Asus M6NW20 Laptop User Review

Like it says – Bruno Paredes

This is the first time I’m writing an article to a website; as I saw the title for this type of article, I decided I could write something to share my experience with my laptop, which I really like and I’m happy with it. 🙂

The laptop I bought was a an Asus M6NW20 with the following specs:

• Intel Centrino (BANIAS CORE) 1,5 Ghz Cpu.
• Intel i855PM Chipset
• 512 MB (DDR-333)
• 40 GB HDD (UNKNOW MANUFACTURER)
• ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 with 64 Mb of dedicated Ram on AGP 4x
• 15,4 Wide screen, it supports a maximum of 1280 x 800 resolution
• 4x USB 2.0 Ports
• 1x Rj-11 Port
• 1x LAN Port, Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit
• 1x Intel Pro/Wireless Lan 2100 (transmits on 802.11b only)
• 1x 1394a Port
• 1x PCMCIA slot
• It has a built in card reader for MMC.SD.MS/PRO
• DVD Burner, it records at DVD 2x, CDR at 16
• Has Serial, TV-OUT, and Monitor-out port

Go here for the Detailed Spec.

This Laptop is almost a year old now – it was bought in mid-April last year and it cost me 1,880€.

So far I’m quite happy with my laptop. It is my first laptop and I bought it because I could use a laptop for school; sometimes I arrived at the university and all the PCs were occupied so I couldn’t work, but I also bought it having in mind a little gaming :).

Why did I choose this laptop?

Well, first I had to go with a Centrino – the battery runs for 4 hours if I don’t stress it too much. It’s very thin and quite light – it weights 2,6 Kilograms. Also I had to have a RAM dedicated GPU – as I said, this is for school but also for some gaming. Wireless would also be appropriate, as my university has APs all over the campus.

I also had taken into account the possibility to upgrade – it is possible to upgrade RAM up to 2 GB, upgrade the HDD and I believe I can upgrade the CPU, because the Dothan socket is the same as the Banias.

What I like most about it:

Definitely the GPU. I can play nice games on this machine – take for example NFS2U; it runs very very well, it only slows down in the beginning of a race, and because there’s a lot of smoke around the cars, I play with almost all the settings on high. But at a resolution of 1024 x 768, it was really a big jump from my older Desktop GPU, a Geforce 440 MX; now I have a 9600 Pro, but I don’t see much difference from my laptop GPU anyway, but this is another story because I guess my 9600 pro is underclocked.

I also like the CPU; the 1 MB L2 cache gives the CPU a great boot, WinXp boots very fast, and it runs very fast overall. The keyboard is very nice, it’s very easy to adapt to it and has a good feeling typing on it. The speakers are very nice from what I’ve heard in laptops – it has a 4 way speakers that can go quite loud without much distortion and I also appreciate its portability and looks.

What I don’t like and problems:

Well I think the HD is the biggest performance killer on my system. I’m almost sure it works at 4200 rpm; sometimes when I’m processing a high volume of data on the HD it takes quite a time. I guess it’s better to have a 5400 rpm HD than, for example, a 60 GB 4200 Rpm. This was probably my biggest fault, I should have checked this before and I should have tried to exchange this HD for a 40 GB 5400 rpm model.

Other thing that’s giving me problems is the DVD burner. I have a difficult time to make it record a full 4,3gb DVD. I can’t understand why this happens – a few days ago I was recording a DVD of about a 2,8 GB, the DVD was correctly copied to the HD, then after recording it to a blank DVD, I couldn’t read the DVD on any of my drives, not even on the same drive that recorded it on my laptop.

This one is a bit of advice/problem I have to everyone who has a laptop:

NEVER HOLD YOUR LAPTOP ON THE SCREEN PART EVEN IF YOU’RE HOLDING IT ON THE MAIN PART.

I never hold only on the screen, but sometimes to help lifting it I would hold the main part and then help lifting it in the LCD; now every time I open my laptop screen, it makes a strange noise in the left part where the LCD attaches to main part. 🙁

I hate the annoying mouse touchpad. The buttons are OK and well positioned, but the touchpad itself, ahhhh, sometimes I hit the touchpad and the arrow goes to the other side of the screen; sometimes I lift my finger and it goes back to where it started from. Believe me, it’s very annoying! And I’m not using any fancy software to control it. Luckily for me, ASUS gave me a USB optical mouse for free and a bag for my laptop, a very nice bag indeed. 🙂

Finally, I have a dead pixel on my screen. I didn’t ask to exchange it because the pixel is very near the bottom end of the screen – it doesn’t bother me so I let it stay this way.

Overall, as I said, I’m very happy with my laptop. Thanks for taking time to read my review.

Regards.

Bruno Paredes – Faculdade de Ciencias e Tecnologia – Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal