Asus S6F (Core Duo L2400 Processor 1.66GHz, 1GB RAM)

We had few other issues with the laptop's usability. Its keyboard had surprisingly large buttons that were comfortable to type on, and the mouse touchpad proved responsive, despite the fact that its square-ish shape doesn't match the flatter, rectangular aspect ratio of the screen. Connectivity, another potential Achilles heel for this and all other ultraportable laptops, was surprisingly good on the S6F. It lacks a FireWire port, but there are three USB ports to choose from, each of which is adequately spaced, so you should have no difficulty connecting bulky USB peripherals.

We wished it had more ports.

An integrated ultra-slim DVD rewriter means there's no need to lug a separate optical drive, and Asus hasn't skimped on format support--the drive can write and rewrite CDs at 24x and 16x, respectively, and can write to "plus" and "minus" formats at up to 4x. This is a tad slow to use as your main backup solution, but it's good to have the option nonetheless.

Multimedia lovers will be pleased with the screen, as mentioned above, but they'll also be glad to find a 100GB hard drive inside the S6F. This is a massive amount of space for such a small laptop considering most of its rivals now settle for 40GB or 60GB disks. This allows you to store around 90 hours of high-quality video on the laptop, but we'd recommend you use a set of external speakers or headphones if you use the laptop to play movies or music.

Graphics performance isn't the S6F's forte. It uses the integrated display adapter as found in the Intel 945GM chipset, so although it runs games, most modern titles will run in low frame-rate jerk-o-vision. We'll forgive it this black mark though, because that's not what the laptop is designed for.

Performance And Battery Life
As predicted, graphics performance was fairly pathetic. It scored a 3DMark 2006 score of 108, and although that's more than double the score of the similarly sexy Sony Vaio TX2, it's nothing to brag about. It ran Doom 3 at just 6.1 frames per second at a resolution of 1,024 x 768 pixels, but was far more impressive when running common productivity applications. It never once felt sluggish during everyday use and notched up a PCMark 2005 score of 2,834.

This tally is the highest we've seen from any ultra-portable laptop, and is better than we'd have expected from an average tower desktop PC before the advent of dual-core processing. More impressively, it ran virtually silently throughout our tests and was very cool during use, so if you like to use laptops as their name describes--on your lap--there's little risk of burning your legs.

We were unable to obtain a battery life score from our pre-production S6F sample, but we'll update this review with a score in the near future.

Service And Support
Asus offers a two-year limited global warranty with all its notebooks. Should a problem occur with the unit, you can send it to any Asus service center around the world and get it repaired using the warranty card. For users who travel overseas often, having a global warranty is important. However, the Asus service overseas centers should be checked for accessibility. Asus Web site provides software support and updates as well as a telephone hotline number.

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