ASUS A52F-XA1 15.6-Inch Versatile Entertainment Laptop (Black)

by Asus

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 15.2 x 10.2 x 1.4 inches ; 5.8 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 8.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B0046HAO2C
• Item model number: A52F-XA1
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,267 in Computers & Accessories (See Top 100 in Computers & Accessories)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: October 3, 2010

Product Description

15.6" HD (1366 x768)/Intel P6100/4G DDR3/Intel HD Graphics/320G 5400/Super Multi ODD/W7HP (64bit)/802.11BGN/0.3M Pixel/Bluetooth/6-cell battery/HDMI out/1yr warranty/1yr ADW

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

135 of 135 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A nice laptop for the money. No issues here. Detailed specs..., November 27, 2010

By 

Reader Mom :) (South Carolina) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: ASUS A52F-XA1 15.6-Inch Versatile Entertainment Laptop (Black) (Personal Computers)

I had previously ordered 2 other laptops and hated them, returning them both until I found this one. It was on super sale for pre-Black Friday and although it did not have a detailed description like most laptops on Amazon, I decided to take a chance and order it because of the nice price. I am pleasantly surprised. Firstly, let me give you the specs since Amazon doesn't tell you much...
Intel Pentium dual core P6100 2.0 Ghz (They completely left off the clock speed in their description. 2.0 is not bad.)
4GB DDR3 RAM
320 GB hard drive
VGA Intel Graphics Media Accelerator HD
Altec Lansing SRS Premium sound speakers
15.6 HD display
802.11N+BT wireless
DVD-R Super Multi Drive
Windows 7 Home Premium 64
Facial Recognition
Built-in Webcam
Bluetooth
Energy Star Qualified
HDMI port
Ethernet port
3 USB ports
Monitor serial port
Media card reader -multiple formats
6 cell battery - Battery life is about 4 hours
Comes with Office Starter 2010, which is not a trial version. It is only Word and Excel, which is all I need or want anyway.
Now, onto my review. The laptop looks nice and worked perfectly fine, contrary to another review. It prompted me to make backup/boot disks when I first turned it on and I did. You need 5 blank DVD-R's. It was a smooth process and took 3 hours. The sound from the speakers is okay. I can hear it just fine and it's plenty loud. I've had laptops where even on the highest volume setting you have to strain to hear what is happening on videos etc. Not this one. I do wish the bass was better on it, but there is a control panel where you can adjust the sound and I was able to get it sounding decent, although not perfect. The fan is quiet and I don't think the laptop gets too hot. The keyboard is bouncy for my taste and the number pad is smaller than I am used to. (I had a 17" laptop and the keyboard on that is huge so moving to this one is a bit of an adjustment, but so far so good.) I love that this laptop has a 12 month warranty and is energy star qualified. It is speedy and a good deal for the price I paid with all the features you get. Overall I am satisfied and would purchase it again given the oppertunity.

Update 12/8/2010: I had mailed in the accidental damage warranty registration card they include in your package and it was returned to me today as undeliverable. I found out that you have register on their website and they make you print out a special form to mail in to an entirely different address than the one on the card from the package. So save yourself a stamp until you do this so it gets to the correct spot. You are not able to do it completely online unfortunately.

51 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars cheap and reliable, fast enough for everyday usage, December 15, 2010

By 

Geek4Life - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: ASUS A52F-XA1 15.6-Inch Versatile Entertainment Laptop (Black) (Personal Computers)

After a few charge/discharge cycles to get things started, the battery lasts about 3-4 hours under normal circumstances with normal settings (e.g., LED screen is on medium brightness). It will last fewer hours if you play movies or something because it takes more power to spin the DVD disc. It's annoying how Amazon listed everything EXCEPT that vital stat, huh? I hope they fix that soon.

This is a good laptop for normal usage like websurfing, MS Word, Excel, light gaming (Plants v Zombies, etc.), and playing movies/watching Youtube/etc.. The P6100 is basically a 2-GHz Core i3 without hyperthreading (but hyperthreading is only useful when you are doing very heavy multitasking or using a highly threaded program). It's even made on the same process/fabs as the Core i3. Thanks to the P6100's integrated memory controller and other efficiencies inherent in the Core i3-style design, it's about as fast as a 2.5-GHz Core 2 Duo. Thus it's well-balanced with a reasonably fast processor and competent GPU (graphics processing unit) that can handle 1080p playback very smoothly in my experience.

The weakest part of this laptop is the relatively slow hard drive, a WD Scorpio Blue at 5400 rpm, which is pretty good for a laptop, but not up to par with a good desktop 7200rpm or SSD. (NOTE: The WD Scorpio Blue's clicking noise is apparently normal and a result of the drive head parking or moving around or something, probably as an energy-saving feature. It's louder than what I've experienced with Thinkpads, but it's not defective just because it's loud.) By the way, if you think ASUS's reliability is bad, wait till you get a load of other companies' "reliability." ASUS is tops in Squaretrade's reliability index (they keep track of which laptops need the fewest repairs), and laptop magazines sometimes run reliability articles where ASUS usually places first or second. Laptop parts can and do fail, so I wouldn't read into one or two bad apples as meaning the entire batch is bad.

This laptop will ask you to make recovery DVDs when you first boot up, though you don't have to make the backups there and then and can delay the backup indefinitely. Backup takes 5 DVD-Rs and several hours. Use quality DVD-Rs if you are getting readback errors. Don't skimp; this is your BACKUP COPY we are talking about here! I recommend Verbatim and especially Taiyo Yuden discs sold by rima.com. The higher-end Kodaks are fine but probably excessive; you don't need the archival-grade gold stuff. Sony DVD-Rs are okay. RITEK is hit or miss, depending on the variant. I dunno about the rest, but chances are that a no-name brand won't last long. If you buy a DVD movie at the store, it is stamped. There is no ink and thus the DVD will last for decades. Stampers are extremely expensive (more expensive than many people's houses, so only big companies own them). Most home users use DVD burners to make DVD-Rs, like this laptop does. The problem is that burned DVD-Rs may last mere months if they use cheap, unstable dyes or have poor bonding (DVD-Rs are made like sandwiches, unlike CD-Rs which are asymmetric and basically a slab of plastic with some dye and lacquer; this is why it's almost impossible to find a "bad" CD-R but much easier to find a "bad" DVD-R).

The laptop doesn't get that hot, so feel free to put it on your lap without fear of sterilizing yourself.

Edited to add: I ran some benchmarks and it seems that there is probably a mediocre RAID controller in the laptop's motherboard, so average sequential read is around 150 MB/s with my Sandforce-powered Vertex 2 SSD, which is laughably slow compared to the >250 MB/s that a Vertex 2 ought to be getting. So feel free to get a slower SSD for this laptop, since it can't max out the faster SSDs on the market anyway. At least you retain the other benefits, like low random access times and shockproof data storage.

The rest of this review is just my general recommendation beyond this laptop:

In my opinion, it's not worth getting a A52F variant with a faster CPU. If you pile on the CPU speed it's still hamstrung by the video so there's no point in getting the faster versions--what are you going to do with a much faster CPU and the exact same GPU? The only times it would matter would be if you were doing something highly threaded that required little to no video, and how many of us do heavy, multi-threaded number-crunching tasks on a laptop? If you want a gaming rig, look elsewhere because the video card here won't be good enough for new games, with maybe a few exceptions here and there. Ditto if you transcode tons of video: get a laptop with a higher-end GPU for that, or get a desktop to pair with the laptop.

By contrast, the difference between a laptop with HDD and with SSD is night and day, so you may want to skimp on the CPU and pour the saved money into an SSD instead. Switching to an SSD is painless: just remove the backplate of the laptop, remove the 2.5" drive carriage, swap drives, and put it back together again, all while touching something grounded or a big piece of metal or something like that, to ensure that your static electricity doesn't kill the drives. It literally took me five minutes to switch to an SSD. Make sure you have a spare copy of an OS disc somewhere, because this laptop doesn't come with a Windows install disc, and using the recovery DVDs may not work right if you don't install it back onto the original 320GB hard drive. (Note: You can use any regular Windows 7 64-bit install disc and use the product key that comes with this laptop [it's on the bottom of the laptop on a sticker]. The product key is the thing that tells the Windows installation DVD which version of Windows to install.) Then use the DVD that ASUS includes with the laptop to install the proprietary drivers.

33 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Luck of the draw..., November 25, 2010

By 

P. Kikuta - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: ASUS A52F-XA1 15.6-Inch Versatile Entertainment Laptop (Black) (Personal Computers)

Seems like these laptops are hit or miss in terms of reliability. Previously, there was a one-star post that got deleted. The reviewer said that he got the blue screen of death the first time he booted up the laptop. One other person on slickdeals also reported a blue screen the first time the laptop was booted up. Also, many have reported an intermittent clicking noise coming from the hard drive. I can confirm that this is true. Another issue reported is that when creating recovery discs, it keeps on failing when it tries to verify the discs. There are 5 recovery discs in all. I had disc #2 fail, but it was ok on my second try.

I also have an issue with the battery not charging correctly. I cannot power on the laptop from the battery. I must use the AC adapter. If I disconnect the AC adapter, the laptop will shut off. The battery indicator icon says that the battery is charging, but it has been stuck at 46% for the past couple of hours. Researching this issue on the internet, it seems that Windows 7 might be causing this. I guess I could blow the HD away and install XP, but I only have the 32-bit version and would waste 1 gig of memory. Not worth the headache.

Unfortunately I have already opened the laptop, so instead of returning it and only getting back 85% of the purchase price. I will take my chances and exchange it for another one. Hopefully the odds will be stacked in my favor the next time around...