After trying N50 around the house for just over a week it was time to take it onto the road. Laptops are meant to have an attention span longer than their power cords so it was time to see how well the N50 handled on the move. But before our road trip I had to find something to put it in.
No matter what manufacturers want you to believe, consumer laptops are relatively fragile devices. When you take your laptop on the road with you it could have a negative impact on its longevity. It’s easy enough for people to accidentally knock your bag and the weather isn’t always nice and sunny either. This is why it’s important to have a decent laptop bag to protect your pride and joy against the nasty outside world.
Where the Asus G71V already comes with a bag the N50 does not. Where years ago it was common place for laptops to come with branded bags, nowadays, this is no longer the case (no pun intended). This generally is quite sensible as not everyone wants to walk around with a generic black bag with a big logo on it and it cuts the overall price down by a couple of quid. Although it might make complete economic sense for Asus and most consumers, for testing purposes it’s more than a bit inconvenient. Call me cheap but I’m not very likely to spend £20 on a new bag for a laptop I may have to hand back in a couple of weeks. Sure you can buy one on eBay for a couple of quid but by the time you actually get it…. well I’m sure you get the general idea. Maybe in future it might be a good idea to send a bag along as well as the laptop to reviews like this?
Luckily this isn’t my first laptop, I’ve owned 14 and 15inch laptops in the past, so the hunt started for the old cases. In the back of what I affectionately call “the computer storeroom”, and my girlfriend refers to as “that cupboard underneath the stairs with all his junk in it”, I found a case that belonged to my old Dell Latitude. After dumping the contents of the bag on the living room floor I came to the conclusion that even though the bag might just fit a 15.4inch laptop it’s nowhere near big enough to fit the N50. This ritual repeated itself 3 more times until I ran out of old laptop bags and all I had to show for it was, an ominous mountain of cables, laptops, bags & papers that had magically appeared in the middle of the living room. Still without a suitable carrying case, I went upstairs and dug through the pile of bags with paperwork that you inevitably end up with if you attended IT conventions / conferences before the dawn of really cheap USB sticks and you still have somewhere if you have a tendency not to throw usable stuff out! Eventually I found a bag with sufficient padding that could be persuaded to close once the N50 was actually in it. Some might say size doesn’t matter but if that was true the dinosaurs would still be alive and I wouldn’t have spent the better part of an hour testing bags for size.
The reason the N50 doesn’t fit in many of the older 15inch laptop cases isn’t because it’s ‘big boned’ but because the aspect ratio of the screen is different. Where older laptops mostly had a 4:3 screen the N50 is built around a 16:10 (4:2.5) widescreen display. So although the screen is still 15inches in diameter it is much too wide to fit bags which were designed with 4:3 15inch screens in mind. On the other hand the Asus N80 with its 14inch widescreen might just about fit in an old style bag.
In my next post we’ll actually go into using the N50 on the road. For now though I’m signing off as I believe I have some mess to clean up….
