Thanks to Grandma Dorothy and Grandpa Joe. We used the money that they gave us to go towards our new laptop. I decided that I wanted to go all out this time so I can use it at Chris’ LAN parties.
My sister got an ASUS A8JS a few months ago and she let me use it for a few days to see how I liked it. I was very impressed. Impressed enough to go ahead and buy an ASUS of my own. So, by going all out, I chose the ‘G’ series, more specifically, the G2S-A1.
The specs are amazing. Far better than my desktop, even with my 22″ LCD. It’s basically a dual core (like having 2 processors, but only one chip) running at 2.2GHz. That may seem slow compared to years ago when the Pentium 4’s were reaching into the high 3GHz and 4GHz ranges, but the architecture is better on these chips. They can do more in a clock cycle, so they don’t need to have so many cycles.
I chose to stay with the standard 2GB of memory, mainly because that’s what my desktop has and I haven’t found the need to go with any more yet. It is expandable to 4GB.
The coolest, most awesomest thing though, is the 17.1″ WUXGA screen. it’s 17.1 inches on a laptop! The WUXGA means that it runs at 1920×1200 resolution. Partner that screen with the current top-of-the-line mobile video card, the GeForce 8600m GT, with 256MB of Video RAM, and we have a real winner.
I chose to buy another hard drive for it so I can have a dedicated game drive. Those of us gamers know that every day use of a computer puts all kinds of garbage on there that slow down games. Even installing Office or Acrobat Reader can leach resources. I figured that we will leave Vista on the hard drive that it came with and I will put XP on the new drive. The new drive is also 7200 RPM, so that will help with load times and whatnot. The one that came with it is 5400 RPM.
When I get XP installed, I will be getting the main staple of games that we play at LAN parties installed. Then I will compare them to my desktop and post some scores maybe.
Until then…
Nice. Although, that’s not something I’d want to lug back and forth to work each day. A guy at work has a 17.1 laptop, he actually uses a rollerbag for his laptop bag.
Anyway, my emachines laptop is still plugging along, I’m still impressed with how well it works after all these years. I’ve had to replace the hard drive once, but otherwise it’s been fine.