I’ve had my laptop a couple of months (almost) now so it’s probably a good time to let people know what I think of it.
Overall, I’m very happy with it and I’m glad I took the plunge when I did instead of waiting for one of the models from this year which sees an Important Feature disappear.
So …. laptop critique and buyers hints if you’re looking into laptops.
I acquired an Asus FX503VD-DM080T 15.3″ laptop, at the time with a rather hefty discount. (Apparently it’s selling without discount at the moment and for much more than I paid ! Woo hoo !) I may have made a slight error because I suspect it has a less good screen than I was expecting. But I’m getting ahead of myself there. Specs ?
As delivered, it has an Intel i5-7300HQ processor. The only things worth knowing there is that when pushed, it’s nice and fast … but not so fast as to be a waste of cash owning something more than you need. Most of the time, a laptop processor won’t be doing much. The “HQ” means that it can slow itself down when not doing much in order to give you more battery time.
Other specs – 8GB memory (this should be seen as an absolute minimum)
nVidia 1050 graphics (gotta admit, not actually used this yet !)
A battery that gave about 4 hours of life … or probably 1 hour if I’d used it for gaming.
A 1 TB conventional disk drive. More on this later.
A camera memory card slot. The newer model doesn’t have one of these and I need one to get pictures off my camera. You could do the deed with a USB widget but … better built in.
No cd/dvd/bluray drive. These are getting pretty optional now and you’re honestly better getting a USB drive.
Out of the box, the performance was severely disappointing. As in … nasty. The problem was that conventional hard disk. I was attempting to copy over the music from the old Macbook Air while the laptop was doing its setting up and updating. Conventional hard discs are a fairly archaic device now which excel in holding lots of data cheaply … but they’re rubbish at getting to that data. They will severely hamper the performance of a machine when you’re attempting to do several things at once (or if the machine it attempting to multitask with data).
The answer is to add a Solid State Device drive, which is essentially a few memory chips that still hold data when the power is off. These are lightning fast and totally solve the performance issues. With the addition of a 256GB SSD, the machine is very smooth and I don’t notice any slowdowns at all.
Yes computer. Yes you. You’re a good boy. (So is my desktop which incidentally is the machine I’m writing this post on !)
Buyer’s Tip – do not buy a Windows PC unless you’re going to run Windows off an SSD. Running Windows on a conventional drive is pain you don’t deserve having inflicted upon you. (Yes our machines at work don’t have SSDs – it’s nasty).
Buyer’s Tip number 2 – you may be able to add an aftermarket SSD (I recommend Crucial SSDs and this one came with a free utility to transfer Windows over) but check the (ALL IMPORTANT) warranty and check whether the laptop supports adding the extra drive. The Asus laptop does but strangely, the retaining screw looks like it’s been threadlocked in. Shame on you Asus. The SSD hasn’t fallen out yet in two months so …
Anyway. Super smooth laptop now.
Keyboard is good, although the trackpad suffers when confronted with multiple input. I’ve disabled tap click because it was being annoying and you have to give it a hand wipe if it gets electrostatic charge.
iTunes runs very nicely, although I’ve had to adopt a hack application to separate the sound from the laptop from the music that goes to the hifi. The laptop is quieter than I’d like … but that’s a fact of life of laptops. Still, you’d expect to be able to run with the volume not quite at 100%, which is not loud enough. For the music, I’m using a free open source audio routing app to throw the sound over to the hifi via Bluetooth. I’m using a cheap Logitech device that isn’t perfect (I can hear occasional break up) but it recovers nicely when disrupted.
What else ?
It’s much heavier than the Macbook Air …. but you’re comparing an ultralight laptop to a multipurpose gaming laptop. The weight means that it’s solidly built. I boycotted HP and Acer because I expected them to have quality control issues. Dell was boycotted due to quality control issues with the screen, which was apparent on the display model at That Computer Store Not-to-be-named.
Windows is annoying. But then you knew that already. Apparently file sharing across the network is broken again. It worked for a little while but I suspect Microsoft have broken something again. What does work is Bluetooth transfer from the phone, this never worked on the Macbook because of … Apple being Apple.
Think that’s it for this totally unstructured laptop review ! It was a worthy upgrade from what I had before and I must check out what its gaming performance is like some time.
Actually after dinner time now !