Asus A8JR

With its 14.1-inch screen and 5.3-pound weight, the Asus A8Jr-4P021C is better suited to frequent travel. It's an adequate performer, though it needs more features (or a lower price) to help it stand out from stronger mainstream entries from Dell and Gateway.
 
The rounded silver-and-black chassis won't elicit stares, but it's attractive. The full-sized keyboard is comfortable, as is the large, smooth touchpad. The pad's integrated mouse buttons are a bit stiff, and with just a thin line differentiating the button area from the touchpad area, it's easy to press the corner of the touchpad when you mean to hit a mouse button. More annoying is the lack of dedicated multimedia control keys. And on our model, the Function-key combo to toggle Wi-Fi on and off didn't work, nor did the preloaded Asus Net Switch utility; we had to use Vista's Network Diagnostic tool to enable the radio.
 
The 14.1-inch widescreen is particularly bright and vivid (and particularly reflective), and text on the 1280 x 800-pixel panel was crisp and legible. It also did a good job displaying DVD movies, and you can use the included Asus Splendid utility to tweak screen settings for various tasks (images, movies, etc). The notebook speaker's audio output, however, was thin and weak.
 
Although the A8Js we recently tested includes the dedicated Nvidia 512MB GeForce Go 7700 graphics engine for gamers, the more mainstream (and affordable) A8Jr goes with the lower-end ATI Mobility Radeon X2300. It's plenty powerful for Vista's Aero, scoring a 3.7 on the Windows Experience Index graphics test. But gamers will be disappointed; while the A8Jr delivered a ho-hum 41 fps on F.E.A.R.'s autodetect mode, it managed just 8 fps at 1024 x 768-pixel resolution.
 
Mainstream users will get plenty of power from the 1.66-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor (the unit scored 3,668 on PCMark05) and 2GB of RAM; Vista will make use of all the RAM you give it. Wireless throughput (17.7 Mbps at 50 feet) was the best in the group, but given the screen size, we expected better than 1 hour and 35 minutes of battery life.
 
As for connectivity, you'll find five USB ports, FireWire, Bluetooth, a 4-in-1 card reader, an ExpressCard slot, plus S-Video, VGA, and DVI. Asus loads the 120GB hard drive with Vista Home Premium and its own InstantFun Plus applet for accessing music, photos, video, DVD functions, and disc-burning tools. In our tests, playing a DVD via InstantFun didn't work at all, and in general the UI and features are inferior to Windows Media Center, which comes with the OS. Perhaps it was a good inclusion before Vista came along, but now it's got to go.
 
The A8Jr is a good--and good-looking--lightweight Vista notebook. But given the stiff competition in the $1,300 price arena, it's not the best money can buy.

 

Asus A8Js
With Intel's Core 2 Duo processor, the Asus A8Js really performs.

The Ultimate Guide to Microsoft Windows Vista
Everything You Need to Know About Vista

 

Here we review three top business notebooks, and give you the most important buying tips you need to make a smart purchase.