ASUS K52JR-SX029V

Why this computer

Thanks to SIE, the vendors, for their good advice.
According to them, ASUS provides very good technical service, perhaps due to a recent assembly plant in Portugal. Others may be slower to respond, and charge some shipping. Other companies to consider are sony and toshiba.
It seems quite important a new system includes the new intel processors: i3, i5, and i7. It seems the manufacturers are still trying to sell the old stock, so it’s actually hard to find these. I had to actually search for these names in the websites. By the way:
ASUS’ website largely sucks. But then, most of the manufacturers’ sites do, including lenovo, HP, sony, and Toshiba. The only decent one is perhaps dell. They are also the only ones to include a section for the public sector and education (and research), not just “home” and “business”.
Other runner-ups:
- ASUS K52F-SX062X (i3, less disk, worse graphics card and only about 100€ cheaper)
- TOSHIBA PSSEOE-00600XCE, aka Satellite Pro S500-10D (comparable to the one above)
- TOSHIBA PSLWTE-00500KCEV (really nice, but about 150€ more).
- There’s a Toshiba T500 (I think) I saw on sale that’s actually quite comparable.

Impressions:

Screen size: the standard, which seems to be 15’4 these days (looks huge to me, but it seems smaller or larger is worse).
The keyboard: it’s nice to have a complete keyboard, with the numeric pad. The keys are separated, which is also ok, but they are a bit on the soft side. I guess a USB keyboard is needed for heavy typing.
The pad: I think it’s ok. I’ve read some complaints, but I thinks is as good (and bad) as the usual pad. Plus, you don’t have the annoying scrolling sections at the botton and the right, you can scroll with two fingers instead of one.
The sound is actually too loud!
Face recognitions seems to work decently, except at low light, or strong contrast.
OS: The general impression is that Windows 7 is greatly better than Vista. It feels so, but I still more time. It clearly looks very much like Vista, which I don’t mind. I have installed SUSE 11.1 linux under Sun’s Virtual Box, as I had done before. I will update the entry accordingly, recording my new learnings.

Specs:

laptop info