I just got an Asus U45jc-a1, which must be the little brother of the one you got. It's got a i3-370M, 4 gigs of RAM and an nVidia GeForce 310M, and it will do on-the-fly swapping between that card and the integrated graphics card depending on what it needs to use, so that it'll preserve battery life. Supposedly it the battery life is nutty, like 8-9 hours of constant use, as long as you're not using the 3D graphics. The GeForce 310M is kind of a feeble 3D card, unfortunately, but I wasn't looking at getting this as a gaming laptop really at all. Honestly, I wasn't looking for anything outrageously powerful, since I already have a pretty good desktop system (or will, once my brother gets off his ass and sends me the copy of Win7 he was getting for me and I can assemble the pile of parts I have sitting in a closet.) I just wanted something that wasn't a complete slowpoke that was light enough to carry around with me from class to class on campus without being annoying. Being able to game with it if I took it on a long flight or something is strictly a bonus. PC Magazine actually named the U45 their best mainstream laptop available right now.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2369666,00.asp I've removed some of the crap off there, like the preview trend micro install, but I haven't had the time to really sit down and go through it with a fine tooth comb. I definitely like it so far, though. Keyboard is nice, mousepad is good once you get used to it, VERY slim profile, and very light. (4.7 lbs is all) Given that anything I could find that was lighter was either much less powerful, lacked an internal DVD drive, or was vastly more expensive (or often all 3), I think the U45 was a pretty good deal at about 850. It's certainly a MUCH better machine than my old laptop, which was a Dell I bought in 2005.
-Arlos
Posted: Wed Oct 27, 2010 5:56 pm