Looking for an Asus laptop that's portable. Suggestions/questions.

Hi everyone. I'm in the market for a laptop in the 13-14 inch range with a decent CPU/GPU combo. I've come across the following laptops:

1. Asus UL30 (GForce 210/Core 2 Duo SU7300)
2. Asus UL80 (GForce 310/i3-330um)

I'm just trying to get the facts straight and all here. First off, I hear Asus customer support is sort of a pain in the which makes me want to make sure that one/both of these laptops are good and don't have any common issues. One "common issue" is the one that plagues 1215N owners. I looked at the eeeuser section and they talk about broken DC plugs because the plugs are too small. Does this effect other Asus models? Since these two are ultraportables, they might have a simialr design to the 1215N so I'm just trying to get my facts straight.

 

What will you use the laptop for?

 

Basic stuff, and SC2. I already know they can run SC2 on low settings, 1vs1. I just need to know if they have any inherent problems cause I don't want to deal with RMAs and stuff.

 

For SC2, i would try to get a better CPU as most blizzard games are really cpu bound. I think if you want to stick with asus, maybe something like ASUS U31JG-XA1 $699. Another to keep in mind is Acer Aspire TimelineX AS4820TG-6847 $725, better cpu and gpu than the asus. Btw I recommend to buy either from amazon, they have a very good 30day exchange policy so you can avoid dealing with Asus/Acer, they would overnight you a new one in case any problems with yours, and they even refunded the shipping that i paid for returning my defective.

 

ASUS customer service is indeed a pain to deal with, although from my experiences their products are generally reliable enough that poor customer service is relatively irrelevant.

As for the plug, I'm not sure how do you define "small", but on my UL80, I never had the problem of breaking the plug. The plug is about 3~4mm in diameter, and unless you really jam that plug, it is highly unlikely it will break.

 

Yeah, I was looking at getting a 1215N, and the pin for the plug is 0.7mm thick. Basically a needle, very prone to breaking, and many complaints about it in the eeeuser.com forums. I actually found the same diameter plug in a universal power adapter I have, and it's scary small.

 

Thanks for clarification guys. Unfortunately my budget doesn't really allow me to go past 620 bucks. My set limit was actually 600.

 

I've been looking for a portable rig that has a mix of speed, portability, batt life and an acceptable screen resolution.

Bought a fully-loaded HP ENVY 14 a couple of months back, and I had to return it to HP for poor assembly quality. It was a steal of a price at about $900 with everything top of the line before the Sandy Bridge refresh came out recently. It was a total bummer to part with the machine, but the build quality was clearly unacceptable.

Recently, I strongly considered a Thinkpad t410 or t510 from Lenovo because they have a solid reputation for quality builds. Currently, there are really good deals out there for about 45% off on some of these models as they clear inventory for their Sandy refreshes.

However, I ended up buying an Asus UL30Vt-X1K from JR last week for $550; the current price is $600, and it gets the job done, has a low profile at 13" screen size, decent display, and a fair amount of graphics power when needed, and 7+ hours of battery time real-world test with basic internet surfing and word processing.

There are a lot of informative posts on the threads here, and Amazon also has quite a bit of positive feedback about some of the variations of this model.

The drawbacks for me were a 1.3k x 768 screen res, lack of USB 3.0, and lack of eSATA port.

One of the hardest parts of the purchase was to find something that I can work on somewhat comfortably in an airplane in coach class. I'm 6'3" tall, and it's really tough to open up and work on a computer that has larger than a 13" screen size, and the viewing angle is tough to get right if you sit up higher in the seat, as I do. Netbooks weren't an option because they simply lacked the needed performance criteria.

This will be my first ASUS laptop, but I own a lot of their networking equipment and a few motherboards that have really proven to be very high quality merchandise.

Just my two cents...I've been lurking here since I had to send back the HP ENVY 14....looking for comperable deals, and I found one in the UL30Vt-X1K.

Good luck!