Item Details

ASUS UL30A-X5 Thin and Light 13.3-Inch Black Laptop - 12 Hours of Battery Life (Windows 7 Home Premium)

(89 Customer Reviews)

Price: $698.52
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Technical Details

• 1.3GHz Intel SU7300 Core 2 Duo Processor
• 4GB of DDR3 RAM, 2 slots, 4GB Max
• 500GB SATA Hard Drive (5400 RPM)
• 13.3" HD LED LCD Display, Intel GMA 4500MHD, Wi-Fi 802.11 bgn, 0.3M Webcam
• Windows 7 Home Premium Operating System (64 bit)

 

Product Details

Product Weight: 3.74 pounds

Shipping Weight: 6.60 pounds

Model: UL30A-X5

Manufacturer: ASUS Computer International Direct

Sales Rank: 45

 

Accessories

Customer Reviews

Great Budget Laptop for People on the Go,
by Mattforn, 2010-03-09

This laptop has been amazing so far, great design, portable, excellent display, awesome battery life, it was exactly what i was looking for.

When you first get this thing and power it up you will notice that it really doesn't come with a lot of bloatware. Most of it is Asus Utilities that help make using it easier. I uninstalled most of the stuff i didn't need and the rest really didn't take up too much memory to run. One thing that bugged me though was the free trial of Microsoft Office without a serial key. It would have been nice to have that. I never really used the ExpressGate so I can't comment on that. I would recommend deleting the huge empty partition and just merging it into the main Windows one.

There are only a couple cons to this laptop. First is the spacebar, sometimes if you hit it near the edge it wont read it. Second is the mouse button. For some strange reason it is getting scratched up in the same spot and is ruining the finish on it. I have no idea what could be causing it, but its a minor detail.

Pros:
Great battery, averaged around 6-8 hours with fairly heavy use.
Great display and graphics, I have the screen to almost minimum brightness and its still crisp
Cool design, both visually and thermally, very lightweight
Trackpad, the different actions you can make with just the pad are cool, it definitely saves a lot of time.
Keyboard, it seems to be the perfect size for most hands.

Cons:
Sometimes it can act a little squirrelly, i think thats more the OS fault.
Trackpad, It can be really touchy, I would STRONGLY recommend manually updating the drivers for this, Windows Update seems to miss it.
Random Flex on the keyboard surface, more of a nuisance than a problem though.
Missing or broken drivers, you would think all the drivers would be up to date but oh well, again just annoying.

Overall I would recommend this laptop, do make sure to manually update all the nessecary drivers off of the Asus website, it will fix the webcam issue and the trackpad issue.

 

Replaced my desktop with Windows 7 and mobility,
by Jake in Kirkland, 2010-03-04

I'm very pleased with Asus and this particular product. Great combination of performance, battery life, weight and price. Everything I had working with my desktop (3 different printers from hP and Canon) were easily made to work with this notebook running Windows 7 except the Twain-32 driver (scanner). There are many options for most scanners on the market today for upgrades with either s/w or h/w so this is not an issue. Back to the UL30A....I love the performance button above/left of the keyboard which instantly selects between high performance and low power modes (or something in between). The 13 inch screen is beautiful. Amazon shipped this product very quickly (I ordered two - one for my daughter in college and one for myself). I called ASUS to get an updated address where to send the Accidental Damage Warranty registration; customer service answered the phone rather quickly and gave me the new USPS address and a web site where I could register the ADW electronically.

 

Great notebook, worthy of consideration,
by N. Chowdhry, 2010-03-04

After much research, I am happy with my purchase.

Pros: Light weight, slim profile, at least 9-hr battery life on power saver mode and Wifi antenna turned off (plugged into ethernet cable at my desk), two-finger scrolling, small AC adapter module.

Cons: touch pad too sensitive & doesn't have bluetooth.

Other note: My original unit's Win 7 crashed after two weeks. I assume I just got lucky with a bad apple in the bunch.
Amazon easily addressed my issue and replaced it. Amazon's customer service excels my expectations.

 

Great laptop--coming from a college student,
by Jenny, 2010-03-04

So, I was in quite the situation when I ruined my old, slow, 10 minute battery laptop by choking and spitting my drink all over its keyboard. I had to act fast and get myself a brand new laptop since I need one for basically everything I do in life. So the first thing I did was check out amazon to see what kind of laptops they had and their specs and prices. This laptop's description immediately caught my eye. Thin and light? 12 hour battery?! That would be amazing after the fat and heavy, 10 minute battery laptop I used to have. The price looked really good as well. But being the frugal shopper that I am, I decided not to act too quickly and go to my local Best Buy, Costco, and Fry's before I make any decision. Everything they had in the stores did not even compare to this laptop in my eyes. Yes, some computers had the new i3, i4, and i5 processors, and other spiffy specs, but that really did not mean too much to me. As a college student all I was looking for was something that was: 1) very portable, 2) long battery life-- have you any idea how irritating it is to find a darn outlet inside a large lecture hall? 3) ~13 inches--anything bigger is too bulky to carry around 4) affordable 5) any operating system other than Vista. This computer best fit my criteria, and after reading all the positive reviews about it, I decided to place the order.

I just received my laptop yesterday, and I have to say. It's beautiful. The first thing I noticed when I took the computer out of its box was that it was very sleek looking, slim, and super light. Great! I open the laptop and I see a BUNCH of stickers and protective coverings. No problem, everything came off clean. The only thing I noticed was that the touch pad area had residual stickiness that made it very difficult to slide my finger across the pad. But the stickiness seemed to just vanish after using it a little, and it works great. I like how it isn't the traditional touch pad, but has little dots that sense your finger instead. Setup was pretty simple. I let it do its thing for about 10-15 minutes, then it asked me to make a username and password, and set up my internet connection and it was good to go. The keyboard is very nice to type on too. One of my friends pointed out that the design looked similar to that of a macbook. It comes pre-installed with a couple Asus programs that I probably would never use as well as some anti-virus program that I had never head of. But that was pretty easy to deal with. Uninstalling programs doesn't take a genius. So far everything has been running very smoothly, no issues to report yet.

My only beef with this laptop is that it does not have a DVD drive, and I depended on my old laptop to burn DVDs and CDs as well as hook it up to my TV to watch movies. They don't really advertise this fact on the product description, so I was pretty sad about that. So I go back on Amazon and notice that a lot of the people who purchased this laptop also bought Asus's external DVD drive/recorder, so of course I had to take a look. It was just what I was missing, so I go ahead and buy that as well. Problem solved! I guess the lack of a DVD drive just a sacrifice we have to make in exchange for how light this laptop is.

I actually took this laptop with me to work yesterday and my manager really liked it. He then called out a couple more of his staff to take a look. It was amusing to watch them all crowd around my computer and admire it. But anyway, all in all, if you are considering buying this laptop, I would say go for it. Especially if you have similar criteria to mine. Its a great laptop at a great price.

 

Good, but not quite great,
by Brejo, 2010-03-02

Well, to start off, I'm not going to say I regret buying this computer, but I think it could be a bit better. That being said, they did a LOT right with this computer as well. This is my review after a little less than two months of review

Pros:

- Lightweight. Perfect companion for a college student (one that takes studying seriously that is and does not use their laptop for nothing but games and watching videos (will get to this later))
- Runs well, good multitasker
- Thin, yet again making it nice for a student, or anyone on the go who needs their computer with them
- Battery life is great. There have been a lot of people on here questioning the battery life, and no, it does not get 12 hours of life. However, even though I have not actually timed how long the battery lasts, I am confident it can give 7-8 hours on a normal basis. Besides, who really needs a laptop to last them for 12 hours? You take it out with you, use it for maybe 6 hours at the most, and bring it home and charge it there.
- LOVE the keyboard. Probably my favorite part of the computer.

Cons:

- Don't think I'll ever come to love the mousepad. The right click and left click buttons are HORRENDOUS. I can never tell whether my fingers are on them or not when I'm not looking at them. The multitouch isn't great either (thought it had zoom in and zoom out... still haven't figured those out yet)
- Streaming videos. Yes, I know this is something that is discussed in many reviews, but I'm still disappointed in it. However, streaming videos that are not too heavy in the quality department should be fine, and viewing videos that are stored on your hard drive is no problem.
- The thing I hate the most is the finger print magnet aspect. If you're like me, in that half of the experience of any gadget is the sexiness of the gadget, this computer will drive you nuts. Yes, this is an attractive computer when it's clean, but get a whole bunch of smudges on it, and, if you're like me, you'll be driven nuts.

Like I said already, this computer isn't a messiah by any means, but at the same, I don't have buyers remorse either. If this were running Vista, however, this might be a different story...