New Laptop: Asus E1-571-6888

I tend to lean towards Dell's when I buy laptops.  My wife has had a few HP's, but all but one of them has had issues.  I didn't use my previous laptop heavily since I got my tablet, so I didn't want to spend a lot of money.  I am a power user, and I do program, but my wife likes point out that I can push hardware far more than most people can.  A big part of that is because I use Linux.  Another reason is because I have a good sense of where the bottlenecks are in a system.  Since I didn't want to spend a lot of money, I decided to go with a lower power laptop that I could upgrade key parts.  I decided to go with the Asus E1-571-6888.  I purchased it retail from Microcenter for $380.

I did research to make sure Linux ran on the laptop.  I heard there was some UEFI issues, but the latest version of Ubuntu claimed to have resolved those issues.  I did not see any references online of someone getting the built in Wireless card to work, but I have some very small USB 802.11N wireless nubs, so I wasn't too concerned.  It would be nice for the built in wireless to work, but I don't travel with the laptop often (the built in wireless does work by the way).

The laptop only came with an Intel Core i3.  Most people want i5 or i7's, but I am happy with an i3.  It still packs 2.5GHz and has 2 cores.  Computers with an i3 in them are a lot cheaper now, too.  It comes with an Intel HD Graphics 4000 which was confirmed to work in Linux.  Many people want a dedicated video card, but those take up battery life and cost money.  I am not playing games on my laptop.

The laptop comes with 4GB of DDR3 RAM.  I don't need RAM that fast, but if it comes with it, why not.  One of the key details was the fact that the laptop has 2 SO-DIMM slots, but only one of them  was taken.  This means it comes with a single 4GB stick.  This is a big deal.  I picked up another 4GB SO-DIMM stick for $19.  8GB of RAM is more than enough for what I do.

The laptop comes with a 500GB SATA drive.  That is a lot of disk space.  That disk space could be a great selling point for some people....just not for me.  The key piece of information was the fact that it was a SATA drive.  This means it can be replaced with another SATA drive that only has 120GB of disk space and has no moving parts.  I don't plan on using my laptop for long term storage, so a 120GB SSD is plenty of space.  Microcenter was running a deal.  You could get a Samsung E 120GB 840 SSD for $99.  They even sweetened the deal by offering an extra 10% off if you purchase a motherboard or computer.

In the end, I payed a little over $500 for a laptop that I could get to perform as fast as a laptop twice its price.  Having 8GB of RAM means I rarely have to swap.  More of my hard disk can be cached into RAM as well.  An SSD makes the operating system boot and run really fast.  Many operations that normally trashed now run a lot faster.  Cherry picking the features that you really care about leads to a better experience while costing you less.