Are Asus laptops any good?

[fire_storm]

Hi

I never owned any asus products before and the 2 years international warranty is assuring but is their laptops reliable?
also i have to chose either 130M or 9650M both 1Gb which one is better?
http/ca.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=5&l2=132&l3=900&l4=0&model=2566&modelmenu=1
http/ca.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=5&l2=132&l3=929&l4=0&model=2873&modelmenu=1

Thank you very much

 

[tseruzhy0]

I have one of the F3 Series in fact I am typing to you on it. I will say one of my only complaints for this laptop is the touch pad in that it tends to get hit while i am doing a alot of typing (ie multiple pages) and can throw you off. I have had this laptop for almost 2 years and survived a 7 month trip to Iraq where I used it on a daily basis, I used it to play music and movies while i was working 16 hour shifts, blew it out daily due to the sand. Additionally i used a pelican case for all transportation which is why my laptop is still in near mint condition unlike most kids who treat their gear like trash.

On another note not sure if it is the Iraqi sand or heavy use but i use the cdrom on this computer and all my work computer quite frequently and I have yet to have one that has lasted more than a year this one included and the computers that I work on are Dell's, IBM's (before and after the Lenova sale), Alienware and Panasonic toughbooks none of these have had a cdrom lasting more than a year. This has never been an issue since while i was in the military we had external cdroms (Panasonic ones) which always lasted had one we used for 5 years and never failed.

As far as Operating Systems go i ran Debian while in Iraq and converted atleast 20 or so people to Linux, I also dual booted the Vista load that came with my computer runs very smooth and i was able to play Farcry 2 and Fallout 3 with some decent detail and nice framerate after i cleaned out some unneeded bloatware.

In conclusion of all the laptops i have used this one is definitely one of my favorites for all around use, for heavy typing I liked the IBM T60 that i used at work