大象传媒

Going ultra light with Asus

• Darren Waters
• 18 Feb 08, 11:41 GMT

I've never really had cause to complain about the bulk of my laptop - at least, not until I started using the .

After a few days use going back to my Macbook was like swapping a pebble in my pocket for a boulder.

The Asus U1E is undoubtedly a wonderfully mobile computer. It comes packed with all the features you should expect from a laptop - and that includes plenty of USB and Firewire posrts (Apple - take note).

And Asus throws in an external CD/DVD drive for the price. But that price is 拢1,300 - which is a lot of money.

The screen is crisp and the keyboard, while small, is perfectly usable for the road warrior with average size fingers.

Inside the machine there's a 100GB drive, 2GB of RAM and an Intel Core 2 Duo processor.

But here's the rub: the CPU clocks at just 1Ghz and so it positively creaks running Vista Business.

I have no idea why Asus has chosen to run the Business edition, or even Vista for that matter. This machine just doesn't have the CPU cycles to pull it off. XP would have been a much better option.

As such it's hard to really judge the machine. As a piece of hardware it is well-engineered, sleek and a joy to have in your laptop bag as it's lighter than many paperback books.

But trying to do any sort of task results in hangs, crashes and problems. Reopening the lid and awakening the machine from sleep can take up to a minute - that's just unacceptable in a modern laptop.

So until Asus improves the processor, or ditches Vista, I'll be lugging round my Macbook and trying to ignore just how heavy my bag feels.