Asus N76VM

It was time for a new laptop. My mega Toshiba Qosmio G40 was getting slower and slower. I have been watching ASUS laptops for some time and was looking for something high end. Specially for studiocomposing and stagework i'd wanted the latest i7 3gen. cpu from Intel.

While unpacking the ASUS N76VM i noticed the fine detail and care ASUS het put into this product.

There's a nifty little SonicMaster sub woofer included wich really spices up the Bang & Olufsen sound of this laptop. You can enjoy music easily during office work or when previewing video or audio productions. I'ts got a Mac-feel to its keyboard and mousepad/touchpad. Nice but cold aluminum surface and the lidcover is black anodized aluminum.

The plan was to put a second Hard disk in this laptop and fill it up to the maximum GBs of RAM memory. Since it already had 8Gigs of RAM out of the box i decided to put a SSD-from Samsung in there with the operating system running on the SSD. The stock 750 GB disk is now the second harddrive. In the beginning i had some issues with the so called VIP service from ASUS because they would not help me in anyway with the upgrade from Windows 7 Home edition to Ultimate edition. Drivers problems, problems, problems. In the end i solved it with a little help from Dutch computer forums.

I now run Windows 8 on it and still face problems with the WiFi connection.

Unfortunately the little subwoofer broke down within a year. Since i've no real interest in this item i did not replace it. Later on i discovered more customers experienced same problem. I went tot look for alternatives but there weren't any. It only works on this laptop with a special plug and input. I decided to buy this as an ASUS sparepart online. It set me back for a whopping 80 dollars. NOT good ASUS.

I now enjoy big sound again but i 've got mixed feelings about this. Price was about a 1000 dollar equivalent to US pricing. I won't buy ASUS again when facing same choice again in a few years.