Asus A8SC

Another good feature we found on the A8SC was its keyboard. The keys are expansive, have excellent tactile feedback and are well spaced. This of course makes typing and working for long hours easier. The only niggle here was the placement of the “” key which is placed is next to the Z key. While it is a minor irritant, it is one that keeps repeating itself time and again across Asus laptops and shows a singular lack of attention paid by the company to consumers about complaints regarding their product lines. The touchpad of the A8SC, in comparison to previous efforts from the company is absolutely terrible. It has no traction at all and if you have large fingers will make for a very uncomfortable experience. A user’s fingers tend to slide across the surface very easily, leading to erratic mouse control. No amount of reducing the mouse speed manipulation was able to improve the touchpad. At the end we had to resort to using a normal laptop mouse to get around.

One area Asus seems to have paid special attention to is the peripheral expansion capability of this laptop. For starters it offers 5 USB 2 slots, which is highly unusual for a laptop. Most laptops in this range normally offer only 3. 5 USB slots certainly make life easier, especially for road warriors who use their laptops extensively. It is now possible to connect a laptop mouse, an external HDD and use the 3rd port to charge your iPod and still have 2 ports left over. A secondary but excellent feature we found is the presence of a DVI slot and a VGA slot. This allows the laptop to be easily connected to a modern day projector, which are now available with DVI inputs. The rest of the specifications are pretty normal with the presence of a Firewire slot, Rj11/ Rj45 jacks, mic/headphones out, a 4 in 1 card reader and a dual-layer DVD drive. Wireless connectivity is present in the form of Bluetooth 2.0 EDR and 802.11 a/b/g Wi-Fi support.