With that said, any standard machine would do, my home built desktop is for performance, I just wanted a computer I could easily carry about.

This fitted the bill, performance-wise it is slightly quicker than my old 1.73 Ghz laptop, probably beacause it’s running XP instead of Vista. It reports itself as having a 1.66 Ghz chip. This will just about run World of Warcraft.

Battery life is awesome, no need to carry the power cord with me (old laptop lasted 20 mins)I dont have power saving options turned on.

The webcam is better than my logitech notebook cam that runs on my desktop which is also supposed to be a 1.3 cam.

Yes it is a bit chunky, but it gives me the impression the hinge will last a bit longer than most of the other machines out there.

I dont like the shiny case (fingerprints everywhere), but that doesnt really count in the grand scheme of things.

I thought the keyboard was a bit cheap & nasty. But all the buttons fall into the right place for my fingers. I HAVE had to have the keyboard replaced after only 4 months of use, keys started failing, but in its defence, it was a SHOP DEMO machine, so had probably already been battered by the time I got it. The keyboard was replaced & returned within 2 weeks although they gave themselves 3 weeks to do it.

Thats the only 2 complaints I have about it. Basically I am very pleased with this machine, glad I bought it.

I wasnt expecting bluetooth on it, that was a nice surprise.

It has the “N” standard for wifi, again very nice, I was only expecting “G”. I can pick up loads of signals where my old laptop detected nothing. I can now use this in my garden. I live in a 900 yo mansion house with 3′ thick lead lined stone walls which a signal is going to struggle to get through.

9/10. It only gets a 9 because I wont give a 10 to anything, to get a 10 it needs the performance of my home desktop, which aint going to happen.

Not shipping with an antivirus is a plus not a negative! I was worried about having to remove a bloated trial antivirus install that would always leave a residue. In fact, the Windows install is refreshingly free of bloatware and I was able to install the antivirus product that I prefer, Avast.

I admit that Asus support has a bad name. So do a lot of companies these days.

The biggest negative is that the system has Windows XP installed instead of Ubuntu, but they thoughtfully provided that huge empty second partition and that negative was quickly resolved!