I’ve been using the ASUS Zenbook for months now. It’s running on an i7 1.8GHz Processor and 4GB of RAM. I can’t say I’m completely satisfied with it. It’s the keyboard that I just can’t get used to. After almost four months, I’m still missing keys when I type. It gets pretty annoying, especially if you have to type often.
I had read about this in many reviews on Amazon and tech sites, but I took it for a test drive in the store and it seemed ok. Trust me on this. It will annoy you, and you’re not gonna get used to it. I’ve been trying to “get used to it” for four months.
The letters on the keyboard are also fading too. Currently, I have about five keys that have almost completely faded.
It’s a huge flaw just because it’s a prominent feature that you use all the time. Everything else is great. It is pretty fast. Sometimes I have thirty tabs on Firefox opened, and that didn’t crash the web browser or Windows 7. It’s slim, light and very portable.
I still haven’t used it heavily with Photoshop using many layers, so I’m not giving the quad-core i7 Intel processor and the 4G RAM a workout yet.
The laptop can display up to a resolution of 1600x900, but on it’s 13.3” screen that’ll be painful on your eyes. It’s good that that there’s that capability when you need to attached a monitor. If you have space on your desk, you might as well attach a keyboard to it too.
The battery life is not bad. It seems to last at least half a day with heavy usage. I’m using it with a wireless mouse and an attached monitor. I’m running Firefox and Chrome with multiple tabs opened (sometimes 20-30), Notepad++, Trillian, and Photoshop. Most of the time, they’re all opened.
The touchpad has a few nifty features, but they’re kinda buggy. There are gestures for scrolling and zooming. The scrolling consistently works for scrolling down, but scrolling up doesn’t always work like it’s supposed to. Zooming in and out is laggy. Yes, I downloaded the latest drivers.
I find mouse wheel much more useful for scrolling and using the control combo with the plus/minus sign much better for zooming in and out of pages.
ASUS made nice netbooks when netbooks were still popular. I can’t recommend the Zenbook because of the keyboard. That’s the first thing you should get right with a laptop.
Oh yeah, there's also those annoying desktop gadgets that I finally figured out how to get rid off.
