ASUS M2405N Centrino Slim Notebook review

Hi All,
Just purchased an ASUS M2405N Centrino Slim Notebook for my wife. I plan on getting the M6 latter in the year for myself and from what I've seen of the M2 I can't wait.

Here are the specs
Intel Pentium M 1.6GHz (1M cache)CPU, 256MB DDR Ram, 14.1” TFT screen (1024x768res.), 40GB HDD, DVD/CDRW Combo Drive, 56k modem, 10/100 LAN, Wireless LAN, Firewire, MS Windows XP Pro Up to 7.4hrs battery life AUD$2699.

So here are my first impressions.

Design build quality:
Very good, the machine feels strong and well built. It looks very nice, may not have the oohah factor of an ibook, but its a lot better looking than an imb or HP or dell in the same price bracket.
Which brings me to the next point. Considering the price of this machine it is a good $1000 cheaper than a similar spec toshi or dell. Very impressed with the overall size and weight, comes in at 2.5kg (with DVD drive and battery) and around 3cm thick making it very portable.
Also came with free leather carry bag & optical mouse.

Screen:
Is good but not great. This is probably were the extra $$$ are saved. It has a good horisontal viewing angle, but vertical is not quite as good. However I have no dead pixels and on the whole I would say that in this price bracket you would be hard pressed to find a better screen.

Sound:
I'm not very experianced with notebook sound but my impressions from the ASUS are that the speakers are average. There is no bass and overall sound is poor. But I imagine this is standard for a compact notebook in this price range. A set of small speakers would be essential for decent music or DVD playback. On the plus side the sound card itself does a good job.

Keyboard/touch pad:
Very impressed with the touch pad, it has responded well, however due to the inclusion of a 'free' optical mouse it is hardly used. The keyboard is good, but a bit soft for my liking.

Wireless:
Works well, although range is abit limited (10-15m) but this maybe due to the farily crappy USB wireless adapter on my desktop and the thick double brick walls in my house, I am yet to test it out in the real world but I doubt there will be any problems.

Performance:
Well its 40+ degrees C here today and around 90% humidity. My desktop is struggling, I have had to open the case and stick a 40cm fan on it to keep it cool. But the laptop is running fine. The fan kicks in around every 30min and cools the CPU down very quickly. The noise from the fan is noticeable but far from annoying, esp compared to the 40cm one on my desktop.
It runs photoshop, office XP, etc etc all very well, even managed a bit of gaming with call of duty performing much better than I had expected from the intergrated graphics chip. Setting were 800by600 mid quality. Game play was as smooth as a babys bottom. Will crank up the settings when I can get my wife off it to see how it performs. Unfortunately she likes it way to much I get very little time to play on it.
Movies/DVDs play well no noticable problems so far.


Battery Life:
They claim upto 7h on the web site. I have been getting around 4-5h on normal power4gear settings off a single charge, so I think that 7h might be possible if using max battery settings.

Overall:
For what my wife wanted, which was a portable laptop around $2500, with a good screen and plenty of grunt for photoshop with a good screen. I am extreamly happy.
In that price range there really wasn't much to choose from. Due to back to school time there was a reall shortage of cheap notebooks around and as I needed one now not in 2-3 weeks and thus was limited to what was in stock at my local computer store. I was left with the ASUS or one of the new LG LM40 14" notebook. I went with the ASUS for a number of reasons, they have been making notebooks for awhile now, there were a number of good reviews on the web for the M2, and ASUS have a 2year world wide warrenty, as were moving to france next year this was a deal breaker, the LG had none of these.

I would highly recommend this notebook to anyone who is looking for a well priced portable notebook that has good battery life and is a good allrounder.
To sum up
"Its got a nice balance"

a
Underpantman[8D]

 

Hi there. Thank you for your detailed review. I'm very impressed that you did not jump on reviewing this laptop within a few hours of receiving it when your excitement can interefere with your objectivity. Instead, you've actually reviewed it after some use, enough to even report the average battery life per charge.

I have some more questions for you:
1. Is the laptop casing entirely made out of plastic?
2. Where is the laptop manufacturered?
3. How warm does the laptop get after watching DVD on it for a hour?

Thank you so much.

 

Hi,
Thanks for the kind words.
To answer your questions.
1. Im 99% sure the case is completly plastic. Having said that it is very solid plastic and I'm pretty happy with it. My only complaint would be that the back of the LCD screen is a bit soft but I doubt this will translate into damage.

2. It is made in taiwan
3. I have only done this a few times and it was noticeably warm in a few spots, however it has been v.hot here 35+ so not sure how this will relate in more normally temp's.
Due to the heat I got a vantec notebook cooler. very cool lookin device and reasonably quiet. This has done a nice job of keeping the notebook cool. The notebook fan has not kicked in since...yet!

Other notes. After a bit more use I would have to down grade the battery life claims I made. it is more like 3-4 h off a full charge. But I use wireless constantly, and have the screen on v.bright, these will drain the battery considerably. I'm sure that I could get 6h if I use max battery settings and turned off wireless. On the screen, after seeing a few sony's I would say that the ASUS screen is good, but no sony. Does not have the same brighness and crispness, but then in the ASUS price range not many laptops do have such nice screens with the hardware to run them.

2 weeks down the track. My wife couldn't live without this laptop. I'm still impressed with it, the only thing I might get is some more RAM, so she can crunch thru photoshop a bit quicker.
Hope this helps
a

 

Thanks again for providing a lot more details this time. You have sparked our interests.

When you say the screen is good, but not great...what about the viewing angle side to side and up and down? Are the colors washed out or vibrant?

Lastly, do you have a good review link or where to buy link for the notebook cooler you're using?? It sounds like exactly what I need. [ ]

 

The screen is good. The vertical viewing angle is not the best. For example if you are sitting and someone behind you is standing then they will see the screen but not that well. However horizontal viewing angle is much better, I would say at least twice as wide.
In terms of colour, when plugged into mains power the brightness and colour saturation are quite good. I was able to compare this model with others (sony compac toshi LG etc) at my local computer store a few days ago, and side by side the screen is a lot better than perhaps have made out. My only reference before this was my flat screen CTR which is still much better for colour and brightness.
The main complaint I would have is that the blacks suffer a bit when running off battery, or when you bump up the brightness. I am no expert in LCD screens but this one seems like its in the middle of the pack.

For the Antec notebook cooler that I got here is the link.
http://www.antec-inc.com/pro_details_cooling.php?ProdID=75004
Being from Australia I can't recommend a place to buy in Canada, but do a google search for your local area to find a dealer, or try amazon, buy.com etc!

You may also be interested in the newly released Vantec notebook cooler with 4 port USB 2 hub built in.
http://vantecusa.com/product-cooling.html#

Hope this helps,
and feel free to ask more questions!

 

Thanks again for the reply, Uderpantman. I've found some review links on the laptop cooler you've recommended. I'll post them here in the accessories forum.

I love Antec products. I've been using their cases for more than 6 years now, and they keep inventing new products that are not only cool, but very useful too! Glad to see that they are also thinking of the notebook users.

 

hi,

is m2405n anything like m2400n? i tried to look for m2405n-130 in my local outlet (am residing in Indonesia), but was told that the type was "actually" m2400n.

how do you compare this asus m2405n with other same class notebook (ie. ibm, hp, compaq, or dell) as the price range is quite close one another?

am using asus manufactured motherboard and cd-rw, and this far the experience is good. would consider to go for asus notebook as well, but am considering their (asus') experience compared to ibm/hp/compaq.

rgds,

 

Hi infitro,
The laptops all fall under the M2 XXX N banner. They may just be fitted out slightly differently, but they are essentially the same notebook. ASUS usually offers there notebooks in two forms as a barebones that re-sellers can build or as complete ready to go package. Thus naming of the XXX's often depends on the retailer.
So I wouldn't take to much notice of the numbers after the M2, just check the specs to make sure your getting what you want.

As far as ASUS goes as a notebook maker, they are newish at it, not to sure exactly how long sorry, but its around 5 years. I am very impressed with the quality vs price that they offer, in fact I will be bold and say that as value for money goes you would be hard pressed to find a better laptop maker.
Recent reports have suggest that ASUS will now be supplying IMB with a lot of there notebooks, this should give you an indication of there quailty.

Price wise I believe that the M2N comes out on top when compared to what the same cash would buy you if you were to go with a compaq/HP, dell or toshi. It is much lighter,long battery life, has a good 2 year international warrenty, & is much cheaper to upgrade memory wise than for e.g a dell.
If price, weight and long battery life are important to you than I would strongly recommend the ASUS M2N.
The other advantage is that at least in Australia ASUS is v.common, when spending $2000+ hard earned cash I like to be able to see/touch/play with a demo before I buy.
For me this rules out brands like Fujitsu, ACER and Dell, leaving only HP, IBM and ASUS.


Hope this has been helpful
a [ ]

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by Underpantman

 

The IBM would be a fine choice, although I think the ASUS is a bit better looking, but in terms of what you would get, the IBM would be a great choice. If battery life and weight are important to you then the toshi will be no compitition for the ASUS or IBM,
but if these are not an issue then the toshi would be fine.

With regards to memory, I'm 99.9% sure that ASUS notebooks use standard notebook ram, which you should be able to get at your local computer store, and install it yourself, with relative ease, and it shouldn't affect the warrenty (don''t quote me though). There should be a free memory slot available and accessable to do this.
Here in Australia the average price for a stick of good quality (eg Kingmax) 512MB DDR RAM is around $200-250. So it should be around $100-150 in the US.

If it comes down to a choice between the IBM and an ASUS I would go for the ASUS only because I'm superfical and like the look of the ASUS. To be honest I think either would be a good choice.
My advice would be to sit down and figure out what is most important to and you rank them, I found this to be the only way to make a decision.

Hope this has helped a bit [ ]
all the best in your choice
a

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by Underpantman

 

Hey Nemo.
I got mine instore from http://www.computeralliance.com.au/ for $2599

Assuming the same spec's as mine the price you've got is pretty good, and I don't think you'll do much better than that.

You can pick them up from
http://www.surpass.com.au/content/standard.asp?name=Notebooks
http://www.umart.com.au/newindex2.phtml?bid=2
http://www.thediscshop.com.au/list.cgi?page=laptop

and many other places however I'm in brisvagas so this is unlikely to help you that much.

Did a v.quick google search for melbourne and found this place
http://www.scorptec.com.au/index.php?catid=00000021&subid=00000331
Got no idea what they are like but hope it helps

Good luck mate [ ]
a

 

G'day!

Just as a follow-up - I have found even more better price here :
http://www.computercom.com.au/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=32&products_id=616

It's a funny thing, but I was driving near this shop and decided to go in. And I was ve-e-ery surprised to see a full line of ASUS notebooks in this shop[ ]

Also I have compared screen of M2400N with Fujitsu screen. Definitely Fujitsu screen is more colorfull - but still ASUS gives you pretty nice picture!

I guess I'll pick my M2400N (M2405N) in the nearest week or so. Later I'll put here my comments about this notebook as well

 

Hey Nemo,
congrats on the pending purchase, that was a pretty damm good price as well.
I hope the laptop goes well for ya. If you can post your comments/review of the notebook that would be great as well.
a
[ ]