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One of the best displays of the notebooks on test
The elegantly named Asus A6Rp-AP026H sports one of the best displays of all the PCs on test. It’s no bigger than the others, but it’s significantly sharper, with rich colours even at brighter settings.
Indeed, this is a good-looking PC in general, with a handsome gun-metal grey body. The design is spoiled slightly by an odd tendency on behalf of the manufacturer to cover any available space with unnecessary symbols and meaningless text such as “Entertainment Notebook Series”.
The impressive build quality is reflected elsewhere, with a comfortable keyboard and a relatively wide touchpad that’s easy and pleasant to use.
The A6Rp-AP026H’s central components, the processor, memory, and hard disk are a pretty solid bunch and gave us an average set of test results. All except for our battery tests, where the A6Rp-AP026H demonstrated as little as half the staying power of some of its rivals. This factor could seriously limit the PC’s usefulness as a portable system but it’s not a problem if you intend to use it at home.
Again, this is no gaming machine, but the A6Rp-AP026H should be more than powerful enough for most family and home office tasks. It’s an easy computer to upgrade too, whether you’re looking to add new components or use older accessories you have hanging around.
As well as memory card, USB and PC card slots, you’ll also find a parallel port for an older printer and even infrared for communicating with your mobile phone. Like the Acer, there’s even a built-in camera and microphone for video calls. The inclusion of Microsoft Works Office Suite makes for one of the more practical software packages in the test, too.
This article is part of a group test of
budget notebooks.
The table can be read via our Pdf download.
Others are:
Acer Aspire 5101 AWLMi
Fujitsu Siemens Amilio Pi 1505
Hi-grade Notino W5600
MSI Megabook M670
Toshiba Satellite Pro A120
Read more reviews
Our verdict
Good points Good design/build quality; useful software Bad points Short battery life
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Basic Input Output System. Essential software built into every PC that connects the vital components....
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Computeractive Excel (2010) Online tutorialPrice: £19.99 |
Computeractive Word (2010) Online TutorialPrice: £19.99 |
Computeractive Powerpoint (2010) Online TutorialPrice: £19.99 |
Angry BirdsPrice: £9.99 |
Back Issue CD-Rom 14 (2011)Price: £15.99 |
Asus A6Rp-AP026H In Practice
I brought this machine to take with me as I completed my studies at university during the final year-an important task when considering the cost of such things. The machine completed the job and the degree was passed so in this respect it can be called a success; however this does not mean Asus has earned top marks for their contribution. My first impression of the Asus A6Rp-AP026H was that is was a sleek looking and powerful notebook, it also seemed to sport a lot of software/hardware that come in handy, most notability the built-in camera and wireless support. This has been the opinion of many reviews of this notebook. Sadly it soon became apparent that there were some issues surrounding the components here; firstly the Asus supplied software seemed to take an infuriatingly long time to boot when the system is first started and worse, it often appeared less user friendly then the original windows equivalents. The before mentioned wireless support proved over complicated as was eventually dropped in favour of letting windows from handle the task. However, the main concern I have with this notebook is physical build quality. Most reviews show this in a positive light but I must disagree, out of the shop the case did not fit properly and even worse keys started randomly falling off the keyboard! Maybe I was unlucky with this one but my partner brought a humble Toshiba notebook at around the same time and the very feel of the machine was entirely different to that of the Asus model. It felt more solid and less cheap and despite the cool style of Asus? note book the Toshiba seemed somehow more considered. I would recommend that fore the kind of money usually asked for by dealers of the Asus A6Rp-AP026H that buyers take time to consider other brands first.
Posted by Drew, 05 Feb 2008