Looking for new 14 inch Notebook - help

I looking to buy for a good Asus 14 inch notebook. I have done some research and would also like to hear your recommendations.

What are some of the best options available as of today ?

(I will be running Linux on it too. )

 

Fill the FAQ please!

 

Looking for:

Thin and Light; 13" - 14" screen
Canada - Ontario
Budget - $1400
No Games - only multimedia and office work. Sometimes I may need video conversion.
Would be nice to have a good battery for driving or flying.
OS - Ubuntu Linux is what I will install first thing.

 

asus f8 series

 

Any specific models ? I am more biased towards nvidia as it works well on Linux.

 

LG 300 should be nice,but i dont know its price...about asus...why not Lenovo T61?

 

F8Sn series have Nvidea you like

 

i agree, go with the f8sn, it's got a nvidia gpu plus the cpu is a penryn. it's well within yur budget.

 

I have F8SN-C1 from excaliberPC. Slapped a Seagate 7200 rpm drive on it and it works real fast.

Only complaint is that its a little heavy compared to other 14" models but not breaking.

The thing is i have power of a 15" notebook under the hood. =)

 

just to be clear, there really is no need to upgrade the hard drive in the c1. it has a 320 gig (i believe samsung) hard drive. this is a very nice, and fast notebook drive, it will outperform many 7200rpm notebook drives due to data density

 

What is the difference among F8SN A,B,C,D 1,2,3 .... ?

 

Check out the differences here

 

It's a WD Scorpio.

Yup its a very fast drive i must say. Scored 5.3 on the Windows Experience Index while the Seagate 7200 RPM got 5.5.

I replaced it because i bought the seagate already.

 

ahhhhh nice to know its WD, as i was leaning towards this over the m50 largely because of the drive, however i am not a fan of WD notebook drives.
and for clarity i didnt mean to insult your choices, more just advice to future buyers that the high capacity 5400s are quite fast, fast enough that for most 7200s are far from necessary.

 

I bought F8SN-B1 so far, very good.

Webcam works well on Ubuntu Hardy Linux.

Thank you everyone.

 

holy crap, they got rid of the damn bison cams ..... ok im sold on the f8

 

To the OP: you said you needed battery life, noone mentioned that yet but the battery life on the F8 is quite bad, and you do not get the option to upgrade to a 9-cell battery, so you're stuck with 2 hours to 2:30.

Just something to consider.

 

How is the screen quality of F8Sn. somehow have a feeling that they r not as good as the W7 or the U3s.

 

this model, F8SN comes with Linux Unbuntu 8.4 in Asia originally , so it is fully compatible to Linux , mine was running under it but I formated it and installed Vista SP1 since I needed to run PS CS3.

so for Linux , the ASUS is a good choice and you can also consider BenQ S41 series , which comes with your choice of Unbuntu 8.1, Vista SP1 or XP sp2 .

 

From what I gather if someone goes with ANY Asus model battery life should not be a major buying point.

Are you saying there's not a larger battery available anywhere for the F8's or that at time of purchase it's not an option to go with a larger battery ?

Seems like when I bought mine (ExcaliberPC) they had the larger battery as an option but I looked at so many models that could be wrong.

 

No, there is no 9cell option for the F8. I believe it's because of the battery compartment layout.

yes the 6-cell life on any ASUS is very bad; but for those that have a 9cell option, you an increase the batt life to over 3 hours.

 

Oh boy I didn't know that re the F8's & batteries. I can see where that would be a big negative for someone who needs a lot of mobility.

Matter of fact that's down right dumb. To be selling a notebook series & advert on its small size AND mobility & then make it not able to use larger battery capacity is , at best , poor engineering.

 

I've checked again on the ASUS website and for all F8 models that I could open, it only lists the 6-cell batt unforunately.

(for some reason I could not open the F8Sn model and some others, the detailed specs table was empty. happens sometimes. But the battery options should be the same throughout the F8 series)

For instance: http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=5&l2=26&l3=501&l4=0&model=1592&modelmenu=2

 

look at the compartment

it is closed off within the machine in 4 directions. How could it get bigger? Only going out.

it was designed to only have 1 size battery.

 

Yep that's what I said earlier but I couldn't be sure since I don't have the machine...