My Experience with the Asus UL30 VT Laptop: A Long-Term Review

It's been several months since I purchased the Asus UL30 VT laptop, and I'm excited to share my long-term experience with this device. As you may recall from my initial review, I was impressed with the laptop's value proposition, offering a great balance of thin and light design, powerful performance, and excellent battery life. In this article, I'll provide an in-depth look at how the UL30 VT has fared as a daily driver, highlighting both its strengths and weaknesses.

Design and Build Quality

The Asus UL30 VT is a sleek and stylish laptop that's designed to turn heads. Its slim profile and aluminum construction make it easy to carry around, while the matte finish on the lid helps reduce fingerprints and smudges. The laptop's build quality is generally excellent, with a solid feel that suggests it can withstand regular use.

However, I've noticed some minor cosmetic issues over time. The hinges, which allow the screen to open and close smoothly, have developed a slight creakiness after repeated use. Additionally, the touchpad has started to show signs of wear, with noticeable scratches on the surface where my fingers come into contact. These are minor complaints, but they've become noticeable enough to warrant attention.

Performance

The UL30 VT's performance is one of its standout features. Powered by an Intel Core i4 processor and 5GB of RAM, this laptop can handle even the most demanding tasks with ease. I've used it for everything from video editing to 3D modeling, and it's consistently delivered smooth performance.

In particular, the solid-state drive (SSD) is a game-changer. The Intel SSD provides lightning-fast loading times and responsive performance, making it ideal for applications that require rapid access to data. I've also noticed significant improvements in overall system responsiveness, thanks to the laptop's ability to quickly switch between tasks.

Battery Life

One of my biggest concerns when purchasing the UL30 VT was its battery life. Asus claims up to 12 hours of battery life, but I've found that this is somewhat exaggerated. In reality, I've managed to squeeze around 9 hours out of the battery with some optimization and moderate use.

While this may not be as long-lasting as some other laptops on the market, it's still remarkably good considering the device's performance capabilities. Additionally, the battery has held up well over time, with minimal degradation in terms of capacity or overall health.

Multi-Touch Trackpad

The UL30 VT's multi-touch trackpad is a highlight of this laptop's features list. Synaptics' latest technology allows for smooth and accurate gesture recognition, making it easy to navigate menus, scroll through documents, and even interact with web pages.

In particular, I've found the gesture-based interface to be very convenient, especially when working with multiple windows or applications open at once. The ability to pinch, zoom, and swipe between windows has greatly improved my productivity and workflow.

Software Performance

As a laptop user, I'm always looking for software that's optimized for performance. The UL30 VT has impressed me in this regard, with most applications running smoothly and quickly.

In particular, the laptop has handled video streaming services like Netflix and Hulu with ease, playing back content at full HD resolution without any noticeable lag or buffering issues. This is a testament to the device's powerful hardware and efficient software optimization.

Rendering and Graphics

While the UL30 VT is not designed specifically for graphics-intensive applications, it's still capable of handling demanding tasks. I've used it for video editing and 3D modeling, and while performance may not be as robust as some other laptops on the market, it's still respectable.

In particular, the laptop has handled HD video rendering with surprising ease, thanks to its fast processor and solid-state drive. While clocked at a relatively low 1.3 GHz, the UL30 VT's Intel Core i4 processor is well-suited for tasks that require less raw processing power.

Conclusion

After several months of use, I'm delighted to report that the Asus UL30 VT has proven to be an excellent choice for my daily needs. While it may not offer the absolute best performance or battery life in its class, it provides a great balance of features and value that makes it a compelling option for anyone looking for a reliable laptop.

In particular, I highly recommend the device's hybrid graphics system, which allows it to switch seamlessly between integrated and dedicated graphics. This feature has greatly improved my overall user experience, especially when working with demanding applications or streaming content at high resolutions.

If you're in the market for a new laptop, I'd definitely recommend considering the UL30 VT. With its sleek design, powerful performance, and excellent battery life, it's an excellent choice for anyone looking for a reliable device that won't break the bank.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey guys it's Brandon mman from techno Buffalo so it's been several months with the Asus ul30 VT laptop we talked about this laptop being a very good value for people who want something thin and light something powerful and something that has really good battery life with its switchable graphics cards and then we also talked about installing an Intel SSD in the back of this to really increase performance um and also get a little bit better battery Lev so it's been a couple of months and I want to give you a sort of long-term update on the ul30 VT and how it's been fairing as sort of my day-to-day laptop I've used this a lot I've taken it to Vegas to CES I've taken it all around and I've got a lot of comments about it let's start with the hardware itself and how the hardware is holding up now I didn't clean the laptop before filming the video on purpose I wanted you to see what it looked like after some use you know some laptops are better than others with stain clean like the MacBooks stay clean very well thanks to the aluminum design the ul30 VT from Asus not so much as you can see the the lid here which is actually a nice brushed metal look becomes very fingerprint covered you can take a little bit of Windex and just wipe this down and get it clean again but you have to do that quite often in order to get it to stay clean in terms of the hardware itself the the the the thickness of the laptop and the weight it is fantastic and a lot of people that pick up this laptop say wow this really feels feels quite thin and light I love the wedge shaped design here it's very thin in the front which means that it slips right into a bag or a laptop case uh without much fumbling let's open up the the laptop here and take a look at some of the hardware features and I want to point out some things that have been bothering me when I first went to buy this device I checked out reviews for many devices like this and also for this particular unit and people said you know the Asus laptops are Great Value but the build quality is not that great I have to say that I kind of agree for a few reasons first of all the armrests here or the Palm rests now make a creaking sound listen it may be difficult to hear but after a few minutes of typing and resting Palms on here they start to Creek Additionally the keyboard seems to give a little bit in the center it almost is like a saggy mattress where right in the center you can kind of feel the keys go down a little bit further than they should these things aren't bothering me too much because the speed of the laptop the battery is all really fantastic and I'm having a lot of fun using it um another problem with this laptop is that the glossy screen really gets annoying um some people can can tolerate glossy screens better than others but for me it's just it's just too much and it's difficult to see if I'm sitting in the reflection or near a window or something like that I love the keyboard I love the clicky chicklet style keyboard it's got a very MacBook like feel um and you can see it just turned on there and we're going to talk a little bit about performance and battery life in a a second uh but want to finish some other comments on the hardware I formatted this laptop right out of the box because it had a lot of bloatware on it that I really didn't want it was running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit Edition I put Windows 7 32bit uh Home Premium on here um which means that I got a little bit less Ram but it also means that I removed all of that bloat Weare uh that was causing the laptop to be a little bit slow out of the box it also means that this button on the left which is supposed to let you switch graphics on the Fly is now dead it doesn't do anything but that's okay because what I've set it to do is to switch into that hybrid graphics mode where the performance increases when you plug it in and then when it's not plugged in it's using the Intel graphics card and then you're getting better battery life so we're going to talk about um using the touchpad with the multi-touch we're also going to talk about performance let's move up on the screen okay the first thing I want to talk about is performance thanks to the solid state drive and the Intel ultra low voltage processor which I think performs quite well this laptop is vast uh when I'm using this I don't feel like it's lagging I don't feel like it's taking time to load things I've got Photoshop open down here it opens up instantly and that's thanks to the solid state hard drive I think which makes a big difference in bringing up programs that are stored into ram ram has to transfer the programs uh or hard drive has to transfer programs from the disc to the ram to get it sort of loaded and this process makes it much faster so I'm going to go over here and open up Chrome and Chrome opens up within seconds and that same applies with any other browser that I'm using down here we've got uh Microsoft Word 2010 beta look how fast it opens extremely fast very good performance let's take a look at the performance Benchmark built into Windows 7 okay I'm going to zoom in a little bit here and we're going to go down the list so what we have here for the processor is a 4.8 which is very solid memory is 5.4 which is great anything really over 4.5 is really great and then for graphics a 4.9 and 5.9 for the desktop performance for Windows arrow and also for 3D business and gaving graphics and wow look at the rating for primary hard drive disc transfer speed 7.8 out of 7.9 the Intel solid state drive absolutely screams if you can afford the upgrade get it it's worth every penny and the prices are coming down all the time so I'm going to zoom back out I have tried rendering HD video with this by the way it does okay you know HD video rendering a lot of the time comes down to the processor power and with the ultra low voltage processor it's kind of clocked low at about 1.3 GHz so it's not really tuned well uh for rendering HD video but doing everything else running Photoshop and internet and and going to um and watching even YouTube HD video let's pull some of that up real quick just so you can see how smooth that is even when we're on the Intel graphics so we'll go to John for Lakers here and let's bump this up to HD and uh there it goes and it loaded up pretty fast and let's see how smooth it is we'll go full screen let's watch for a minute Buffalo here generally I keep personal information out of this channel I save it for inside so perfect perfect playback of YouTube HD perfect playback of of Hulu or any other video streaming content it works really well now while we're on the internet again I want to talk about the multi-touch trackpad uh it's a synaptics trackpad so you can get the program that allows you to to do the multi-touch gestures so what I can do here I'm going to try to do this may be difficult to show but I'm going to swipe two fingers downward um to get it to scroll down like you would do on the Macbook so here I have two fingers and I'm inching down works very well I use the multi-touch all the time it's very convenient to use and finally one last note and we're going to talk about battery life Asus claims that the UL 30 VT thanks to the ultra low voltage processor thanks to the hybrid graphics can get up to 12 hours of battery life obviously that's not true in the first month of using this I could get about 9 hours of battery life with some optimizations even and with the solid state drive now I'm about down to five Battery Technology still hasn't evolved to where the battery life doesn't decrease over time so I'm at about 5 hours now which is still quite uh remarkable for any sort of laptop and I'm really enjoying being able to run uh the Asus UL 30 VT without having to charge it so often and zoom software which is particularly resource intensive um works very well so I'm going to bring up real quick um some of the fancy Graphics here and it works very well so guys that was an update on the Asus UL 30 VT I highly recommend this laptop it's come down a lot in price since I filmed the first video about this it's now $749 tack on an Intel SSD onto that you're about talking $950 or $1,000 or you can keep it in its standard configuration isus has new models of this coming out this year so you may want to watch out for that but of course they're going to start at higher price points this model the ul30 VT may be a good bargain come 2 or 3 months from now right before the new models hit so that's it for now\n"