Asus K52F-EX1238V 15.6-inch Laptop (Intel Core i5 480M 2.66GHz, RAM 3GB, HDD 320GB, DVDSM, WLAN, Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit)
Equipped with the latest Intel Core processor family, the ASUS K52F delivers the best mobile multitasking performance in its class, be it for multimedia entertainment or productivity. Power4Gear with a self-adjusting fan helps you conserve battery power and provides a quieter computing environment. The ASUS K52F features Palm Proof Technology, which intelligently analyzes the differences between palm and finger contact surfaces, and prevents the mouse cursor from accidentally moving while typing. The Chicle…
List Price: £511.33
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A fine laptop badly let down by a load of pre-installed crud-ware,
Having lived with this laptop for a couple of months now, here’s how I feel about it:
On the plus side:
* Nice looking
* Seems well-made
* Beautiful screen – crisp, clear, bright, colourful
* Keyboard is fine (but if at home I always use it with a plug-in keyboard anyway, so I can it onto a Kensington stand and so get the screen at the right height)
* Nice and quiet, even when working it hard
* Has all the performance I need – plays DVDs etc without any problems
* Good value
On the minus side:
* It comes with a load of crud-ware pre-installed (more of this in a moment)
* The mouse buttons are a single bar rather than two buttons. So you have to sort of rock it at the end that you want. Is not an easy or positive action, so you very often find you’ve not actually clicked it, although you meant to. Not the end of the world (plug in a £10 optical mouse if bothered – I was and I did), but really, Asus – how many pennies did you save by having one button instead of two? Poor.
* The sound from the built-in speakers is rubbish. It has some sticker on it saying how marvellous the speakers are – presumably they had to use the sticker to tell you that because you’d never know by listening to it.
So by the time you’ve plugged in speakers and a mouse, the hardware is fine, although not now so portable.
Now, about the crud-ware. The laptop comes stuffed with all sorts of applications that you neither asked for nor wanted. They include the ubiquitous MS Office – not a free version, but a time-limited version which you then have to pay for it you want to keep using it. And if you buy a MS Office on disk it says you have to un-install the trial version first before you can install the real one anyway. Also lots of games, which are all demo-ware – i.e. they don’t work until – yes, you guessed it – you pay money. From the look of the demos they were not up to much anyway. And a whole load of Asus backup stuff and online things for mucking with your data, most of which run as always-on services. Plus McAfee anti-virus (free for 30 days – big deal), which I am not a fan of at all – that was a particular pain to uninstall, as it did not uninstall cleanly and I had to do the thing of googling for everyone else’s similar problems and then unpicking it using the recommended work-arounds.
Pretty much from the start with this laptop there was a disk-pounding issue (something working the disk all the time), which slowed the computer down a lot but disappeared after I uninstalled all the crud-ware. Smoking gun.
I am a MS Certified and IBM Certified computer professional, and cleaning the laptop up from all of this stuff took me a few hours. Bad Asus. Once it was cleaned up, it is not a bad computer at all, especially for the price. If you could buy a clean version of this laptop (i.e. just had a clean Windows install, that’s all), this would be 5-stars, no problem. But a computer that takes several hours off your life to get it back to a usable state? Not nice.
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|Great Laptop,
I have had this laptop for 4 months now. I have had no problems with it and am very happy with its performance, I use it mainly for web browsing and often have several webs sites, applications open at the same time and have not had any issues with freezing or slow performance.
The score currently showing on the laptop is
Processor 6.7
Memory(RAM) 5.5
Graphics 4.4
Gaming graphics 5.1
Disc data transfer 5.5
On the previous review’s comments about the time limited crud-ware I chose to use my own antivirus software that came with my broadband with Virgin this uninstalled the free trial software for me with no issues. I also had my own disc for MS office so never went into the time trial version installed so no issues again with this.
The mouse is just a single bar so some users may not like this I have found this fine to use and have not needed to plug in any additional mouse.
Overall would recommend this laptop the feel is quality,, the keyboard is large and the keys soft to touch, there is no noise when its running even after several hours the sound though could be better hence the 4* rating
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