Prime Notebook Computer Review

The Asus A8Jm is a thin and light notebook. Not ultraportable but still nice to carry around with a bag. This notebook looks quite nice and sturdy. The color is silver and the casing is made by hard plastic. The screen built is also very well with no ripples when push in the lid. The hinges is solid to. The A8Jm screen is a14.1 WXGA 1280 x 800 pixels resolution, with ASUS Colour Shine technology. There is quite a bit of glare on the screen when working in really bright areas. But there’s no dead pixels on it and minimal light leakage for this screen.

The A8Jm specs :

Processor : T2400 Core Duo 1.83 GHz
Operating Sytem : Windows XP Home
Screen : 14.1 WXGA 1280 x 800
Memory : 2GB DDR2 667MHz
Hard Drive : 100 GB 5400 RPM
Graphics : NVidia Go 7600 512Mb

The A8Jm processor is Core Duo T2400 1.83GHz with DDR2 667MHz RAM. The hard drive that come with this notebook is 100GB 5400rpm. The performance of the processor is excelent. Used Super Pi program to Calculate the number of Pi to 2 Million digits. The results are sus A8Jm (1.83GHz Core Duo) took 79 seconds to calculate the value, Dell Inspiron e1705 (2.0GHz Intel T2500) took only 72 seconds, IBM ThinkPad T43 (1.86 GHz Pentium M) took 105 seconds and IBM ThinkPad Z60m (2.0 GHz Pentium M) took 96 seconds.

The A8jm comes with Windows XP Home as the operating system. It also provided with the Recovery CD’s, Driver & Utilities CD, ASUS DVD, Microsoft Works and Nero Express. Asus doesn’t install too many useless programs on the machine. There’s only such Power4Gear for power management and ASUS DVD are quite useful.

The A8Jm’s keyboard is excellent with no flex when type on it. The only problem is the location of the left located FN and CTRL keys which is Fn key is in the far left bottom corner and then the Ctrl key is next to the right of it. The color of the touchpad is silver and works well although some people hate the texture of it. There is also a scroll area on the right side of the touchpad which is quite difficult to use.
The speakers are located at the lower front of notebook. The sound is ok but not good.

The A8Jm had a vent on the back right side. The air blows from there are warm not too hot. Under the keyboard area feel warm rising up from there. The palm rests and bottom of the notebook are get warm after few hours exercised. Temperatures range from 48 - 51 C during idling and office use and hard drive temperature was at 35 - 40 C most of the time. The fan is not noise. It’s rarely audible while working normally. The optical drive also make a sound when reading files.

The Asus A8Jm comes with some ports, they are 2 x USB 2.0 and InfraRed on the right side the notebook, USB 2.0, FireWire, 5 in 1 Memory Card Reader, Express Card slot, Mic In, and S/PDIF Out on the left and 2 x USB 2.0, DVI-D, VGA, S-Video, Ethernet, and Modem on the back.
The Asus A8Jm came with the Intel 3945 a/b/g wireless card as well as an infrared port and also have a bluetooth.
The Battery is 6-cell Li-Ion, 4800mAh. It get 3 hours of battery life when brightness on a lower setting, wireless on and doing regular office work and internet surfing. with wireless off it could get 3 hours and 40 minutes.

The Asus A8Jm is well built notebook. The poor of this notebook maybe only the the InstantON feature which not working properly. But this is very quiet and cool notebook with fantastic Core Duo Processor. It also have a built in camera, DVD-D output, and the LCD are nice and well built. For someone who looking for a thin and light notebook with almost every feature in it, the Asus A8Jm is the best choice.