mrDMxtreme
New member
The Asus U36SD-A1 is my first experience with anultraportable (its not like the upcoming 'ultrabooks' that are the size ofmacbook air's, but its thinner and lighter then notebooks). I will try to writethe review as best as I can, but I am not Tom or VonBlade, also this is myfirst full review that I have written, so keep that in mind.
First I’ll start with its looks, this is subjective but I personallyreally really like the looks of the thing, its so sleek its frame, keyboard,lid, and bottom (so everything) is black, the trackpad button, power button,and Asus logo are highlights and they’re chrome. From the side its really thinso whats not to like? Also what I shouldmention is the material this is made of, magnesium-aluminum alloy. I reallylike it, its hard to get finger print on it, and it feels soft, I don’t knowhow to describe metal as soft, but it is. And the trackpad uses some type ofglass or plastic that feels very similar to the frame of the laptop, but just abit more ‘slippery’ (but more on the that later). Oh and the bottom is plastic,just saying.
Next, the specs. So this has a 13.3” LED screen with a1366x768 resolution. It’s got an Intel core i5 2410m (which I was pleasantly surprisedto see is a dual core with HT, so 4 cores
) its clocked at 2.3GHz and has aturbo speed of 2.9GHz. It also comes with ONE 4GB dimm of DDR3 memory, which isKingston RAM and its speed is 1333MHz, and its timings at 9-9-9-24-1T. Thereason I stressed that it was one dimm is because this makes it easy to pop inanother one if you ever want to upgrade to 8GB. The GPU it has is a Nvidia GT520m 1GB with optimus (its also got intel’s HD 3000) and optimus actually workspretty well, you’ll see when I mention the battery life. The HDD it comes withis a 640GB Seagate momentus 5400RPM (more on this in a bit). And lastly its gota great 8cell battery. Now that I covered the internals, on the exterior thereare 2USB 2.0; 1USB 3.0; HDMI; VGA; Ethernet; card reader; head phone jack; micjack; and where you plug in the ac adaptor. OH and almost forget the most important (tome) part, the weight, all this is packed into just 1.66kg
.
I’m now going to tell you how it feels to use this machine.First the keyboard, which is one of the things that gets used the most. Thekeys are a little bit stiff (but this is probably normal for a laptop, I’m justused to my desktop’s mechanical keyboard) but the layout is perfect. I say thisbecause even though the right shift key is small then usual its never caused mea problem, and there is no funny business with the backspace and enter keys. Ishould also mention there is practically no flex in this keyboard at all. Next thetrackpad is great, your finger slides on it perfectly and there is the right amountof friction. I thought I was going to need a mouse before I bought it, but nowunless I want to game (and this is not a gaming laptop at all, I have mydesktop for that) which I probably won’t, I’m happy with the trackpad. The mostannoying thing though is that asus just crapped on the button(s) for thetrackpad. When you press it, its loud and irritating, so I try my best to onlytap to click. I did however notice that if I need to use it, if I put anotherfinger on the opposite side that I am clicking, the noise was reduced. (ex. If Iwere to need to right click, I would putone of my fingers on the left side of the button). Next the screen, its kindashiny as so its reflective if you are near a window or something, but under artificiallight (at school/in the even/closed blinds) it’s a pretty good screen. (I’m noexpert on screens, I just need to see what I’m doing)
Battery life: ITS GREAT! Using windows pre-set of “highperformance” (which is the only one I use) I can get an amazing 6-8 hoursdepending on what I’m doing. If just web-browsing or pdf viewing (which is mostof the thing I do at/for school) its closer to the 8 hour mark, and when I wasinstalling programs for school and viewing a couple of youtube videos and such,I got around 6 hours. Back to the how well optimus works, I think the batterylife is so good because it uses the integrated gpu for almost anything, andonly turns on the 520m IF doing something graphically intensive, or if you setit to turn on. I am very pleased with it.
So as I said before this isn’t a gaming laptop, so I didn’tinstall any to try out, but I did spend 5 minutes to download and playminecraft (which runs ok with the HD3000, ~20-40fps) (but runs great with the520m ~80-110fps).
Now before I give you a closing statement, let me just saythat there is quite a bit of bloatware that comes on this, I know all laptopscome with it, just letting you know this is no exception.
Now that I told you most of what I know about the laptop,let me just tell you what I bothered me. The HDD. My last laptop (well it was atank, and couldn’t be used on my lap) was an alienware m17x, and it had a 256GBSamsung SSD in there (one of the first I think, the p800 or something like that)and then the desktop I built has a 120GB vertex3. So I’ve been used to SSDspeeds and where you feel the difference the most is boot up time. Now somepeople might not care how long it take, if its 20seconds or if its 3minutes. AndI wouldn’t care so much for a desktop at home either (I mean I would prefer itto be faster, but I could live with it if it wasn’t) BUT for a laptop that I needto turn on and off a bunch of times at university, It irritated me soo muchthat booting up and shuting down was taking so long. So what I did was switchthe m17x’s ssd with the drive in here (my dad is currently using the m17x as adesktop replacement, and he doesn’t really need anything too impressive). Nowwith this ssd everything feels nice and fast (and this got rid of all the bloatware,since I did a complete reinstall).
Now for upgrading the HDD it was a mission, you really got to gut the thing.
first removed little plate at the back.
<p class="MsoNormal">
First I’ll start with its looks, this is subjective but I personallyreally really like the looks of the thing, its so sleek its frame, keyboard,lid, and bottom (so everything) is black, the trackpad button, power button,and Asus logo are highlights and they’re chrome. From the side its really thinso whats not to like? Also what I shouldmention is the material this is made of, magnesium-aluminum alloy. I reallylike it, its hard to get finger print on it, and it feels soft, I don’t knowhow to describe metal as soft, but it is. And the trackpad uses some type ofglass or plastic that feels very similar to the frame of the laptop, but just abit more ‘slippery’ (but more on the that later). Oh and the bottom is plastic,just saying.
Next, the specs. So this has a 13.3” LED screen with a1366x768 resolution. It’s got an Intel core i5 2410m (which I was pleasantly surprisedto see is a dual core with HT, so 4 cores
I’m now going to tell you how it feels to use this machine.First the keyboard, which is one of the things that gets used the most. Thekeys are a little bit stiff (but this is probably normal for a laptop, I’m justused to my desktop’s mechanical keyboard) but the layout is perfect. I say thisbecause even though the right shift key is small then usual its never caused mea problem, and there is no funny business with the backspace and enter keys. Ishould also mention there is practically no flex in this keyboard at all. Next thetrackpad is great, your finger slides on it perfectly and there is the right amountof friction. I thought I was going to need a mouse before I bought it, but nowunless I want to game (and this is not a gaming laptop at all, I have mydesktop for that) which I probably won’t, I’m happy with the trackpad. The mostannoying thing though is that asus just crapped on the button(s) for thetrackpad. When you press it, its loud and irritating, so I try my best to onlytap to click. I did however notice that if I need to use it, if I put anotherfinger on the opposite side that I am clicking, the noise was reduced. (ex. If Iwere to need to right click, I would putone of my fingers on the left side of the button). Next the screen, its kindashiny as so its reflective if you are near a window or something, but under artificiallight (at school/in the even/closed blinds) it’s a pretty good screen. (I’m noexpert on screens, I just need to see what I’m doing)
Battery life: ITS GREAT! Using windows pre-set of “highperformance” (which is the only one I use) I can get an amazing 6-8 hoursdepending on what I’m doing. If just web-browsing or pdf viewing (which is mostof the thing I do at/for school) its closer to the 8 hour mark, and when I wasinstalling programs for school and viewing a couple of youtube videos and such,I got around 6 hours. Back to the how well optimus works, I think the batterylife is so good because it uses the integrated gpu for almost anything, andonly turns on the 520m IF doing something graphically intensive, or if you setit to turn on. I am very pleased with it.
So as I said before this isn’t a gaming laptop, so I didn’tinstall any to try out, but I did spend 5 minutes to download and playminecraft (which runs ok with the HD3000, ~20-40fps) (but runs great with the520m ~80-110fps).
Now before I give you a closing statement, let me just saythat there is quite a bit of bloatware that comes on this, I know all laptopscome with it, just letting you know this is no exception.
Now that I told you most of what I know about the laptop,let me just tell you what I bothered me. The HDD. My last laptop (well it was atank, and couldn’t be used on my lap) was an alienware m17x, and it had a 256GBSamsung SSD in there (one of the first I think, the p800 or something like that)and then the desktop I built has a 120GB vertex3. So I’ve been used to SSDspeeds and where you feel the difference the most is boot up time. Now somepeople might not care how long it take, if its 20seconds or if its 3minutes. AndI wouldn’t care so much for a desktop at home either (I mean I would prefer itto be faster, but I could live with it if it wasn’t) BUT for a laptop that I needto turn on and off a bunch of times at university, It irritated me soo muchthat booting up and shuting down was taking so long. So what I did was switchthe m17x’s ssd with the drive in here (my dad is currently using the m17x as adesktop replacement, and he doesn’t really need anything too impressive). Nowwith this ssd everything feels nice and fast (and this got rid of all the bloatware,since I did a complete reinstall).
Now for upgrading the HDD it was a mission, you really got to gut the thing.
first removed little plate at the back.
<p class="MsoNormal">
