Asus W1S laptop

My wife and I both needed a new computer. As usual it took me so long to decide which one to get, and I considered so many factors and went through so many possibilities, that I ended up spending more than I should have. £1400 actually. Ouch.

The W1S has a really nice 1600 pixel 15” widescreen display, which thankfully has a matt finish, instead of those shiny coatings you seem to find on almost all ‘multimedia’ laptops these days. They may be nice for watching movies but not so good for long-term working

Actually the 1600px wide resolution is a bit too high for everyday use because everything looks a bit small. For web surfing I think 1280px is a better resolution for a 15” screen. But again, for proper design work, say with Photoshop, the high resolution is a great advantage because you can spread out your tool palettes and still see the document you are working on.

The build quality on the Asus is exceptional and it is a very good-looking laptop. Actually the build quality is better than my Powerbook. The Asus is made of black brushed aluminium and carbon fibre and nothing seems to flex.

Overall in terms of hardware the W1S is the best PC laptop I’ve seen. With a 1.8GHz Centrino chip and 100GB hard drive it is fast and has a good amount of storage space. Battery life is not particularly great, but it does have a built-in Digital TV tuner and remote control.

Unfortunately the software is not up to this standard. For a start there is Windows XP. If you’ve used OSX for any length of time then XP is just pretty horrible. Added to this Asus has installed a bunch of utilities which are loaded up on startup and slow things down a bit. I tried to uninstall some of them using msconfig, which resulted in all sorts of errors and in the end I ended up reinstalling the whole thing from the rescue disk.

Where things really go downhill is with the Asus take on Microsoft’s Media Center, ‘Mobile Theater’. It is one of the clunkiest, most badly designed pieces of software I’ve used (OK some web applications are worse). It likes to pause for a second or so between each mouse click. It invites you to sign up (and pay for) for an Electronic Program Guide subscription, which then doesn’t work. Channels sometimes disappear and the only way to recover them is to rescan all the channels.

Having said this, it is possible to adapt to the program if you have a bit of patience (I wasn’t very patient at first, having just spent £1400). Once you accept that the software is just like this, and that Asus doesn’t know anything about software engineering or interface design, you find that the quality of the TV and the recordings it makes are really excellent. The sound from the speakers is also great (it has a good sub-woofer underneath, to give it quite a full sound).

Overall the Asus W1S is an impressive PC laptop. Weight and software shortcomings mean it won’t match a MacBook Pro. But the build quality is better and it has a built-in digital TV tuner. If you have a spouse who doesn’t want to move to a Mac, and suddenly find yourself with some money in your bank account, the W1S is a great option.