It’s that time of the week again – a post from your favourite blogger here on Electricpig! Only joking. I’m going to be testing the speed and performance of the Asus N80 laptop today, seeing how it compares to my Pentium D 2.2GHz base computer, and my old single core Celeron M 1.5GHz laptop.
Thought I’d make this blog post a bit of a fun one today, make it a bit different.
It’s going to be in the form of a quiz show. Yep, that’s right! Well…-ish.
What I’m going to do is compare the N80 with my Lenovo computer, and my old Acer laptop in a number of categories – from how long it takes to convert an MP3 file into a WAV file; how long it takes for the laptop to load it’s OS; and how long it takes for simple applications such as Microsoft Internet Explorer to load. The winner in each category will be labelled ‘fast’, and the losers ‘flop’. The winner at the end will be the one with the most ‘fast’ labels!
Yes, I know you may say that the Asus will win hands-down, but remember it’s a laptop – they’re not designed to be overly powerful, so even though it has a Core 2 Duo 2GHz processor it may not utilise it well!
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Category 1: Operating System
Asus N80Vc (Vista) – 22secs
Lenovo PC – 37secs
Acer Laptop – 74secs
So, the results are in!
Asus – Fast
Lenovo & Acer – Flop
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Category 2: Convert a simple MP3 to WAV
Asus N80Vc (Vista) – 27secs
Lenovo PC – 53secs
Acer Laptop – N/A (it locked up and reset itself!)
Asus is FAST! A lot faster than I expected to be honest. Much better than the Lenovo and Acer, which both flop miserably. I suppose that’s something to do with the 3GB RAM.
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Category 3: Loading Internet Explorer
Asus N80Vc (Vista) – 4secs
Lenovo PC – 3secs
Acer Laptop – 19secs
Surprisingly, the Lenovo was faster at this, so wins the coveted ‘fast’ label. The Asus was not far behind, but the Acer was way behind. I can’t believe I ever managed to use that laptop!
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So, the overall winner is the Asus N80 (cue cheering!). I can’t say it wasn’t to be expected, but the difference in time taken for the Asus to load the operating system is astonishing – it is widely known that Vista takes longer to load than XP, and for the Asus to win even when the desktop has XP shows just how fast its processor really is and just how well it utilises its in-built 3GB of RAM.
It was quite surprising that there is little between the Asus and the Lenovo Pentium D when it comes to load times for Internet Explorer. A small test also found that it takes both around the same time for both to load Microsoft Office programs too. I suppose this could have been from me having the desktop PC longer though – I have tweaked it quite a bit to get the most out of it, while the Asus is basically brand new! It’s no mean feat though – for a laptop to beat a similar (if not better) spec desktop PC takes a lot of power!
In my next blog post I’ll be running through what software is bundled with the Asus N80, and I’ll let you know how I got on with changing the touchpad settings!
