ASUS UL30A-X5 Laptop

ASUS UL30A-X5 Thin and Light 13.3-Inch Black Laptop - 12 Hours of Battery Life (Windows 7 Home Premium)

Other products by Asus

4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (56 customer reviews) | More about this product

Product Features and Technical Details

Product Features

• 1.3GHz Intel SU7300 Core 2 Duo Processor
• 4GB of DDR3 RAM, 2 slots, 4GB Max
• 500GB SATA Hard Drive (5400 RPM)
• 13.3" HD LED LCD Display, Intel GMA 4500MHD, Wi-Fi 802.11 bgn, 0.3M Webcam
• Windows 7 Home Premium Operating System (64 bit)

Processor, Memory, and Motherboard

• Processor: 1.3 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• RAM: 4 GB
• RAM Type: SDRAM

Cases and Expandability

• Size (LWH): 12.9 inches, 9.28 inches, 0.98 inches
• Weight: 3.74 pounds

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best under $700 notebooks, October 24, 2009

By	Jeff Carroll (St. Joseph, IL USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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Just received my Asus UL30A-X5 yesterday. After much review, and a try-out with an Acer 1410, I decided that I wanted a full-sized chiclet/island keyboard and the larger screen. I'm already quite pleased with my decision. At the <$700 price point, this is an excellent notebook.

Pros
- Keyboard. A pleasure to type on.
- Touchpad. It drags at first, but once you get some finger oil on it, and change the pointer speed, it's one of the best that I've used. Very smooth two finger scroller. Support for customized two and three finger click.
- Screen. Bright and easy to read at 30 degree angles.
- Battery life. Yes, it will do over 10 hours.
- Weight/size. 1 inch thin and very light.
- Body. Love the brushed black metal look on the case.
- Asus facial recognition login. Didn't think that I would care, but it's nice to have the computer log in, without touch, when I'm sitting in front of it.
- Asus FastBoot (not the BIOS fast boot). This lets you configure which programs load during startup and which load after. Speeds up the boot quite a bit.
- Decent speakers. Not ear-destroying, but suitable for the size. Much better than most netbooks.

Cons
- Placement of touchpad. It still registers my palm as I'm typing even at the extreme setting. Downloaded the new touchpad driver, but that didn't fix. Still looking for a solution. This is by far the most frustrating problem. UPDATE: The TouchFreeze utility seems to almost fix the issue.
- Case still shows fingerprints.
- Web cam is low res and has difficulty in low light (haven't tried different drivers yet).