Asus W1772 - This is a UK model and may not be available in the US with this configuration.
Banias 1.7Ghz Pentium M
ATI 9600 64Mb
1024Mb RAM
80Gb HDD
DVD RW
TV Tuner
First impressions are pretty good. The latch-less fastening for the lid is a great idea (probably pinched from Apple) that works well. Most of the socketery is hidden behind a discreet flap so it doesn’t compromise the looks. The bushed steel chassis looks good and lends an air of durability. Lots of nice touches like the backlit power button and LED status display on the front edge of the notebook. Nice hinge detail for the screen. Overall it looks understated and well built.
Opening up the boxes yields a few ‘extras’, a tiny brushed aluminium Logitech mouse with scroll wheel. A nylon Targus bag with ‘Asus’ stamped on it. Various adaptors and cables for the TV tuner and the usual power supply, disks and manuals. Only a Win XP recovery disk though.
Turning it on the first thing that wows you is the screen, it’s a WSXGA wonder, a massive 1680 x 1050 pixels resolution. It looks clean and crisp, although some of the icons and text are arguably a bit on the small side. Viewing angles seem good, although brightness suffers in comparison with sony’s best. Still, it more than holds it’s own against my desktop TFT screen.
There are a few pre-installed applications, nothing to get too excited about though. Windows XP Pro is a welcome improvement over the usual XP Home. There’s a clutch of Asus’s own utilities including the Mobile Theatre package discussed below. On the packaged CD’s is Nero Express and a few games.
It runs quietly and without too much heat. The top of the keyboard area stays cool with most of the hot air kicked out of the bottom and right hand side, I guess this is the advantage of Pentium M. Battery life is hard to assess just yet, but a mix of installing, browsing and checking email with the screen on max brightness will probably provide 2.5-3.5 hrs of battery life. I’ll update this when I’ve had more time to play with it. Performance wise it seems to be quite responsive outpacing my 2.5Ghz P4 in some tasks although the HDD is a little slow, it doesn’t seem very noticeable in general use. Wireless networking was a doddle to set up at home, connecting to my office network was, however, a bit more difficult, through no fault of the laptop though. The DVD writer seems a little temperamental preferring 1x to the max 2.5x write speed, but I’m sure the quality of the media will have a role to play in this.
The 64Mb 9600 video card performs better than expected hitting benchmarks of 2440 in 3D Mark 03 and 9167 in 3D Mark 2001SE. It runs Far Cry at native resolution with low settings and high terrain detail (which looks pretty good) in a playable fashion, but clearly this isn’t a games machine. My desktop 2.5Ghz P4 with an ATI 9800 makes mincemeat of it in this regard. It is perfectly capable of providing a bit of on-the-move gaming though. Sound is adequate, but despite a subwoofer in the base it’s never going to be wonderful. I wanted to connect it to my desktop CRT, Keyboard and mouse at work so I was pleased to discover it has no problems running through a USB KVM switch. The resolution settings need adjusting for the 4:3 CRT, but it works just fine. I’ve also tried connecting it up to a 42” plasma producing a great picture when playing back DVDs, AVIs and Far Cry.
The TV tuner and associated Mobile Theatre software is a mixed bag, it works, but it’s a bit unwieldy. Asus’ software isn’t particularly elegant and it took several goes to figure out how to make it all work. An adaptor is required for the notebook to accept a UK aerial lead (provided with the notebook) which has presumably been designed for Far East or North American markets. Picture quality is ok though and you can record direct from source onto the HDD. Bizarrely, despite the 16:10 screen ratio it only seems to display the TV input as 4:3, even when feed a widescreen picture from my Sky+ box. DVDs will run in widescreen however.
On the down side the remote control supplied with the TV tuner doesn’t seem to work and the HDD is annoyingly formatted as FAT32 rather than NTFS (although this was easy to rectify). Whenever I boot up the Num Lock function seems to be on, defaulting certain keys to numbers, on several occasions I’ve found it difficult to log on because of this. I eventually had to sort out the num lock setting in the bios.
On the whole it seems a slick package and it fulfils my critical requirement of having a WSXGA screen, I’m sure I can resolve the few minor faults I’ve uncovered given time.
Some links to pictures I've taken:
image 1
image 2
image 3
image 4
Banias 1.7Ghz Pentium M
ATI 9600 64Mb
1024Mb RAM
80Gb HDD
DVD RW
TV Tuner
First impressions are pretty good. The latch-less fastening for the lid is a great idea (probably pinched from Apple) that works well. Most of the socketery is hidden behind a discreet flap so it doesn’t compromise the looks. The bushed steel chassis looks good and lends an air of durability. Lots of nice touches like the backlit power button and LED status display on the front edge of the notebook. Nice hinge detail for the screen. Overall it looks understated and well built.
Opening up the boxes yields a few ‘extras’, a tiny brushed aluminium Logitech mouse with scroll wheel. A nylon Targus bag with ‘Asus’ stamped on it. Various adaptors and cables for the TV tuner and the usual power supply, disks and manuals. Only a Win XP recovery disk though.
Turning it on the first thing that wows you is the screen, it’s a WSXGA wonder, a massive 1680 x 1050 pixels resolution. It looks clean and crisp, although some of the icons and text are arguably a bit on the small side. Viewing angles seem good, although brightness suffers in comparison with sony’s best. Still, it more than holds it’s own against my desktop TFT screen.
There are a few pre-installed applications, nothing to get too excited about though. Windows XP Pro is a welcome improvement over the usual XP Home. There’s a clutch of Asus’s own utilities including the Mobile Theatre package discussed below. On the packaged CD’s is Nero Express and a few games.
It runs quietly and without too much heat. The top of the keyboard area stays cool with most of the hot air kicked out of the bottom and right hand side, I guess this is the advantage of Pentium M. Battery life is hard to assess just yet, but a mix of installing, browsing and checking email with the screen on max brightness will probably provide 2.5-3.5 hrs of battery life. I’ll update this when I’ve had more time to play with it. Performance wise it seems to be quite responsive outpacing my 2.5Ghz P4 in some tasks although the HDD is a little slow, it doesn’t seem very noticeable in general use. Wireless networking was a doddle to set up at home, connecting to my office network was, however, a bit more difficult, through no fault of the laptop though. The DVD writer seems a little temperamental preferring 1x to the max 2.5x write speed, but I’m sure the quality of the media will have a role to play in this.
The 64Mb 9600 video card performs better than expected hitting benchmarks of 2440 in 3D Mark 03 and 9167 in 3D Mark 2001SE. It runs Far Cry at native resolution with low settings and high terrain detail (which looks pretty good) in a playable fashion, but clearly this isn’t a games machine. My desktop 2.5Ghz P4 with an ATI 9800 makes mincemeat of it in this regard. It is perfectly capable of providing a bit of on-the-move gaming though. Sound is adequate, but despite a subwoofer in the base it’s never going to be wonderful. I wanted to connect it to my desktop CRT, Keyboard and mouse at work so I was pleased to discover it has no problems running through a USB KVM switch. The resolution settings need adjusting for the 4:3 CRT, but it works just fine. I’ve also tried connecting it up to a 42” plasma producing a great picture when playing back DVDs, AVIs and Far Cry.
The TV tuner and associated Mobile Theatre software is a mixed bag, it works, but it’s a bit unwieldy. Asus’ software isn’t particularly elegant and it took several goes to figure out how to make it all work. An adaptor is required for the notebook to accept a UK aerial lead (provided with the notebook) which has presumably been designed for Far East or North American markets. Picture quality is ok though and you can record direct from source onto the HDD. Bizarrely, despite the 16:10 screen ratio it only seems to display the TV input as 4:3, even when feed a widescreen picture from my Sky+ box. DVDs will run in widescreen however.
On the down side the remote control supplied with the TV tuner doesn’t seem to work and the HDD is annoyingly formatted as FAT32 rather than NTFS (although this was easy to rectify). Whenever I boot up the Num Lock function seems to be on, defaulting certain keys to numbers, on several occasions I’ve found it difficult to log on because of this. I eventually had to sort out the num lock setting in the bios.
On the whole it seems a slick package and it fulfils my critical requirement of having a WSXGA screen, I’m sure I can resolve the few minor faults I’ve uncovered given time.
Some links to pictures I've taken:
image 1
image 2
image 3
image 4
