 I had to call them about 6 times for driver issues. Each time they pitched a fit that I didn't use the ASUS windows 7 upgrade and said I had to reformat back to vista to fix the problem. I did this and ended up wasting 8 hours of my time, it did not fix the issue and I found the solutions using google. They did offer to RMA my computer and fix it though and really were trying to help they just had no idea how to solve the problem I was having.
Processor - this is not a beastly processor, it suits my needs perfectly but I'm not sure it would be good for any serious gaming. I might try to play a few games on it later though and will update.
Summary:
Despite the cons I listed I am thrilled with my purchase. This is the perfect combination of the best features of netbooks (small size and portability) and laptops (computing power, optical drive, hdmi). For my specific needs this thing is perfect. I give it a very high recommendation.
Update 1:
been a couple more weeks and I am even more pleased with this machine. I recognized the utility of the optical drive when I absolutely had to have one three times for work randomly. I knew this was going to happen and decided my paranoia would have meant I would be carrying a stupid external optical drive back and forth. I'm really glad I have an internal one, one less thing to worry about.
I played around with one of the ASUS utilities called splendid utility and was able to drastically improve/darken the contrast, this screen is really nice now. No complaints.
I sold my old computer and when I opened it up to reformat it and realized how unnecessarily huge it was compared to this thing, I had a hell of a time trying to type on it and the screen looked dull and dark. It just goes to show how fast I adapted to this thing.
Hold Crap the SSD is faaaantastic, and extremely easy to install. Take out two screw and pop out a panel, take out three screws and pop out the hard drive, then 4 more screws to get the hard drive out of its frame, stick in SSD and screw back in, done and done computer is now twice as good as it was. It really seems like the processors aren't working as hard as well but I didn't test it before. I got the entry level/low end Kingston v-series 128 gb model which will be discontinued in February and is about half as good as high end models but also half the price and three times better than the one that came in this thing. The computer boots super fast, it actually made me laugh the first time it did because it was so strange. All applications open in 1-5 seconds (the most dramatic improvement is in Microsoft outlook which has always taken forever to open), it is lighter, uses less power(could be impacting my battery life statements), way more durable and dead quiet no noise other than the fan which I have to hold up to my ear to hear...it is absolutely worth the cost in my opinion. Just amortize the time savings over the period you will be using the computer and put a price to your time saved. Plus the v-series came with a little kit that turned the old hard drive into a removable drive and really nice imaging software that transferred an exact copy of the old hard drive to the new one so I didn't have to relive my driver nightmare. But I digress...
I found the multi-touch driver and installed that. I didn't; realize there were about 20 gestures you could do on it, and you can edit what motions cause what. I change right click to two fingers taping. There are a lot of cool things you can do with this. One other thing I forgot to mention is that a lot of the new ASUS computers have weird spaced dots for the touch pad that a lot of people have complained about. This one has a really nice smooth touchpad that is really nice to use. My other one was made of metal and was not nearly as good.
Battery life is still good but I haven't tried the basic or battery saver settings. I had it unplugged streaming a tv show on full screen and that caused a significant drain on the battery, still said it had 2.5 hours after about 1.5 hours of this though. Also, it takes a very long time to charge this battery, probably because it is three times larger than my old one but it takes several hours (2-4) especially if I am using it while trying to charge.
I also have the following gadgets displayed (Black and dark Notes,margu-Notebookinfo2(must have awesome! It looks cool and is extremely useful, ultimate explorer, weather) it took me awhile to find good ones and these work really well on this computer
Finally I found a good link to tell you what the asus utilities do and which ones should go:
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that's all for now.
Get more detail about ASUS U20A-B2 12.1-Inch Black Laptop (Windows 7 Home Premium).
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