Gadgetory

hey guys it's brandon bitumen from technobuffalo so it's been several months with the asus UL 30 VT laptop we talked about this laptop being a very good value for people who want something thin and light something powerful and something that has really good battery life with its switchable graphics cards and then we also talked about installing an intel SSD in the back of this to really increase performance and also get a little bit better battery level so it's been a couple of months and i'm going to give you a sort of long-term update on the UL 30 BTW and how it's been faring as sort of my day-to-day laptop i've used this a lot i've taken it to Vegas to CES I've taken it all around and I've got a lot of comments about it let's start with the hardware itself and how the hardware is holding up now I didn't claim the laptop before filming the video on purpose I wanted you to see what it looked like after some use you know some laptops are better than others with staying clean like the macbook stay clean very well thanks to the aluminum design the UL 30 VT from asus not so much as you can see the the lid here which is actually a nice brushed metal look becomes a very fingerprint covered you can take a little bit of Windex and just wipe this down and get it clean again but you have to do that quite often in order to get it to stay clean in terms of the hardware itself the the the thickness of the laptop and the weight it is fantastic and a lot of people that pick up this laptop say wow this really feels quite thin and light I love the wedge-shaped design here it's very thin in the front which means that it slips right into a bag or a laptop case without much fumbling let's open up the laptop here and take a look at some of the hardware features and I want to point out some things that have been bothering me when I first went to buy this device I checked out reviews and for many devices like this and also for this particular unit and people said you know the asus laptops are great value but the build quality is not that great I have to say that I kind of agree for a few reasons first of all the arm rests here or the palm rests now make a creaking sound listen it may be difficult to hear but after a few minutes of and resting palms on here they start to creak additionally the keyboard seems to give a little bit in the center it almost is like a saggy mattress we're right in the center you can kind of feel the keys go down a little bit further than they should these things aren't bothering me too much because the speed of the laptop the battery life is all really fantastic and I'm having a lot of fun using it another problem with this laptop is that the glossy screen really gets annoying some people can can tolerate glossy screens better than others but for me it's just it's just too much and it's difficult to see if I'm sitting in the reflection or near a window or something like that I love the keyboard i love the clicky chiclet style keyboard it's got a very macbook like feel and you can see it just turned on there and we're going to talk a little bit about performance and battery life in a second but want to finish some other comments on the hardware i formatted this laptop right out of the box because it had a lot of bloatware on it that i really didn't want it was running windows 7 home premium 64-bit edition I put windows 7 32-bit a home premium on here which means that I got a little bit less ram but it also means that I removed all of that bloatware that was causing the laptop to be a little bit slow out of the box it also means that this button on the left which is supposed to let you switch graphics on the fly is now dead it doesn't do anything but that's okay because what I've said it to do is to switch into that hybrid graphics mode where the performance increases when you plug it in and then when it's not plugged in its using the Intel graphics card and then you're getting better battery life so we're going to talk about using the touchpad with the multi-touch we're also going to talk about performance let's move up on the screen okay the first thing I want to talk about this performance thanks to the solid-state drive an Intel ultra low voltage processor I think performs quite well this laptop is fast when im using this I don't feel like it's lagging I don't feel like it's taking time to load things about Photoshop open down here it opens up instantly and that's thanks to the solid state hard drive I think which makes a big difference in bringing up programs that are stored into rammus to transfer the programs or the hard drive us to transfer programs from the disc to the RAM to get it sort of loaded and this process makes it much faster so I'm going to go over here and open up chrome and Chrome opens up within seconds and that same applies with any other browser that I'm using down here we've got Microsoft Word 2010 beta look how fast it opens extremely fast very good performance let's take a look at the performance benchmark built into Windows 7 okay I'm going to zoom in a little bit here and we're going to go down the list so what we have here for the processor is a four point eight which is very solid memory is five point four which is great anything really over 4.5 is really great and then for graphics a 4.9 and 5.9 for the desktop performance for Windows Aero and also for 3d business and gaming graphics and well look at the rating for primary hard drive disk transfer speed 7.8 out a 7.9 the intel solid-state drive absolutely screams if you can afford the upgrade get it it's worth every penny and the prices are coming down all the time so I'm going to zoom back out I have tried rendering HD video with this by the way it does okay you know HD video rendering a lot of the time comes down to the processor power and with the ultra low voltage processor it's kind of clocked low at about one point three gigahertz so it's not really tuned well for rendering HD video but doing everything else running Photoshop an Internet and going to and watching even youtube HD video let's pull some of that up real quick just so you can see how smooth that is even when we're on the Intel graphics so we'll go to John for lakers here and let's bump this up to HD and there it goes and it loaded up pretty fast and let's see how smooth it is we'll go fullscreen this watch ribbon so perfect perfect playback of youtube HD perfect playback of Hulu or any other video streaming content it works really well now while we're on the internet again I want to talk about the multi-touch trackpad it's a synaptics trackpad so you can get the program that allows you to do to do the multi-touch gestures so what I can do here I'm going to try to do this may be difficult to show but I'm going to swipe two fingers downward to get it to scroll down like you would do on the macbook so we have two fingers and I'm inching down works very well I use the multi-touch all the time it's very convenient to use and finally one last note I'm going to talk about battery life asus claims that the UL 30 BTW thanks to the ultra low voltage processor thanks to the hybrid graphics can get up to 12 hours of battery life obviously that's not true in the first month of using this I could get about 9 hours of battery life with some optimizations even and with the solid state drive now I'm about down to 5 battery technology still hasn't evolved to where the battery life doesn't decrease over time so i'm at about five hours now which is still quite a remarkable for any sort of laptop and i'm really enjoying being able to run the asus UL 30 feet without having to charge it so often and zune software which is particularly resource intensive works very well so i'm going to bring up real quick some of the fancy graphics here and it works very well so guys I was an update on the asus UL 30 VT i highly recommend this laptop it's coming down a lot in price since i filmed the first video about this now 749 dollars tack on an intel SSD onto that you're about talking 950 or a thousand dollars or you can keep it in its standard configuration asus has new models of this coming out this year so you may want to watch out for that but of course they're going to start at higher price points this model the UL 30 VT may be a good bargain come two or three months from right before the new models hit so that's it for now