I'm in the market for a new laptop, and was wondering if anyone had experience with Asus. My current is a HP Pavilion, and while it served me well, I was looking for something with a bit more power behind it, graphically. Asus seems to fit the bill, providing Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 2.26G CPU, 4 GB Ram, and a NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GS Video Card. 250 MB Hard Drive was also a plus, although I have a few 500 MB externals.

The downside is Vista. I'm unfamiliar with it, and this seems to come with the 32-bit version, and not the full 64. I'm sure I could ah..obtain...a full copy, or even go back to XP Pro, but I'd probably give the standard set-up a shot, first.

Asus M50 Series M50Vm-X1 Notebook is the model I'm looking at, just curious is anyone has experience with the line, or thoughts about my choice. Any other recommendations in the 1150 and under price range would be nice too, if you feel they offer more power/performance for the price. Thanks!

 

I recently (last christmas) got myself an asus G2S.

Very nice. Battery life not too bad. Doesn't seem to have a problem with over heating. I got it upgraded to 4GB Ram

Windows Vista Ultimate - only two problems Ive had was a USB driver was causing Blue screen, think that was fixed in SP1

Norton antivirus doesnt like the multiple levels of compressions it does for large files. As long as you do a disk clean up before full system scan, no problem. In hindsight though I should have gone with XP SP3 and waited for windows 7

 

Nothing much to add besides that you may want to be careful about assuming you can downgrade. I bought my PC because it looked like a great base to start with, from which I could upgrade to make a decent gaming box for a low price with the intention of downgrading to XP. Turns out that XP is not supported by several of my PCs hardware choices (network card being the most obvious).

So don't assume you that you can downgrade unless you read/hear that it's possible.

Also, vista 32 only supports 3 gigs of ram, so you'd be wasting that last 1 gig. Not a big deal because even with vista and extensive games with fairly high specs, I've only ever used 2.5gb of my 3 gigs, but still a heads up.

 

If you're in the market for a new laptop it'd be a crime to not buy a Thinkpad, specifically the Lenovo T400.

It's not the flashiest thing in the world but it's sturdy and has ridiculous amounts of battery life.

 

I may have wasted 1Gb right now - but I doubt itll be too long until I get software support for that last gig, and since I usually only buy a rig every 3-4 years - eh

 

Yep, Asus G1S right here, it works flawlessly and it came with Vistaids. I uninstalled that shit the moment i got it. Most, if not all asus products will come with XP drivers so you might consider an downgrade (upgrade tbh). You can trust Asus though, there products havent failled me yet.

 

Thanks for replies. I looked into it a bit, and it seems that there 'is' an XP Driver with this model, at the very least, so if I'm not happy with Vista, I can down/up-grade with little hassle. The system specs make me happy, I've heard nothing negative about Asus, and it's a reasonable price considering what it offers. I'll toss my order in tomorrow.

 

I'm suprised no one has corrected you on the 32, 64 Vista thing.
The 32 runs on (tada!) 32-bit processors, and the 64 on...64 bit processors.

If it comes with 32 bit Vista, then yeah the processor is 32-bit, you can't 'upgrade' to the 64 bit version. It doesn't have the capabilities.

What you're thinking about is XP's different editions (home and professional), Vista has this too as Basic, Ultimate and another I think.
You can upgrade the version to full Ultimate, but if its not 64-bit you can't run 64-bit vista.

 

However, you can run 32 bit vista on a 64 bit processor. And the processor he mentioned is in fact 64 bit.

Therefore, you can upgrade to 64 bit vista on this laptop if you want. Personally, I don't see a need for that much memory, but if you think you need it, go for it. (You can probably get the 64 bit version on the web somewhere)

 

I recently purchased a latop with a similar spec. The Sony Vaio VGN-FW11E.

32bit Windows Vista Home Premium, Core 2 Duo P8400 @ 2.26Ghz, 3GB RAM, 250GB HDD, 256MB ATI HD 3470.

I'm pretty impressed with it, but considering I jumped from a 1.6Ghz Athlon XP with 512MB RAM, anyone would be.

£700 from Currys, you could probably find it for 650 online though Though saying that, I couldn't find it on any US sites.

Also, I find having more than 3GB of RAM with a 32-bit Windows pointless.

 

Lol, Sony. Overpriced shite.

My Toshiba Satellite M300 is pretty much your Sony, except with x64 Vista and a slightly less powerful processor (T5750 @ 2.00GHz).

I've saved about $400 my way.

Also, you can run 4GB or RAM on x86 Vista. You just can't go over that.

 

And then get a blue screen of death, find out vista is full of aids, get aids, die of aids, then upgrade to XP. In all seriousness though, Vista crashed the first 2 weeks i had it, refusing to boot up again. It also used up 1gb+ of my ram, out of 3gb.

 

I'm doin' it right.

But Vista is AIDS and fail.