After problem with MSI X430 described in earlier post, I kept shopping. There were few interesting contenders. By chance I saw in the shop a ViewSonic ViewBook Pro VNB131. I didn't even consider a ViewSonic to be a company to consider notebooks from, but they keep providing surprises. The screen immediately catches attention - it's truly bright and vivid, unlikely washed-out generation of current inexpensive notebook screens. And in around 1.6kg they managed to cramp even easily-replaceable DVD. Which is a brilliant ... drawback, in the same way as big battery in notebook is ;-). DVD in my nx9420 is amost dead now, hardly reading every 5th disk I put into it (which is rare nowadays).
Well, anyway, VNB131 is outstanding device (they even promise all-aluminum frame), exactly of that type that you notice, keep in mind, and when finally you want to get one few months later - oops, it's no longer around. The reason I skipped it was that I got idea of L335 performance, and looked up Core2 ULV (used in VNB131) performance - it turned out it's not much better than 5-year old Toshiba M200 which I have. As I got idea taht i won't get anything decent for $500, I decided to shell out more, but get something noticeably powerful than even nx9420.
And the winnder was Asus X34F, which just recently got into stock around. X34F is a strange device, there was no info about it on Asus site. No reviews on the net. Googling just gave lot of pricelist hits clustered for some locality, giving good, though sometimes controversial specs. After extensive research, it turned out it's a U35F spinoff for these localities. Afre finally spotting an instance in a physical shop, I've ordered it and it seems everything is right with it. Funny thing, scrolling with touchpad again doesn't work with Ubuntu 10.10 (device otherwise sells with just FreeDOS). But I have high hopes and trust Asus not to stick films advertising 2-finger scroll on an unsupporting touchpad. Just Linux driver needs upgrade or maybe hacking. After all, I already fixed (thanks to forums) hang-on-suspend issue which at first occured.
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