Asus W7J 13.3 inch Portable Core Duo Notebook Review

Impressions and Conclusions

For serious PC and laptop enthusiasts, this laptop may not interest you too much because of the lack of upgradability, middle of the road game performance, and small speakers. But at the end of the day, I wish the Asus W7J was my own laptop. Why? For someone like me who uses a laptop for serious work, the W7J was an absolute joy to take around. Two big features stand out for me from a business pespective: portability, and superb user experience. Weighing just 5 lbs. and packing a lot of performance is important for a business user, especially when you’re trucking around town (or the country) and you need to whip up some Power Point or do some image editing.

The “superb user experience” comes from the fact that the W7J is polished in every respect: the video is sharp, graphics are capable, the performance is there when you need it, it has all the connectivity, and even includes a microphone and webcamera so you can do Skype or video conferencing without having to pack extra accessories.

The most serious concern with the Asus W7J is the heat it produces. When completely loaded with a workload, the laptop gets extremely warm because of the NVIDIA GeForce Go 7400 GPU. If you don’t do much in terms of graphics, then heat shouldn’t be a concern for you, but it is something to keep in mind when using the W7J on soft surfaces. Despite the heat, the W7J was stable and did not show any signs of instability during testing.

The performance of the W7J is on par with other laptops based on a similar chipset and CPU — nothing surprising there. Battery life is good but business users should seriously think of upgrading to the 9-cell battery if possible as it will give you an extra hour of life (a total of roughly 3.5 hours).

While there were aspects of the Asus W5F I did not like but adapted to, the Asus W7J does everything right for a portable laptop. Gamers and general home users probably won’t find too much use of this product, but business users and students should definitely take a very close look. The market is crowded with portable laptops these days and I think the Asus W7J has a good combination of style and features to make it stand out.

You can find the Asus W7J notebook for sale at Newegg.com starting at $1498, or use our pricing engine below to check out other e-tailers.