BobsLawnService
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- Jun 18, 2010
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First of all repeat after me : "The 1201N is still a netbook."
Now that we have that out of the way I will tell you exactly what it is. The 1201N is a netbook for people who need enough screen real estate to be able to perform useful, every day work in a small portable form factor and who don't have enough money to buy one of the CULV ultra-thin and light netbooks. If you keep this in mind you are going to enjoy your experience as much as I have.
Besides the crystal clear, glossy 12.1 inch screen displaying a resolution of 1366*768 (A bare minimum for being useful to manipulate large Excel spreadsheets or write code in Visual Studio.) what sets the 1201N apart from every single other netbook out there is the dual core 330 Atom and Nvidia Ion graphics chipset. This combination ensures that the 1201N has enough power to run the more demanding applications that are expected of it and pump enough pixels to that excellent screen to ensure that the user experience is a pleasant one.
The netbook has a well laid out chiclet style keyboard that is a pleasure to use and feels a lot more spacious than it really is. It really feels a lot better than a few of the 15'6 inch laptops I've used. Unfortunately I can't say the same for the awful touchpad. Asus have gone with a touchpad that is flush with the rest of the machine and textured with raised dimples which feels terrible. You are going to want to get a small portable mouse for extended use.
So far I've used the machine to work on a smallish project in MS Visual Studio 2008 Express, manipulate a solid 3mb Excel spreadsheet, watch movies, surf the net and play some games. I'll be going into each of these in more depth.
Visual Studio was responsive with a few tiny pauses in the IDE when I got ahead of the CPU. It took about half an hour to get used to it but it is perfectly usable. Compilation takes about two to three times longer than you would expect it to take on a Core2 desktop with equivalent RAM. I generally code with WinAmp playing music in the background, a browser window open as well as a word document containing design specifications which is how I tested it. Switching between these windows was quick and responsive due mostly to the dual core CPU. My verdict is that it is perfectly serviceable as a coding machine for the road or even a primary machine for students and other folks who do some light development work. I did not install SQL Server Express.
Excel, Word and Power Point were quick and responsive and if your job sees you primarily manipulating Office documents you are going to be very satisfied.
The Ion graphics chipset handles movies very, very well. Although I did not get the chance to play any 1080p .mkv videos those encoded at 720p were smooth. The 1201N also comes with a HDMI port to send video to your high definition TV set. This I did not test as we don't have one at home. Donations are welcome.
Web surfing was great although at times it did seem to struggle a little bit with 720p Youtube videos. Nothing major but there did seem to be the occasional barely noticeable stutter.
Finally gaming. Despite some of the hype the 1201N is not a suitable gaming laptop. I don't consider it worth playing games in anything other than native resolution and modern shooters were a slide show even with the graphics settings set to low. Older titles like GTA : Vice City were playable. I did get better mileage from strategy games like Civilization 4 : BTS and Rome : Total War which were very playable. This is great for me because when you are sitting alone in a hotel room on business and there is nothing on the DSTV light bouquet a few hundred turns of Civilization always go down well.
In summary the performance of the 1201N is sufficient for most of the things you are going to do if you are patient and expect netbook performance. Don't expect it to keep uo with CULV or i5 machines out there. If you have realistic expectations then it is a great buy at a good price point in a convenient, portable form factor.
It ships with Windows 7 Home Premium, two gigs of RAM (Easily upgradable to four), 3 USB 2 ports and a 250Gig 5200rpm hard drive.
Edit : Finally a word about battery life. The Ion chipset and dual core CPU mean that the battery life does suffer. While I'm still in the first three charge cycles and the battery life does seem to be improving I typically get between four and four and a half hours of use if I disable Wifi when I am not using it and set the screen brightness to 50%.
Now that we have that out of the way I will tell you exactly what it is. The 1201N is a netbook for people who need enough screen real estate to be able to perform useful, every day work in a small portable form factor and who don't have enough money to buy one of the CULV ultra-thin and light netbooks. If you keep this in mind you are going to enjoy your experience as much as I have.
Besides the crystal clear, glossy 12.1 inch screen displaying a resolution of 1366*768 (A bare minimum for being useful to manipulate large Excel spreadsheets or write code in Visual Studio.) what sets the 1201N apart from every single other netbook out there is the dual core 330 Atom and Nvidia Ion graphics chipset. This combination ensures that the 1201N has enough power to run the more demanding applications that are expected of it and pump enough pixels to that excellent screen to ensure that the user experience is a pleasant one.
The netbook has a well laid out chiclet style keyboard that is a pleasure to use and feels a lot more spacious than it really is. It really feels a lot better than a few of the 15'6 inch laptops I've used. Unfortunately I can't say the same for the awful touchpad. Asus have gone with a touchpad that is flush with the rest of the machine and textured with raised dimples which feels terrible. You are going to want to get a small portable mouse for extended use.
So far I've used the machine to work on a smallish project in MS Visual Studio 2008 Express, manipulate a solid 3mb Excel spreadsheet, watch movies, surf the net and play some games. I'll be going into each of these in more depth.
Visual Studio was responsive with a few tiny pauses in the IDE when I got ahead of the CPU. It took about half an hour to get used to it but it is perfectly usable. Compilation takes about two to three times longer than you would expect it to take on a Core2 desktop with equivalent RAM. I generally code with WinAmp playing music in the background, a browser window open as well as a word document containing design specifications which is how I tested it. Switching between these windows was quick and responsive due mostly to the dual core CPU. My verdict is that it is perfectly serviceable as a coding machine for the road or even a primary machine for students and other folks who do some light development work. I did not install SQL Server Express.
Excel, Word and Power Point were quick and responsive and if your job sees you primarily manipulating Office documents you are going to be very satisfied.
The Ion graphics chipset handles movies very, very well. Although I did not get the chance to play any 1080p .mkv videos those encoded at 720p were smooth. The 1201N also comes with a HDMI port to send video to your high definition TV set. This I did not test as we don't have one at home. Donations are welcome.
Web surfing was great although at times it did seem to struggle a little bit with 720p Youtube videos. Nothing major but there did seem to be the occasional barely noticeable stutter.
Finally gaming. Despite some of the hype the 1201N is not a suitable gaming laptop. I don't consider it worth playing games in anything other than native resolution and modern shooters were a slide show even with the graphics settings set to low. Older titles like GTA : Vice City were playable. I did get better mileage from strategy games like Civilization 4 : BTS and Rome : Total War which were very playable. This is great for me because when you are sitting alone in a hotel room on business and there is nothing on the DSTV light bouquet a few hundred turns of Civilization always go down well.
In summary the performance of the 1201N is sufficient for most of the things you are going to do if you are patient and expect netbook performance. Don't expect it to keep uo with CULV or i5 machines out there. If you have realistic expectations then it is a great buy at a good price point in a convenient, portable form factor.
It ships with Windows 7 Home Premium, two gigs of RAM (Easily upgradable to four), 3 USB 2 ports and a 250Gig 5200rpm hard drive.
Edit : Finally a word about battery life. The Ion chipset and dual core CPU mean that the battery life does suffer. While I'm still in the first three charge cycles and the battery life does seem to be improving I typically get between four and four and a half hours of use if I disable Wifi when I am not using it and set the screen brightness to 50%.
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