Asus A6R

by Ana Matos
(Braga, Portugal)

1)Why did you decide on this laptop over the others?

I own this Asus for more than 3 years and I bought it because my other laptop was stolen and I needed another right away because I was finishing university. This was bought at a local store, the price was low comparing to big stores and Asus at the time was very popular among geek students that I knew.

2)What specs (memory, hard drive, etc.) did your laptop come with, if known?

As far as I know:
CPU & cache memory: Intel Celeron M 360-380 1.40GHz-1.70GHz & 1MB On-Die L2 Cache, 400 MHz;

Hard drive: 80 GB;

Graphic Chipset: ATI Radeon Xpress 200M;

Memory: DDR2 533MHz SDRAM, 2x socket SO-DIMM to 2GB;

Screen: 15.1”

3)What are the best and worst things about your laptop?

Good for a daily use, students and other people but basic users. With the OS Windows Vista was a disaster, bad performance, a friend bought the same model a week later and with Vista and regretted. But she never did anything to improve the laptop and sold it!

Instead, if not a basic user, like me, I have put more memory and now have a total of 2GB, the performance is better and I didn´t need to sold my machine. It supported Linux and a virtual machine with Windows at the same time, supported hours and hours of work with statistical tools and other projects for school.

The laptop sill rocks and works entirely. The bad thing besides putting more memory it´s the battery, the time life was only of 1 year. Another thing is the energy cable adapter, it needs to be rolled carefully otherwise one day it could make a short-circuit and be damaged forever.

It happened to me, fortunately a professional opened the adapter and repair the situation (I don´t recommend doing that because it´s not very easy to open the adapter and the only manner to close it is to put duct tape around!). The screen it is very limited in brightness, very bright or very dark. The graphic ATI was also slow performance and is limited.

4)How would you rate the keyboard, touchpad, and speakers?

In a scale of 1 to 10, the keyboard is satisfactory and nothing to report, I rate 9. The touchpad is also normal, perhaps it could be in another position, more approximated to the body and the 2 keys are very large and rigid, I give a 7. The speakers are very bad, the quality is very poor, the volume is limited and the position of the speakers doesn’t help, I give 5.

5)How would you rate your laptop's speed and performance?

As I said the performance and speed is satisfactory for basic users but poor for advanced users who work with more applications and at the same time. In a scale of 1 to 10 I rate my originally laptop with 6 and now with more memory with 8.

6)Would you recommend this laptop to a friend? Will you buy from Asus again?

This laptop at this point is outdated so I do not recommend, I only recommend if low budgets and for basic users and perhaps young people (teenagers). Since I have used other laptops I wouldn’t buy an Asus again because isn´t the best nowadays, but it was at the time at least in my country.