Anyone have experience with ASUS laptops?
 

My 19 month Toshiba died an early death. I'm looking at ASUS this time around. Have had Dell, HP and Toshiba so far. ASUS seems to do about the best of the non-Apple laptop makers according to PC Mag's annual survey.

I pretty much only surf the Internet and watch videos on it. I'm looking at one of their low-end 17.3" laptops, the X75 line. It has an Sandy Bridge i3, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD, CD/DVD, HDMI, VGA, Ethernet, and 1 USB 3.0 and 2 USB 2.0 ports and is under $600. I do not want a laptop that doesn't have at least one USB 3.0 port since the transfer rate is far superior to 2.0 for external HDDs. It also has 2 year parts/labor warranty. I did read that the service/support is not as good as other aspects of their product. It rates about HP level according to PC Mag, but the reliability of the PCs are good.

I just don't see spending a lot of money on a PC that will not travel with me a lot and is a desktop replacement. I have an iPad 1 and soon to have an iPhone 5 and don't really need an ultrabook or similar. I could get a Mac, but I can't justify spending $1500+ on a Macbook Pro.

I think it's hard to make suggestions about ASUS notebooks as a whole. We have a fair number at work and I really like some of the 10" netbooks and Zenbook, but find some of the X53 series a bit cheap.

If you could describe what features you're looking for we may be able to provide better help comparing ASUS to others in its class.

I own a Asus EEE PC 900HA (bought used) and a Lenovo THinkpad Y460P.

I have had no problems with the Asus, and very little with the Lenovo. Both are the best non-Apple laptop brands in my opinion.

Toshiba is up there too, but Asus is better in terms of reliability from what I have seen.

This is my personal opinion :P

OP,
I would suggest you spend some time around IT forums to get nitty-gritty info, but here are my $0.02.

ASUS laptops used to have bad reputation in mid-2000s because of their motherboards (would fry faster than potato chips). The issue has been long fixed. I looked at ASUS hard when purchasing new laptop and was impressed from hardware view point. These laptops have the most impressive specs: CPU, RAM, VideoCard memory, hard drive speed/size, etc. They are also relatively cheap. The downside is the size as they are too bulky to carry around.

However, the best price/quality laptops are Lenovo ThinkPads. They are tough as nails, great workhorses both for work and casual use (though I wouldn't use them for gaming). I particularly recommend ThinkPad X220 and X1.

ASUS laptop specs are appealing, but they might drop the ball in the warranty and support departments. By the recent posts about ASUS on consumerist.com, ASUS's warranty service is giving HP's consumer support a run for the worst in industry. Personally, I would avoid ASUS until they address the support issues.

I would recommend a business class laptops such as ThinkPad, Dell Latitude/Precision or HP ProBook/EliteBook. Business laptops are less flashy but built to take the abuse. ThinkPads often go on sale, and they usually go for less than their Dell and HP counterparts and approach consumer laptop price level.

I have an Asus G75VW DS72 Factory built with i7 3610 processor, 16 gigs ram an nvidia GTX67m graphics card(17 inch premium gaming laptop). Previously and still running perfectly, a Del XPS M1730 (also the premium laptop of its time in Dell's line up. The Asus has great performance; and has a great build quality. It has great specs and have had no issues at all. I have also a Asus Eeepc 1215n netbook which sees mostly around the house duty, and used to travel with it for about 2 years. Asus has pretty good quality nowadays, and their prices are excellent when compared to similarly spec'd laptops from other manufacturers.

My 7-year-old Asus Z96J is still humming along (with its beautiful 15.4" 1680x1050 screen). Shame it has a PATA hard drive connection, or else I'd throw in a SSD and use it until it croaked. Well, the battery is also shot, and so is the DVD drive, but it surfs and web and accepts SDHC cards.

My 4-year-old Asus EEE 1000HE recent got a SSD installed, and it's also performing well. I will probably install Window 8 RTM on it soon.

My next computer (in a few months) will probably be the Asus Zenbook UX31A-DB51, unless something with better specs comes out. I will also buy Mrs. Swede an Asus Ultrabook should they release a new one with a 1600x900 screen.

Thanks for the posts so far. I put in the specs of what I'm looking at.

Here is a chart of 3 year failure rates for laptops:

http://eyebald.blogspot.ca/2009/11/l...-by-brand.html