Asus VivoBook Pro 16X OLED
Look, I keep telling companies I don’t do reviews, okay? Fortunately, this doesn’t seem to stop them sending me kit, so for my trip across northern Europe I took an Asus VivoBook Pro 16X OLED complete with AMD Ryzen M7600Q processor. You can se see one along with a lot of flashy graphics by heading to pcpro.link/329asus.
One reason the VivoBook joined me on m my travels is because a couple of people had he heard my concept of the pandemic being a “time machine” – that humans can move themselv themselves through time, ignoring the days that are too similar to one another and compressing the years of 2020 and 2021 into a brief spell of lockdo lockdown and quarantine, but that computers can’ t.Espe Especially ill not their hi hard disks, which have been spinning away all through lockdown, just as though every day was a normal working day.
And boy, have I turned out to be right. The first guy to whom I described this effect went back and looked at his paired NAS boxes. Each one was starting to report a climbing count and increasing rate of sector errors on one of the two drives in each device: the early warning that tells you to get your credit card out, before you start seeing red LEDs you didn’t even know your NAS had.
What did this have to do with the VivoBook, Steve? Well, the main practical reason I took this machine with me was that it had many USB 3 ports. My biggest backup disk is also USB 3: to rebuild the NAS RAIDs it would be so much simpler to put the odds and ends on the USB disk, nuke both NAS devices and rebuild with updated firmware, before putting the data back again. Except, and I can’t believe it took me ten days to notice this, the VivoBook that Asus sent doesn’t have an Ethernet port on it.
Okay, so this isn’t a showstopper. USB-to-Ethernet converters are available and they don’t seem to impact throughput that badly, plus I have a strange selection of port-replicator things from CalDigit and Portable Addons, although both of them suffer from USB-C cable compatibility issues. More decisively, as I sat there I was over a thousand kilometres away from either peripheral.
The VivoBook wasn’t without its compensations, though. The screen, a 4K OLED unit that measures 16in diagonally across, is actually too bright when the machine’s plugged into the mains. The battery and motherboard combination makes it seem as though my time machine aide memoire has pushed us into the future. Sixteen hours of battery on a 100% charge? These are phenomenal achievements, especially on such a slim and light device.
However, all that lovely battery power isn’t available via the machine’s BIOS. Both Lenovo and HP make laptops whose USB ports are left powered up even when the machine is off. I had no idea how dependent I had become on this until I sat at a machine without it. Turns out that it’s vitally important to me to charge those phones while I’m asleep, or the machine is, without plugging in three more transformers, each with charging LEDs that flash like mad when they’re 100% charged. How to turn your hotel room into a nightclub, just as the jetlag wakes you up at 4am.
And finally, in the picture you’ll see a trackpad. It is possibly the worst designed of such devices, in the world, ever. It’s hinged along the top to give you “haptic feedback” when you click on the bottom, and it also accepts a light tap that doesn’t move that hinge, as if it had. Clear? Anyway, that design of trackpad might work with an inferior, lower-resolution screen, but the “tap or don’t tap” approach completely screws up my ultrafine accuracy with things such as pop-down arrows on dialog boxes.
For me, the main result of this device is: (1) cursing; (2) RSI, because you hover off the surface lest you generate a “non-moving tap event”; and (3) lost files, because when my protesting forearms finally let the finger drop, I have no idea where the cursor went or therefore what it hit.
I qualify as a trackpad lover. I have ALPS trackpads for Apple Desktop Bus, and Logitech wireless ones with nice big, plastic, mechanical tap-buttons. Even with my familiarity with this type, I found getting on with the VivoBook a challenge. Buy it for that screen and that runtime, but leave some money in the budget for a £15 USB wired little mouse. That, at least, will plug in without any issues.