A8JS First impressions from a newbie...

Picked up my A8JS from MilestonePC on Friday, and I've spent the weekend playing around with it for a bit. I thought I'd post my first impressions, but keep in mind that even though I have decent experience with desktops, this is my first ever laptop.

First of all, I would just like to point out that the buying experience through Milestone has been great. They gave me a very good price through the Groupbuy (btw, thanks to whoever set that up - can't remember his name right now), and they were very pleasant to deal with. They phoned me as soon as the laptop was in stock, and I went out immediately to pick it up. They have a very nice new store, btw!

The laptop is primarily meant for my wife. Sharing one computer hasn't really worked out for us, and she wanted a laptop so that she could take it to work once in a while. We have been searching for about 8 months now, and it became clear early on that only Asus would fit our requirements: 14", good GPU, nice design, durable. The info in this forum was invaluable for narrowing down our choices - thanks everyone!

Now, let's get on with the juicy bits!

My A8JS has the standard configuration for NA:
T7200
100 Gb 5400 rpm HD
1 Gb Ram
Nvidia Go 7700 GPU
14' 1440x900 WXGA+ glossy screen

The machine is ready to go out of the box. Just insert the battery, plug in the power supply and fire it up. All that's needed is to go through the Windows setup (name, timezone, etc.).

My first impression was that it was slow to load Windows, but with the amount of icons in the taskbar, I was not surprised!

The first thing I did was to reinstall Windows from the recovery CDs. This took absolutely forever, especially the Drivers CD. Probably should have just left it the way it was. When this was done, I started to get rid of programs that I saw no need for (e.g. Skype, Norton). However, I've still left a lot of the programs since I'm not sure what all of them do.

Then I converted to NTFS, defragmented and repartioned the HD (three partitions seemed like a good idea plus the recovery partition).

I pretty much followed EBE's very useful guide

Suddenly startup was a lot faster, and now almost rivals my 3800+ X2 desktop!

For some general impressions:
It's very quiet. You can sense a slight hum from the fans, but it's not at all intrusive. I'd say it's even quieter than my 3-month old desktop, especially when gaming, which is when the slightly noisy fan on my desktop's 7900 GT kicks in. I've only played Civ 4 (my wife's favourite!) on the laptop so far, but I did not detect much increase in the noise from the fans. Very satisfied in this department!

This is my first experience with widescreen, and I'm still not completely sold. Working a lot with documents, I would have rather had more space vertically, but I'm willing to give it a try. Many people talk about the usefulness of displaying windows side by side, and this is something I will explore further.

The screen in itself is OK. Even turned to the highest brightness I still find it to be a bit dark. The vertical viewing angles are not very good, although horizontally they are great. However, if I sit centred in front of the laptop, the screen is noticably darker on each side when I glance left and right. Not very happy with this, but I can live with it. I must say, though, that the screen of the Sony SZ (which we did consider for a while, but found it too small, plus the GPU is no good) is a lot better than this.

I'm also struggling to get used to the 1440x900 resolution which makes everything on the screen very small. Maybe I'm just getting old and need new glasses!

What can I say about the sound... Absolute garbage! I expected it to be bad from everything I've read about it, but it turned out to be even worse. No bass whatsoever, very low volume, midrange and treble that grate on your nerves - even the Windows startup jingle sounds like nails on the chalkboard. This laptop will be permanently muted!

The position of the function key has been a topic of much discussion around here. Yes, it’s a bit annoying at first, but I find that you get used to it quickly. I’m a big fan of keyboard shortcuts, so I use the CTRL key a lot, and I was comfortable with the A8JS setup after a couple of days.

Another discussion topic has been the audible clicking sound made by the HD. Again, I don’t find this to be a problem. You can hear it simply because the laptop runs so quietly. On mine, it stops after about 10-20 seconds when I leave the laptop alone, and it’s not very loud. My old desktop had a HD that was failing – now, that’s what I call a loud worrisome clicking sound!

I’m very pleased with the overall look and feel of the laptop. With its silver lid it looks like a very expensive piece of equipment, and I think the overall build inspires confidence. I have spent some time with the W3J as well, and I don’t find that the extra money is worth it if all you’re looking for is better build quality. The only niggle would be the latches for the lid. The one on the right hand side doesn’t close if you push down on the lid in the middle. However, if you push down on the left (right above the left hand latch) both click into place beautifully. Obviously the right hand one isn’t lined up properly, but this is not a major concern.

The laptop came with a mouse and a carrying bag. The bag is very solid, but looks a bit old-fashioned. The mouse is a USB optical Logitech one that works very well. Nothing fancy, but very useful. Btw, the vent on the right hand side does push out some warm air onto your mouse hand while gaming, but I don’t have a problem with it at all.

I haven’t run any benchmarks, but I’m not expecting them to be any different than what has been reported in other threads. I might run some later just for fun.

Overall, my wife and I love it! Some minor concerns, but nothing we can’t live with. For our needs, this was the absolute best laptop out there. Thanks again to everyone who posted in these forums while we were making our decision – very helpful. We’ll probably draw on your knowledge again when we need a new laptop in 3-4 years!

 

hehe, your welcome. I think you're the second person from the program to receive your laptop by picking it up. Any that need to ship will go out imminently.

~ Brett

P.S. - If you re-installed the OS using the Asus recovery disc or partition, it was probably not worth it since it merely sets up the exact same configuration as when it arrived, 3rd-party programs and all.

 

I ordered my W3J on Friday ... Can't wait to get it

Cheers.

 

Congratulations on the purchase, & thanks for the impressions.

Can you post some battery life numbers once you have the chance to further explore it? Really interested in finding out if the newer GPU reduces battery time compared to the older A8Jm..

 

Thanks for the mini-review. It is appreciated! Want to write a full review, and submit it?

 

Yes you may as well copy what you posted here and then do the tests on your machine and turn in a review and get paid for it.

New pictures are not necessary but would be nice too.

 

Wow. Really hated the sound, huh? XD

 

As I reread that Im thinking of making my speaker transplant from my aged sony vaio a reality.

The thing does have excellent speakers and theyre not doing it any good anymore.....

 

Thanks guys. I'll try to run some tests tomorrow. Battery life should be easy enough if I can just get my wife to stop playing Civ 4 on it...!

Yeah, the sound really sucks. Then again, I'm a bit of a hi-fi freak, so bad sound really bothers me. A speaker transplant... Hmmm... Would that be painful?

 

Yes, it probably would be and it would kill the warranty. Maybe you could look for an external sound card like this if the card itself is the problem.

~ Brett

 

How about getting portable speakers? Unless you're kind of on the move ALL the time.

 

I'd check your machine with a pair of headphones first. You stated in your initial post that this is your first notebook, and to be honest mediocre speakers in notebooks tend to be the rule rather than the exception.

If it still sounds dodgy using cans or external speakers, I'd contact Asus... I remember there being sound issues with some of the V6J's sold earlier this year.

 

I don't think I'll bother doing anything to try and enhance the sound. This laptop will not be used for playing movies/music anyway, and Civ 4 is just as good with the sound off.

Did a battery test today. 2hrs 33 mins from startup to hibernation on a full charge. It was set to battery saver mode, and I did some heavy web browsing with several windows open at once. Again, I guess I'm giving away my newbie status here, but boy is the laptop SLOOOOOW when running in battery saver mode! When I put in the powercord and the mode changed to high performance, the difference was like going from wading in mud to running like Maurice Greene!

Super Pi came up with 1 min 3 secs (to 2 million digits).

 

I don't know, my Z33 seems snappy enough at the lowest speed step (800mhz)

 

I know this thread is old but thanks for the link to the xp install