Chucking out your desktop is all the rage these days? And the Asus UL50VG pitches itself as the ideal compromise between a laptop’s portability and a full on desktop PC’s grunt. So is it worth slinging your ageing machine for this 17-inch colossus? Read our Asus UL50VG review now and we’ll reveal all.
You certainly can’t accuse the Asus UL50VG of lacking skills. As well as a plentiful 4GB of RAM, it comes stuffed with NVIDIA GeForce G210M graphics, a hefty 500GB HDD and Windows 7 Professional. The graphics can be switched from the NVIDIA to the Intel, so you can squeeze out more battery if you’re using basic apps rather than graphic intense ones.
All this points to a more than handy machine. Once the Asus UL50VG is up and running, you’ll find it handles stacks of open applications with ease, although when we tried to edit a few home movies, it did struggle to keep up with our handiwork. That said, it’s more than ample when you’ve got Outlook, Office, a web browser and Media Player all doing their thing at the same time.
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Asus has also slung in an Intel Core 2 Duo SU73000, although with the advent of its new Core chipsets at CES, this is a mark against the Asus UL50VG. Why plump for this when you can get something noticeably speedier?
That said, we were more than impressed with the ace keyboard on the Asus UL50VG, especially as it manages to include a numeric pad for doing your tax returns and depressing yourself with January budget calculations. It’s a cool extra, that’s well worth having on such a large machine.
However, the touchpad leaves a lot to be desired, its multitouch style hampered hugely by the plasticky build. It’s the same material as the main body and takes an age to register swipes and swishes.
While the HD Ready panel is great, the fact that there’s no Blu-ray and that the Asus UL50VG doesn’t rock Full HD, really does count against it. The newest desktop replacements are crammed with such features.
While we can’t deny the Asus UL50VG is a decent large scale laptop, there are so many new features in newer machines, that it’s difficult to recommend.
