Received my ASUS F3JV!

Yesterday evening, I arrived home from work to find that my new ASUS F3JV that I purchased from NewEgg.com had arrived.

I was surprised by all of the... packaging, lol... you'd think they were sending me a nuclear warhead. It's nice to know things such as brand new laptops are treated with equal care.

The specs are in my forum signature but I'll provide more detail here:

Model & Specifications
ASUS F3JV-AP026P
15.4" WXGA Glossy Display
Intel Core 2 Duo T5500 1.66ghz 667, 2MB L2 Cache
1gb DDR2 667 x 1
NVIDIA GeForce Go 7600 256mb
100gb SATA 5400 RPMs
8x Super Multi DVD +/- Dual Layer
Intel PRO Wireless 802.11a/b/g
Bluetooth® V2.0+EDR
Windows XP Pro SP2 (incl. a free express upgrade to Vista Business Edition 32bit/64bit)
Weight: 6.5lbs
Included Accessories: Carrying Case, Optical USB Mouse
Total Price: $1,298.99 before Shipping & Handling ( +$14.82 USD)

Pre-Purchase Needs/Wants & Pre-Purchase Research of Alternative Brands/Models
I'm a sophomore in college about to graduate with my ABA, and then transfer to the McCombs School of Business @ the University of Texas, in Austin, to study finance. I've been wanting a laptop since my Senior year of high school. The necessity side of my purchase was to find a laptop that would provide for a good amount of multi-tasking, for school & work use. The non-necessity side of my purchase was to find a laptop that could handle a few of my most commonly played games (you've got to live a little! ).

At first I had been scoping out the Dell Latitude D820, before I realized I may want to allow for some minimal gaming. I had one priced at around $1,570+, and was about to successfully order it from Dell, until I was halted by Dell wanting me to own a business, or show that my purchase was affiliated with one. Frustrated with the elongated ordering process, I made a strong turn back towards NewEgg, which I've known to be more than reliable from all of my hardware purchases.

This ASUS notebook has been extremely great so far. I have no regets, and am 110% satisfied. I was able to get a notebook that out-performed my spec'd Latitude D820, and was still about ~$300 cheaper. (Not to mention, it included a carrying case & mouse - two components you'll find are quite a bit extra @ Dell, oh yea, and bluetooth, ).

My only controversial thoughts are as follows: (they are not things that would prevent me from buying another ASUS laptop)
Thought 1:
There are 3 partitions, which... I was expecting some partitions, but the sizes used by the factory partitions are... weird. There's a recovery partition, a primary partition & secondary partition. The primary is ~50gb & the secondary is about ~50gb. Maybe that's ASUS's standard, but I rarely ever setup symmetrical partitions on a machine. I'd prefer to just have a 20 & 80. I'll get rid of the recovery partition whenever it comes time to format the laptop, but for now it's no big deal at all.

Thought 2:
Both hard drive partitions were FAT32. I know the differences between NTFS & FAT32 quite well... but, I find it odd that by default, the partitions were formatted for FAT32. Either way, ASUS was kind enough to include a shortcut right to the NTFS Coverter application (if you don't know where this is, it's usually located in "C:\WINDOWS"), so I converted both partitions to NTFS (which is my preference). So that was no big deal at all, it just seemed awkward.

Thought 3:
There was a little more bloatware than I would've liked to see. But to be honest, I don't consider the "software itself" to be bloatware... Rather, I consider "the way in which the software has been lazily configured & left messily about the operating system" to be bloatware. By this I mean that, all of the applications pre-installed with crippleware, are nice, and useful. However, each one of them & their grand mother had an icon in the system tray, and there were more startup processes enabled than ideal (especially for a first boot). I spent about an hour reconfiguring the utilities, uninstalling the ones I don't need, and cleaning up things in the system tray & the msconfig.

Thought 4:
I believe I have 2, possibly 3 dead pixels. They are dead (black, on all backgrounds), not stuck (white on black backgrounds). They're in locations that are very close to the edge of the screen - ridiculously close. I don't notice them unless my eyeball is practically touching the glossy screen. It is of no concern to me really... The F3JV from what I can tell, is not covered by ASUS's Zero Bright Pixel policy, and so I'm not even going to mess with it. If the pixels were in more annoying positions, I would perhaps throw my own personal temper tantrum & then get over it... but, these aren't bad at all.
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Overall Satisfaction & "Would I buy another?"
I would definitely buy another ASUS Laptop if I needed one. I am more than satisfied. ASUS made a great notebook that fits my needs & wants perfectly, NewEgg gave it a great price and got it to me within 3 days. This laptop will last a good number of years through my post-secondary education, and allow me to have a little fun when I'm not grinding through work & school.

P.S. - Please post here if you have any questions or comments, I'd love feedback, especially if any of you are considering purchasing a laptop from ASUS's F3 Series. Feel free to send me a PM or whatever you'd like.

 

Congrats on your laptop.... Man, I've been waiting to get the F3jP since forever, but it hasn't even been released here.. Will have to pick it up on my travels, but that's gonna take some time.
By the way, do post your battery life, gaming performance etc if you ever get a bit of free time.
Also, did your Win XP come with a setup cd, or a recovery cd?

 

Don't worry, I will be sure to post follow-ups as I discover such things. Under just normal operation, battery life is approximately 3hrs 52mins, and the unit is advertised for 4hrs. It all depends on what the machine is doing at the time, of course, but I haven't spent too much time adjusting many of the power settings, as I'm still excited by its arrival and clicking every button I can get my fingers on.

Yes. It included the Genuine WinXP Pro SP2 CD, F3 Series Resource CD, Nero, PowerDirector, and some other miscellaneous software CDs that I haven't opened yet to see what they correspond to that's already installed.

In fact, the product's image page on NewEgg shows everything it came with - and nothing was missing from my shipment.

Here:

 

Great battery life.. far exceeds my expectations. A 6 cell giving close to 4 hours- Now if that isn't cool, then I don't know what is...