Hi Tech Gadget

The ASUS G50V-A1 is a new 15.4″ gaming notebook to hit the market this holiday season.  The G50V-A1 is one of the best machines produced by ASUS performance-wise, but it has other issues that should be considered if your intention is to use the “gaming notebook” heavily for its intended purpose.

The notebook offers excellent performance powered with an Intel Core 2 Duo T9400, high-quality WSXGA+ screen, and numerous features that make the system stand out.  It is even bundled with useful accessories that do not normally come with a laptop, including a backpack and gaming mouse. The G50V is covered with a two-year warranty, and the first year includes accident damage coverage as well.  The ASUS G50V-A1 also comes with a recovery disk that can be useful in the case of emergency.

If the system was marketed as a business machine, we could stop there with an exceptional review.  However, while the laptop offers great stock performance, the G50V-A1’s over clocking and power management abilities didn’t fare so well. Even though the machine was nearly flawless during regular usage, it’s always a plus for it to perform during rigorous benchmark tests (WorldBench, Mobilemark, etc.). Another serious issue is that it lacks driver support for widescreen resolution (1440×900), which would come in handy. It runs perfectly in its normal resolution of 1680×1050, but having to step down to 1280×768 for a decent widescreen resolution is not a good look.

The G50V-A1 comes with Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit, with 4GB of DDR2-800 RAM. The notebook includes an 8X DVD-RW Super Multi drive, 8-in-1 memory card reader, built-in 1.3-megapixel webcam, and Intel Wireless WiFi Link 5100AGN with built-in Bluetooth support.  Overall, the G50V is a quality gaming platform.  The design and numerous features are great. The graphics card it uses (the NVIDIA GeForce 9700 GT) is a bit of an undershot for ASUS since it’s quite underpowered for a gaming laptop.

The A1 can be purchased for a little under $1600, but it may be overpriced since the ASUS G50Vt-X1 can be purchased for $1,250. It’s a cheaper machine, but it has a Core 2 Duo processor, a 15.6″ 1366×758 display, and a NVIDIA GeForce 9800M GS, which is simply a better graphics card for a gaming platform.

Fujitsu is always well-know for its laptops, and is so popular to the teenagers nowadays. Now, Fujitsu, in order to catch with the hot trend of “natural beauty” and “environmental-friendly”, have manufactured a new wooden case laptop, converted from its FMV series.

However, Fujitsu is now the first one to made wooden-cased laptop. In fact, ASUS has already manufactured a similar one not long ago. Although it is only a conceptual products and will not involved in mass production, this kind of “green” products should always be promoted and recommended. I sincerely hope that the laptops in the future can be more bio-degradable, and this is the real way to become “environmental-friendly”.

If I need to say one good thing that EeePC does, then it will be the pushing force from EeePC to Microsoft in a way that the latter need to re-evaluate Linux, and its competitiveness towards Window OS. In addition to that, I also admire the gust shown by ASUS that it can still adopt Linus for the OS in the low-priced laptop, while all other laptops are using Vista already.

In order not to lose its share in this low-priced laptop market, Microsoft needs to introduce its XP again, and announces that XP will be sold to EeePC no until 2010, or even 2012 when Window 7 is launched.

Microsoft didn’t explain further whether it will give a improved version for XP, or continue to provide Service Pack, but what we can see is that, after 10 years of time, XP is still have its own influential value. Can you deny its ability and achivement?

Desktop version of EeePC is one forms of the EeeDT plan from ASUS. But is it really look the same as the picture above? To me, this EeePC picture is more or less like a PS3. Nonetheless, ASUS still haven’t released any new pictures at the moment. Anyway, it is a focus product in 2008, and its relative information must be released in the near future (after computex?).