ASUS N90Sv X1 - Core 2 Duo T9550 2.66 GHz - 18.4" TFT

3/10 Don't waste your time

JustAnoherDude - 07/24/09

I am very surprised to see any review of this product in "the high numbers". First off, it is SLOW. I mean, it is VERY SLOW. Playing audio files is virtually impossible because they "hesitate" so often. This is with NO OTHER SOFTWARE RUNNING, and Norton removed. It was REALLY SLOW w/Norton running! Can not watch a DVD on this machine -- continually "stalls" for a few seconds at a time. Audio quality and volume are very poor. There is virtually no low frequency audio, and even at max volume, you can not listen to music. The user mnanuals don't show correct diagrams of this device -- none of the Express Gate buttons are described in the manuals. Express Gate is useless. ASUS boasts "8 second boot-up with Express Gate", but this machine takes 34 to 35 seconds. Worse, is that the Express Gate could not find ANY of the numerous wireless connections that are local -- but Vista finds them all, connects to any. The Express Gate applications are not quality apps -- very "low end", mostly useless software. ASUS claims 320GB disk, but TOTAL disk space, on 2 partitions, is 138GB+136GB. We all know that about 7% formatting overhead is typical, but this machine suffers over double that. Applications take between 20 to 90 seconds to load -- even Notepad. It's the worst (slowest) I have ever encountered. Boot-up is about 3 minutes; shut-down is about 90 seconds... very poor performance. Task Manager shows average CPU usage is about 3%, and average memory usage is about 1.3GB (of 4 total). So I have no idea why everything is so SLOW. I have other Vista machines, and they are nowhere near this slow. On the plus side, the 18.4" display is very nice, and no dead/stuck pixels. Image display quality is very good. Overall, this machine is a huge disappointment to me. It does not even compare to machines that are half the price. I tried OpenOffice on it, but a typical document took over 2 minutes to open. The Adobe reader was useless too -- again, terribly slow to open a PDF. I installed Foxit, and it was much faster, but even that is taking over 30 seconds to open a small PDF file (100KB -- takes 5 seconds on other computers). Adobe Elements was so slow it was not usable, and ditto Corel PSP Photo X1. I tried another unit at the store, with same results, and was told "no return" because I had removed some of the pre-installed apps (Norton, etc). I would not recommend this machine to anybody.