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I know this has been done but I thought that I'd sit & write this to give my opinions on this machine & its OS.

First off this is my third Notebook PC:
(1) Emachines M6811 10/15/2004 a intermediate machine till I got my second notebook.
(2) Sager NP9860S 03/05/2005 now this was a desktop replacement with oomph.
(3)Asus G1S-X3 01/05/2008 my new gaming/work notebook.

As with the Sager I was looking for a gaming notebook PC but this time I wanted something with better battery life & a bit lighter for long hauls but still wanted a great screen & power for the occasional video editing project & ofcorse have the ability to play the newer games so a 15.4” notebook with a Intel Dual Core processor & Nvidia 8600M GT was the basis of my searching.
I started my search a few months back & looked at 4 different notebooks, the Compal IFL90, the Sager 2090C, the MSI MS-163a, & the Asus G1S.

Compal IFL90 - - nVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT 512MB GDDR2 - - 15.4" WXGA ( 1280 x 800 ) standard - - $1590.00 + shipping “discountlaptops.com”
Sager 2090C - - nVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT 512MB GDDR2 - - 15.4" WXGA ( 1280 x 800 ) only - - $1390.00 + shipping “pctorque.com”
MSI MS-163a - - nVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT 512MB GDDR2 - - 15.4" WXGA ( 1280 x 800 ) only - - $1152.00 +shipping “cyberpowerpc.com”
Asus G1S - - nVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT 256MB GDDR3 - - 15.4" WSXGA+ ( 1680 x 1050 ) standard - - $1499.00 + shipping “newegg.com”

Although they are mostly identical in basic configuration except that the G1S come with the 1680X1050 resolution screen “standard” where the others only come with the 1280X800 resolution “standard” & the G1S only has 256Mb GDDR3 dedicated video ram compared to the others with 512Mb GDDR2 so mostly I was working with available options, functionality, & whether or not the screen resolution or the extra video ram is the better option.
By reading a lot of reviews on these PC’s & considering the option of either the 512Mb of video ram or the better resolution, I’ve settled on the Asus because it had the most of what I was looking for in a new PC where the better standard screen resolution was more to my liking, the battery life was pretty decent, the weight was great, & the ability to connect a ESATA drive for faster through put for the occasional video editing project was a good selling point for me, but I actually bought my G1S from Best Buy here in Woodbridge, Va. Mostly it was by chance that they had a few left in stock & I was in there buying a Thumb Drive.

Specks
Operating System - Windows Vista Home Premium
CPU Type - Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 2.2GHz
Screen - 15.4" WSXGA+
Memory Size - 2GB DDR2
Hard Disk - 160GB Hitachi 5400rpm
Optical Drive - DVD Super Multi
Graphics Card - NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT
Video Memory - 256MB GDDR3 VRAM, TurboCache up to 512MB
Communication - Modem, Gigabit LAN and WLAN
Card slot - 1 x Express Card
Battery Life - 2 hours
Card Slot - 1 x Express Card
USB - 4
IEEE - 1394 1
Video Port - 1 x VGA, 1 x S-Video TV-out, 1 x HDMI
Other port - 1 x eSATA
Card Reader - 4-in-1
Webcam - 1.3 Megapixel Webcam
Battery - 8-cell lithium ion
Battery Life - 2 hours
Dimensions - 13.9" x 11.2" x 1.5"
Weight - 6.8 lbs.


Impressions of the packaging has been done so many times it’s not funny so I will not bore you with that but I will say that Asus did do a very good job in this area along with all the supplied disks, manuals & gear.
My first impression of the machine its self after boot up & getting basic settings out of the way was Hmmm Vista looks nice & this machine has some power under the hood but the first game I installed “Crysis” was slow and shuddery, not what I was hoping for although the second game Halo 2 PC ran flawlessly.
Once I installed Vista Home Premium 64 then installed my 4Gb of Crucial DDR2 667 & configured it the way I thought it should be; IE Page file on its own partition & set to a static size, not install some of the Asus junk like Live Update, Instant Fun, Splendid, & Email LED, then disabling unnecessary services like Fax, Tablet pc, & lastly install a better Virus protection software instead of Norton Internet Security “AVG ” this machine ran awesome considering that it still needed to get Superfetch & Indexing taken care of, & finally found Tweak UAC which has made life a bit easier while using Vista & performing normal duties with my machine.
Going back to Crysis, once I was told how to set this game to run on DX9 settings this machine runs Crysis pretty good @ 1280X960X32 on all medium settings “25-35FPS Average.”
With having this machine for only 3 weeks & it running Vista 64 bit with the 4Gb of ram for 2 of those weeks it seems to come to its own in running the few applications that I have ran like Divx 6.7, Word & Excel 2007, Nero 7, ITunes, & ofcorse running 3D Mark 2006 & Pc Mark Vantage X64 & playing some of my games that I’m impressed with Vista, granted there are still some bugs that I hope that will get ironed out when SP1 finally comes out but otherwise it cold boots pretty fast “sorry I do not have a stop watch to time it {yawn}” as well as comes back from Hibernation pretty quick, the applications open & run with speed & smoothness as well as all the games that I’ve had time to play on here have ran perfectly with no issues although I cannot say that I can really see much of a difference in DX10 than DX9 “except with how Crysis runs on DX10” & although my scores are a bit low in Pc Mark & 3D Mark, Vista is a fewsh look that Microsoft has been in need of for some time & the software is quite intuitive has my Thumbs up.
The battery life is pretty good especially compared to my Sager or even my Emachines that I had, 2.4 hours on a single charge before it got to 15% while performing an Excel spreadsheet along with surfing the web!
By comparison I was only able to get an hour with the Sager 9860 & maybe 1.5 hours with the Emachines 6811 so I’m impressed with this machine “& possibly the software” in having a good battery life.

Comparing my experience with this machine to what others have written.
Noise level: OK, you can hear the cooling fans run on occasion “when the system is really taxing” but not terribly loud, the DVD drive is a bit noisier than I wish but tolerable being that it is only during initial spin up & from other notebooks that I’ve had or used it’s about the same.
Heat: Simply put what heat, my Sager got pretty hot around the keyboard & palm rests, this machine I would say gets a little warm but I don’t notice it much.
Speakers: to me they are quite nice, not too annoyingly loud but also not a cheap sounding set either.

Benchmarks
Pc Mark Vantage: 3062 http://service.futuremark.com/compare?pcmv=34747
3D Mark 2006: 3697 http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm06=4896356
PC Pitstop.com: 3066
Vista WEI: 4.8 memory being the lowest of the whole machine
I know my scores are a bit low by comparison but I may not have tweaked Vista in the right areas or have the right drivers to get the best of what this machine is capable of yet.

Pros:
This is a big improvement in portability & power to the Sager 9860 that was my gaming platform & Vista so far shows promise of being a good OS once hopefully SP1 fix some of it’s quirks, the combination of a great screen resolution & a pretty speedy graphics chip makes this a great gaming platform yet awesome business notebook.
Cons:
Some of Asus’ software is simply annoying & not very useful, the DVD drive could be a bit quieter, & the fit of the battery could be better.