Asus M2418E

The M2418E is a good-looking notebook with some excellent features.

Price: £1643.83

Manufacturer: Asus

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Verdict

Pros:

Good system performance; great looking; excellent screen.
Cons: Poor battery and graphics performance.
Overall: If you can put up with a one and a half hour battery life and don't want to play games, this well-featured notebook could be the one for you.

Mark Walsh, Personal Computer World 11 Nov 2002

The M2418E isn't the prettiest of names, but the notebook itself is very good looking. Wrapped in silver and black hard plastic, it's compact, but has the power and features of a high-end desktop replacement.

Inside there's a 1.8GHz Mobile Pentium 4 chip, supported by 384MB of memory, 32MB of which has been devoted to graphics. Results in Sysmark were more than adequate, and very impressive for a notebook of this size.

Our main worry here was that this good performance would lead to an uncomfortable amount of heat coming from the chassis.

However, we were pleasantly surprised; while it could take the chill off your lap on a cold winter night, it's surprisingly cool.

This is thanks, at least in part, to the three hardworking fans surrounding the chip. This does make the notebook a little noisy though.

Our favourite part was the screen. It's 14.1in, so not the largest we've come across, but it's of such good quality that we didn't need any more. With a native resolution of 1,024 x 768, images are superbly rendered, and it's bright without being too much so.

Battery life was, however, very disappointing, particularly considering how ideal the M2418E would be to those permanently on the move.

Granted, one hour 31 minutes isn't the worst we've seen, but it's hardly enough to make it portable, and it shows a trend towards power over battery life, regardless of the form factor of the notebook.

Were you to want to play games on this, then tough. Using an SIS 650 graphics chip and 32MB of the system's own memory, it managed just 1,084 in 3Dmark.

It's not the worst we've seen but, if the six frames a second it gave us on Jedi Knight is anything to go by, you'd be better off with Dell's 8200 with the Radeon 9000 chip if gaming is your bag.

But don't let these problems put you off too much, as there's plenty here. There's a 40GB hard disk and more than enough ports around the sides.

The left-hand side gives us a mini-Firewire port, an excellent inclusion in our eyes, as well as an infrared port and one Type II PC Card slot.

The rear has the inevitable Kensington lock plus Ethernet and 56K modem ports. There are also two USB1 ports, a VGA connector, parallel port, though sadly no serial, and a proprietary connector that allows you to connect the notebook to your PC.

The right-hand side houses headphone and microphone sockets and the DVD/CD-RW combo drive. Around the front there is a selection of audio controls including play, stop and volume.

The buttons on our sample did not work, although Asus assures us that this was purely because it was an early model. The M2148E also has wireless local area network capabilities built in.

Both speakers are pretty poor, leading to disappointing CD playback. It's tinny, and you're only slightly better off using the headphones. The sound chip is bog standard and is partly to blame.

The keyboard has had to be condensed due to the M2149E's overall size, and so a few keys have been muddled around to squeeze them in.

In particular, the backslash key has been shifted down and to the right of the Alt key; if a key was to be moved, we'd opt for this one too. The rest of the keys are large enough to not be fiddly and are comfortable to use.

The touchpad is quite small, as are its buttons. Even though it's quite a compact notebook, they could have been made bigger; JVC's Mini-note PC had a similarly sized arrangement and was about half to two-thirds the size of this.

While we were disappointed with the battery life and the weak graphics performance, the rest of the notebook is excellent.

Some of the £1,650 you'd fork out would be for its looks, though; other notebooks offer the same features for a few hundred pounds less.

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