Asus G75VW-BBK5 Laptop Review

Design:

The Asus G75VW Republic of Gamers line of laptops is phenomenal. I have used this laptop for two years now and I have only had one problem with it (mentioned in operation section). This laptop features a stealthy look with two rear vents for cooling that take after a fighter jet's afterburners. The included ports are: four USB 3.0, DVD drive, SD card reader, mic and headphone jacks, power port, VGA, HDMI, Ethernet, mini display, and a Kingston lock. It has a backlit keyboard using white light, and an easy access port for upgrading the laptop's hard drive and ram.  The laptop was designed with quality materials and is made up of plastic and metal. 

Photo by: asus.rog.com

Operation:

This laptop contains the Intel Core i7-3610QM, clocked at 2.3GHz with a turbo boost of 3.3GHz, 8 GB of ram, and a 1 TB (terabyte) hard drive. The best part of this laptop, and the feature that made it so expensive at the time of purchase, is the Nvidia GTX 660M graphics processor with 2 GB of dedicated memory. This laptop was $1,300 two years ago at Best Buy. The laptop quickly handles any program I want to run on it. The only part that is slowing down this machine is the 1 TB 5400 RPM hard drive. The RPM speed on this drive is the slowest drive available for consumer purchase. The only time this effects my daily use of this laptop is during start-up. It boots up very quickly, but the start-up programs make the hard drive suffer initially. This laptop has a webcam which is good enough for Skype calls, but it is only 2 megapixels. The keyboard and track pad are the best of any laptop I have used. The built in speakers are the only issue/problem I have with this laptop. The speakers are very tinny and do not get very loud, even with an included sub woofer.

Battery Life:

The other drawback of this laptop, besides the slow hard drive, is the battery life. This laptop was designed and built before Intel and Nvidia were trying to minimize battery consumption. I can get 1-2 hours of battery life out of this laptop. Two hours is achieved using the lowest brightness setting on the screen, and using the "Power saver" feature in Windows.

Software:

As the years have progressed, using this laptop has been progressively more enjoyable. New programs like Nvidia's GeForce Experience have released, which help people adjust their game settings for the optimal frame rates. This laptop originally came with Windows 7, but I upgraded it to Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit last year. The Windows 8.1 experience was not very enjoyable because this laptop does not have a touch screen. This year Microsoft released "Update 1" for Windows 8.1, and the experience has improved substantially. It makes Windows 8.1 operate closer to how Windows 7 worked because the Start button is back and users can switch between Modern applications and x32 applications with the task bar. The included Asus software can be helpful, but most of it can be uninstalled because Windows already contains some of the application's features. The drivers and software can be re downloaded from the Asus website.

Overall Thoughts:

The Asus G75WV-BBK5 gaming laptop was a great purchase for the price. Asus made sure to have a premium build quality and great internal specs for about half of cost of the competition. The laptop can run most games at full 1080p on Medium to High settings, and sometimes Ultra (it all depends on how demanding the game is). My only complaints about this machine are its slow hard drive, speakers, and battery life.

Score:

9/10

Asus Q200E Laptop Review

Photo by: notebookcheck.com

Design:

Not only is this laptop small, but it packs a punch.  This laptop was ~$400 and it looks like a MacBook. The materials are a mixture of plastic and metal. The ports include: a power port, Ethernet, HDMI, one USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0, Kingston lock, VGA, mic/headphone jack, and an SD card reader.

Operation:

This laptop contains an Intel Core i3-3217U processor, clocked at 1.8GHz, 4 GB of ram, and a 500 GB hard drive. This laptop is very powerful for the price point, but the reason it was a great deal was this laptop has a touch screen with "Full Windows Touch Support with 10 Touch Points". Having 500 GB of storage is great for a laptop of this size, but the hard drive is slow spinning at only 5400 RPM. At this price point, some performance has to be decreased. The Intel Core i3 chipset in this laptop can easily be overwhelmed with tasks for a power user. Since i3 processors do not have a turbo boost, the processor struggles to run more demanding software. The keyboard and track pad are easy to use, and work great. The included webcam is an added bonus, but it is only 2 megapixels which is only really adequate for Skype calls. The keyboard is not backlit on this laptop.

Battery Life:

With smaller computers comes amazing battery life...right? No. In this laptop, this is not the case. For some reason, this laptop can only last 2-4 hours tops. This all depends on the programs running and what the screen brightness is set to, but the battery life is very disappointing on this machine. Other laptops in this category get 5-8 hours of battery life.

Software:

Asus includes some helpful software in this laptop that allows the hardware to come to life. One application is called "Asus USB Charger Plus" which allows users to plug in their devices into the USB 3.0 port and charge their phone even when the system is on or in sleep mode. Windows 8.1 64-bit runs amazingly fast and responsive using the mouse and keyboard or the touch screen. The new "Update 1" for Windows 8.1 adds added functionality for mouse and keyboard users, if you choose to work Windows that way.

Overall Thoughts:

The Asus Q200E is a great package deal for the money. If people want a touch screen on a relatively powerful laptop, look no further. Other laptops, with touch screens, run close to $1,000 dollars when this was bought last year. It makes a great portable laptop that can run almost any application. The only downsides to this laptop are the battery life and hard drive speed.

Score:

8/10

LG L55C Smart Phone Review

Photo by: amazon.com

Design:

This smartphone has a minimalist design that many people find appealing. The phone caters to the right handed users because the power button is located at the upper left hand side of the phone. The volume controls are on the left side along with the micro USB charging port. The phone features a full QWERTY slide out keyboard. There is a dedicated camera button on the right side of the phone, allowing for quick photos and videos, when it works, but I will get to that feature in a bit.

Operation:

As mentioned before, this smart phone was designed with right handed operators in mind. Besides this, the phone performs as expected for a phone that runs Android 2.3. The specific version on this phone is 2.3.4 and it is laggyyy. Never use the stock web browser, it is terrible and crashes constantly. If the phone is not full, use Mozilla Firefox for a semi enjoyable experience. This phone was designed for a time when apps did not take up multiple megabytes or even gigabytes. The phone is severely limited in daily use by its lack of internal storage and ram. The phone is rocking 200 MB (megabytes) of internal storage and 350 MB (megabytes) or ram. In practical usage, I can only run one, maybe two, apps at the same time before the phone starts to lag to a skreetching hault.

Battery Life and Camera:

The battery life of this phone is one full day...with light to slightly moderate use. The 1540 mAh battery suffers under normal load. If the Facebook app is running in the background for too long, the battery suffers significantly. While actively using Facebook, from a full charge, the battery will drop rapidly.

The 3.2 megapixel camera/video camera is not good at all. It takes bare bones photos and terrible video quality. The shutter speed of the camera is slow, so do not expect to snap lots of pictures in a short amount of time.

Overall Thoughts:

The LG L55C was designed and built for a customer years ago. I bought this unit from the local Walmart on the Straight Talk Wireless plan. I pay $45 a month for unlimited talk, text, and 2.5 GB of data. The unfortunate part of this is, the phone is locked to the Sprint towers. In Wilmington, NC Sprint is the absolute worst in signal strength, signal reliability, and 3G speed. My favorite feature of this "smartphone" is the included keyboard, and it is sad to see them fading away in the smartphones of today. The phone works and has lasted me many years, but it lacks the usability and longevity of the smartphones of today.

Score:

5/10