Customer Reviews

ASUS N10J-A1 10.2-Inch Laptop (1.6 GHz Intel Atom N270 Processor, 2 GB RAM, 160 GB Hard Drive, NVidia 9300M 256MB, Vista Premium)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a great netbook, basically the most powerfull one they make.

I am very happy with the purchase since this little netbook will do everything it is suppose to do. I have played games on it, along with hooking it up to my big screen tv for improved view. Additionally I can play games locally with a very nice easily viewing smaller 10.2 inch screen.

My only grip is that it comes with vista instead of xp. It loads fairly fast and seems to be able to do any notebook tasks like emails, word, basic office tasks. Very light weight and comes with a soft pad case.

Hope this helps it is worth the extra 200.00 above the other ones if you want more graphics power and battery performance.

Thanks,

"I love this computer. It is small enough to be portable but have even more power than my Dell Latitude. I love how the screen changes with battery options. The express gate function is very handy but sometimes it will shut off when I am online for no reason so that is a problem occasionally. Going from that to the OS seems to not work I just shut down and start up though. I think I will continue to purchase only ASUS laptops from now on."

I was in the market for a netbook that can play 1080p video and has HDMI out port. Incredibly, it was very hard to find one that fits the bill... and then I bumped into Asus N10J...

I picked up a slightly more beefed up Canadian version off eBay -- it is the same as N10J-A1 but has a bigger 250 GB hard drive and a "bilingual" keyboard which has a few French symbols on it (makes no difference to my typing experience whatsoever).

The laptop looks great and feels sturdy. Keyboard is slightly cramped. Smaller shift keys bothered me at first, but I am now back to typing without even looking at the keyboard.

Vista runs fine. 2 GB Ram and dedicated video card can handle the glassy shiny Aero without any problems. The only occasional slowdowns occur under heavy multi-tasking... which is not what netbooks are intended for anyway. Overall, I'm very happy with the performance.

What I really like is the ability to use N10J as a media center PC. First, it can play 1080p video with no issues whatsoever given it is set up properly. Here's a very helpful tutorial on how to get smooth full HD playback on this little monster:

[...]

Second, it delivers 5.1 sound via both HDMI port and a hybrid mini/SPDIF audio port. To get 5.1 audio via HDMI, you'll need to select nVidia Audio Output device via Control Panel => Sound.

Mini to SPDIF adapter is required for digital audio via the mini audio port. Actually, I recommend getting mini to SPDIF cable since there's signal loss with adapter + SPDIF cable combination.

Last, but not least, be sure to check out Asus N10 user community forums at [...] for helpful tips and tutorials.

I highly recommend this very portable yet very capable netbook. The price premium over less powerful machines is well worth it in my opinion.

I am very happy with the N10J. It was purchased when my wife's Thinkpad failed after several years. I had a high end desktop and a Thinkpad W500 (a newer high end laptop). I used my Lenovo mostly for travel and more for entertainment and e-mail connectivity than for work as I am retired. I had gotten tired of it being too big to use comfortably on an airplane. So I gave her the W500 and bought this for myself.

Good:
Portability
Camera and fingerprint reader for Skype, photos and security
LCD is very readable and can be connected to a larger VGA in office
Keyboard and touchpad are good (see one keypad issue below)
Attractive with solid construction (but not as sturdy as the Thinkpad)
Can play many games, just not the newest most resource intensive ones
See [...] for compatibility list

Issues:
Right shift key is only half size
Several plugs on the right interfere a little with using a mouse there
Processor is the bottleneck in this computer. It is problem for processor intensive games and video conversion, and other applications are slower than I am used to them being.
Battery life is somewhat short for this type of unit (3-4 hours) even when using the integrated graphics.

In order of importance, if I could make changes I would (1) increase the size of the shift key (2) get Intel to make a similar but slightly faster processor so it was better balanced with the graphics card and (3) move the location of some of the connector ports.

Despite the issues, I am quite happy. This machine is what I expected. It is much cheaper than what I have been using (despite being high for a "netbook" due to the graphics card) and I wanted the portability. It is fine for video (I bought an external DVD drive and can convert video to store on the HD) and it plays a large number of my games.

First things first, I'm going to refer to this notebook as a netbook (because that's what I treat it as). This is a great product, the notebook feels solid, the keyboard is amazing and the screen resolution is great! The graphics are also very crisp.
Pros
-Great solid build
-Integrated graphics + discreet graphics
-Ample hard drive space
-Great screen
-Asus has great customer service
-2 gigs of ram
Cons
-Vista
-Atom Processor isn't strong enough to handle vista

I would have given this five stars if it had xp. Oh well, now I guess I'm going to wait for Windows 7. Also, out of box I had a faulty wireless card, but that was quickly taken care of by Asus.

Come on guy's. Do some research these notebooks(netbooks) don't come with an optical drive. Please don't rate a product on your mis-information. The is by far the best laptop i've ever purchased. I was thinking of getting a new unibody MacBook but for much less than half the price I couldn't turn this notebook down.

If you're looking for a highly portable laptop that draws attention from across the room this is the one for you. I don't play games so that Nvidia graphics works well for movies and other video playing.

I love this laptop. The warranty that asus offers is second to none.

This ASUS has a very beautiful display. It comes with a few things I found odd. One is the nice black case. The only problem is the netbook won't fit in it. Duh. Another is that the hard drive is partitioned. If you don't notice that before you start putting things on the C drive, it will fill up very fast. I unpartitioned mine so I didn't have to worry with it. Another thing is an invasive little program called Personal Safe. Best I can figure, this is part of the fingerprint application. It cannot be removed from the desktop. I like a really clean desktop with no icons and this is a real irritant. If I wanted it on the desktop, I would put it there. Anyway, the Atom processor is slow, of course, but not as awful as I had heard it would be. I'm used to dsl and this is a bit of an adjustment. It would be absolutely awful without the 2GBs of RAM. You can't add anymore RAM unfortunately. It's quite heavy (for a netbook) at over 3 1/2 pounds. The battery extends out from the back and is not flush. Not a problem, just thought you might want to know. I took it on its first road trip in early August and it did just fine. I'm not unhappy with the machine, but rather disappointed. I would have to say that if I had it to do over again, I would probably be more patient and get a purple Dell. If I have to deal with slow and heavy, I'd rather do it in purple!

its very powerful for a Lil thing the hdmi works great i can do what ever i wanted to do with it i play games watch movies it does it all for a netbook built nicely like it very much go here everything u need to know about this [...]

I would tread very carefully on this one, even if it does have 256MB video card. An Atom is still an Atom. And you really need at least 4GB of RAM to make Vista half-decent. My brother has a full-size, 2.2 GHz Dual-Core laptop with 4GB of RAM and a 512MB card, and Vista Premium still lags way behind Windows XP in speed. I know because I did a side by side comparison with my 3 year old Toshiba 1.4GHz Centrino (one core) with 1.25GB RAM and 32MB card running XP Pro, which ran circles around Vista no matter how many tweaks we tried to put on the Vista. Nuts!

Just a heads up for prospective buyers excited by the 2GB of memory and video card, both unheard of in the netbook market previously.

I suppose the bright side is that you can now get a free upgrade to Windows 7 when it comes out in a few months. Windows 7 is said to be faster than Vista (which isn't saying much, lol) but not any big improvement over XP. Just another way for Microsoft to squeeze more money out of the consumer, after making them guinea pigs in beta-testing Vista, exactly as it did with Windows Millenium which was garbage until XP replaced it.

Purchased ASUS N10J (model A1) yet it did not include the External Optical Drive referenced within the User Manual (and also in various reviews I have read).

In the User Manual Section titled: "Using the Notebook PC", Subsection: Optical Drive (External), it explains connecting the external optical drive--> "... for use with the provided optical drive." Also, in
Section A-2 of the User Manual it lists Optional Accessories, yet the External Optical Drive is not listed.

I'm awaiting a final decision from ASUS but their initial claim is that the inclusion of the External Optical Drive is dependent upon the distributor as to whether or not it is included.

Obviously, this isn't very helpful now.