I have recently done something I’ve never done before: I purchased a new laptop.
Not “new used”, “gently used”, or even “a couple years old but still somewhat OK but now found on ebay at half the price” – NEW, out-of-the-box, register-the-warranty, bleeding-edge hardware, not a single fingerprint on it, NEW.
I rather quite like it.
After limping along the past year on my old (but still fully functional) Thinkpad T60, I purchased a NEW Asus G74Sx.
This thing tears my old laptop a new butthole.
However…I still have nits to pick, because I am picky and particular, and there are, in fact, some nits.
The USB camera in the lid. In linux (Of COURSE I’m putting linux on it!), the camera doesn’t like being to enter a low-power or no-power state, and kicks the ACPI system in the balls anytime ACPI tries to sleep.
The keyboard. It’s a nice size, but the layout could use some work. Quite frankly, it’s not as friendly to my keyboard-oriented usage as my old Thinkpad. I miss my Trackpoint, for starters. The ‘delete’ and ‘insert’ key are combined – I have to press a key-combo to ‘insert’. It’s reeealy weird having the home/end/pgup/pgdn keys aaaaall the way over to upper right above the keypad. The pgup/pgdn keys have an issue with responsiveness, and only seem to register every third press. The keyboard backlight is nice, but IMHO there should be a hardware control for the brightness.
The touchpad. Oh gods, the touchpad. I have loathed touchpads since I first saw one. I have since undergone a crash course in touchpad technology, and while I will admit that there might be some good touchpads somewhere, what currently exists in my laptop could not be counted among them. It’s not a Synaptics – it is a Sentelics Finger Sensing Pad, and I have a secret dream that someday I will lift the lid of my G74Sx, and find the touchpad has left, leaving a note: “I understand. I’m gone.” The touch pad is overly sensitive and poorly positioned – as a Trackpoint lover, I hate having anything under my wrists while I type, especially if it reacts to just the near proximity of my thumbs.
All in all, this is a bitchin’ piece of hardware. It’s built like a carbon-fiber-and-aluminum stealth shithouse. It has a nice, sturdy feel, with very adequate cooling capacity and a rockin’ quad-core i7 with 12G of DDR3 and GeForce GTS 560M. Hell, this thing is nicer than my desktop. Still, I may make a winter project of finding a way to replace the touchpad and/or keyboard with something better.