ASUS N50Vn-C2S NoteBook Intel Core 2 Duo T9400(2.53GHz) 15.4" Wide SXGA+ 4GB Memory 500GB HDD 5400rpm DVD Super Multi NVIDIA GeForce 9650M GT - Retail

Reviewed By: on 5/17/2009

Tech Level: high - Ownership: 1 week to 1 month

This user purchased this item from Newegg

Pros: Sweet sweet computer, especially for the price. I had a real bad experience with my last HP laptop so I decided to go for an ASUS. Bought hardware components from them before but never a laptop, and I have yet to be dissapointed! This computer has everything you need, the fingerprint reader works fast and accurately. Minimal extra bundled software (a good thing), just some essentials. Laptop has a lot of cool extras and shortcuts which I'm still exploring.

Cons: Video skips when playing streaming off the web, but download the BIOS update and it should fix this. Loud/hard mouse clicker, so I usually touch tap the touchpad instead of an actual mouse-click (or use the mini-mouse the computer comes with!). Unfortunately comes with 32-bit version of windows. I installed the 64-bit myself, the product key works with it you just have to find the installation 64-bit DVD somewhere.

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HD died after a week of use.

Reviewed By: Jousty on 4/13/2009

Tech Level: high - Ownership: 1 week to 1 month

This user purchased this item from Newegg

Pros: Great laptop for the price. The display is crystal clear and the device comes with many useful features that are "missing" in other brands.

Cons: The hard drive died after a week or use. The system stopped responding and when restarted I got BSOD with error "PROCESS1_INITIALIZATION_FAILED". The automated recovery fails, chkdsk shows 116Kb in bad sectors. So far (after 2 days) no luck with the recovery.
Asus Vista CD is useless - the only option you have is to wipe the disk clean and do a full reinstall.

Other Thoughts: Unfortunately I cannot send the laptop/drive for a repair - the disk contains company classified information along with my fingerprint. Even format wont destroy that completely. The disk has to be destroyed. The drive is made by Seagate (made in China) and looks really cheap. You may want to get a WD drive and just do the restore from CD to it.

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N50V-C3S (slightly diff config)

Reviewed By: matt001 on 4/6/2009

Tech Level: high - Ownership: 1 month to 1 year

Pros: My laptop is slightly different than this listing (C3S), has 320gb HD, Blu-Ray ROM, but otherwise the same (it seems that newegg was clearing that config out, so I still want my input). I recommend this laptop! Screen impeccable, great keyboard (full numeric keypad!), fairly light-weight, quiet running, cool running (no overheat issues), good arrangement of ports, not too much junk-ware. I paid $1299 from Newegg, shipping was good, fast, well protected.

Cons: WinDVD8 is not bad software, but I needed to update to play blu-ray (remember, this is a different config), and that update took forever, and a call to manuf.

My other concern is that ASUS didn't package the 32-bit version of Home Premium to go with the 64-bit capable processor and 4Gb of RAM! You can't fully access 4Gb of RAM with a 32-bit OS. I called ASUS to ask about this, and they stonewalled me. Crazy to sell a computer with 4Gb of RAM w/o a 64-bit OS! Msft won't give you an update, and neither will ASUS. You have to buy the 64-bit version seperately, which adds a lot to the cost!

As others have mentioned, the 6cell batt isn't the greatest life, but if you put it on batt save, you can get almost 3 hours out of it, unless you are running the optical drive (maybe 2 hours in that case). It runs about 1 hour on high performance settings (ex. online games)

The touchpad buttons are very stiff. I enabled the touchpad double tap to accomplish it, but old habits die hard.

Other Thoughts: I've been really happy with it otherwise. If you signed up for the Windows 7 beta, it works well, until they cut off the beta. Video card is pretty great for a laptop, rivals my desktop running 8800 GTX nVidia. It will run screen and my 40" 1920x1200 Samsung LCD TV really well.

I was a bit disappointed when I called ASUS tech support to see if they would upgrade the OS to 64-bit. The guy wasn't even very nice, he just flat out refused and said they don't do anything for that.

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