Asus X5EAE laptop
Overall Rating
7
out of 10
The Asus X5EAE is perfect for students with an AMD Athlon II Dual-Core 2.1 GHz processor, beautiful 15.6-inch HD LED backlit screen and chocolate keyboard which won the Red Dot Design Award in 2009.
Price: £399
Cheapest at: Laptops Direct
Straight out of the box and the laptop looks the business. The Asus X5EAE comes with a battery, charger, the laptop itself, and is pre-installed with most of the software you’ll need such as the operating system, DVD/CD software; and trial versions of Office and Anti-virus.
The Asus X5EAE is indeed a good looking laptop. It’s not going to bedazzle you like the Apple Macbook Air 2010 or Dell Latitude Z600, but it’s far from a bad looking laptop.
Aimed at students, it’s what would be considered a high-end laptop in the price range for students.
Sitting at £399, the 15.6-inch laptop comes with an HD LED backlit screen with up to 1366x768 resolution. What’s even more appealing is Asus’ award winning keyboard design that means that coursework and other documents can be compiled quickly and free of mistakes. It's similar to the Vaio Control Center found on Vaio's such as the Vaio NS20.
Asus Control Desk
The Asus X5EAE laptop comes with a number of built-in applications. None is more useful than the Control Desk. The Control Desk is a feature specifically designed to optimise the laptops performance in a simplistic manner that even the most computer-shy people can understand – like my mum!
You can edit power, display and response options quickly and simply within the Control Desk.
Light and easy on the skin
Bundled inside the 2.8kg laptop is a 1.3 megapixel webcam that comes with an integrated high quality microphone as standard. Another useful feature is the ice cool palm rest which keeps your palms cool and stops the sensitive skin on your wrists getting damaged with heat.
12 month warranty as standard
The Asus X5EAE comes with Windows 7 64-bit Premium as standard so the 3GB memory is utilized to the maximum. It’s worth mentioning that the RAM on the Asus X5EAE can be upgraded and a 12 month warranty similar to the Rock Xtreme X790 comes with the laptop as standard. The warranty is something you are going to need in a house like mine!
The Asus X5EAE’s 3GB of RAM is more than adequate for web surfing and running multiple programs at the same time. It has four high speed USB ports and an SD card slot.
Random freezing
Having sung the Asus X5EAE’s praises, there are bad points to the laptop, too. The touchpad can be slightly unresponsive at times and the laptop can get very hot after small periods of time. Surprisingly, this heat-problem was quite random in rearing its ugly head. Due, I imagine, to the ice-cool palm rest. The Asus X5EAE did become unresponsive at times and occasionally froze.
In conclusion, there is no doubt the X5EAE is a very good laptop that can perform basic tasks with ease. Yet the few problems aforementioned let it down slightly. You may consider the Dell Studio 15 if you were looking at the X5EAE. Regardless, the X5EAE is a very good student laptop and is very good value for money.
