ASUS u46e-bal7 - Silly Name, Super Fine Laptop

Years ago, I bought a Sony laptop and loved it. I assumed that I was now a fan of Sony, and would buy from then, from now on. Not so, as my next laptop was a Dell Vostro. Again, I loved it (still do, actually), and assumed I would be buying from Dell from now on. And again, I was proven wrong.

Neither Sony, nor Dell, had anything that really impressed me, so I went back on the hunt for laptops. While poking around Best Buy I discovered the Asus u46e-bal6. It had impressive specs for the price (i7 process, or 8 gigs of ram, 13" screen and was relatively low weight). Add to that the positive review by cnet and I was sold.

As luck would have it, the bal6 model line was discontinued, but the bal7 line is now available. It appears to have almost no differences (except a higher price) than the bal6, but was still what I considered to be a solid bargain.

So I did it, and for the first time in my life, I'm an Asus owner.

What's truly amazing about this laptop is just how smooth a transition it has been to use. The setup took about 3 minutes. I downloaded Firefox and xmarks, and within another two minutes I had all my bookmarks. I was now ready to use the cloud, and with zero effort had access to all my e-mail, docs and company information.

I removed the virus software that came with it (as no doubt, it was some sort of trial) and just installed Microsoft Security Essentials, what seems to be a free and reliable virus checker. And other than the Bing Bar being installed, I've been impressed with how little bloatware is on the laptop. I can remember not too long ago, when manufacturers would provide you a computer littered with the stuff.

After the Anti-Virus and Firefox were in place (which, yeah, I should have done in the reverse order. But, whatever), I installed Cygwin and emacs and the vast majority of my development tools were taken care of.

Finally, I installed Carbonite and "restored" my files from my old Sony laptop. In another few days, all my files should transfer from the old laptop to the new.

It's all just been so dang uneventful.

The actual physical laptop seems to be high quality. They keyboard seems usable, though, most of the time, I have I'll have it hooked up to an external keyboard. In theory, it has a WiMax chipset built in, and USB 3.0 - but I really don't have a use for these. I just know that it seems fast, and so far, has been reliable. I haven't seen how long the 8 cell battery will last, but I'm sure it's more than satisfactory.

As for down sides, it has few minor nits. There's no finger print scanner, but it does offer facial recognition that's quite impressive. Time will tell if its practical to use. It also doesn't have a backlit keyboard, which my Dell Vostro has and makes working in bed next to a sleeping wife more pleasant. But, given the other specs of the machine (i7+8Gb RAM), I figured I could live without the keyboard. Or heck, maybe I'll upgrade it later. Another psudo-nit is that I'm not in love with the placement of the volume keys on the keyboard, but that was trivial to fix with this autohotkey script:

HotKey, +#Up, vol_up
HotKey, +#Down, vol_down
vol_up:
  Send {Volume_UP}
  return
vol_down:
  Send {Volume_Down}
  return

All in all, I couldn't be more pleased with the new laptop. Its peppy and has been a breeze to switch to. Couldn't ask for anything more.