New Laptop -- ASUS UL50AG

I bought this right before thanksgiving, and I absolutely love it so far!


ASUS UL50AG-RBBBK05
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit (I upgraded from Home)
15.6" screen, 1" thick, 4.2lbs
10-12? hrs battery (advertised)
7hrs 45mins battery (best buy)
500GB hard drive
4GB RAM
WebCam, 5-in-1 card reader
1.3GHz Intel® Core™2 Duo


It's amazing what a $680 laptop can get you these days!

It's also amazing what best buy can do for you these days!

At $680, their price is comparable to online prices. Amazon and newegg list a similar model ASUS UL50 Series UL50Ag-A2 for $720. With taxes my best buy purchase came to $762.29, and that ofcourse comes with immediate gratification and an easy return process. :)

I was also impressed with best buy's battery life estimates. It seems likely that laptop manufacturers vary in terms of how they report battery life, and my guess is that their estimates tend to exceed usable battery time by 10-30%. Best buy's estimate of 7 hrs and 45 minutes was less than the estimates I saw online for similar ASUS models UL50AG-A2 and UL50AG-A1 at 11-12hrs, though I can't be sure what ASUS advertised for my UL50AG-RBBBK05 model. (I checked the ASUS website and they didn't list the battery life for the UL50AG. They did list the battery life for the UL50VT as 12 hours. Unfortunately, best buy doesn't sell this model, so I can't compare battery life estimates!) There was a toshiba laptop at best buy that looked pretty cool until I saw that the battery life was just over an hour. I might need to go back for the model number now to see if I can compare it with toshiba's advertised time.

One cool feature is that my asus can access web, photos, and music almost instantaneously from it's powered off state. It has two boot-up options and while normal mode is pretty fast, the fast-boot option is super fast.