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Review: Asus 1201 HA(B)

The 1201 HAB is a Best Buy exclusive retailing for $329, as far as I can tell, it's the same as the old 1201 HA, just at a lower price.

It has a 12.1" LED backlit screen, a 1.33 Ghz Z520 Atom processor, 1 GB of RAM, and a 160 GB HDD. It's six cell battery will give you anywhere from 5 hours to upwards of 8 hours with wifi on, depending of course what you are doing.

Anybody that knows me well knows I don't like slow hardware, I frequently will do my best to have the fastest and the best that I can afford. My desktop runs a lightweight OS with a quad core processor and 8 GB of ram. However my requirements in a laptop are vastly different. My desktop can do all the heavy lifting, so all that really matters to me is the price, the battery life, it's overall portability, and the ability to enjoy using the screen/keyboard.

Price:
It's at the perfect sweet spot, I got it using Christmas money, and even if I end up selling it later, I won't loose too much because they simply don't have that much value to begin with.

Battery:
My minimum was 5 hours, I have gotten this laptop to over 8 hours with the wifi on.

Portability:
It's just about a foot wide, and barely over a inch thick, coming in at just about 3 pounds, it's heavy enough you know it's there, but not so heavy that it's actually a burden, this laptop travels very well

Screen/Keyboard:
Most netbooks have a 8.9" or 10" screen, maybe I'm picky, maybe I'm getting old, but that's just too damn small. 12.1" is just enough. With it's 1366x768 screen resolution, it even has a higher res than some desktop monitors that you can buy.

Caveats:
I will admit that it ran like poo until I installed 2 GB of RAM, it only has one slot, so I had to discard the original 1 GB. With this laptop the weak point is definitely the processor, so while the ram helped, you still need to be conscious when you are using it of that limitation, and it's a big one. Flash is still cpu only based and therefore anything other than a regular youtube video didn't play back very well at all.

Conclusion:
All in all I love it. It doesn't play flash well, but I have honestly never had good luck with flash. It has a good screen, decent speakers, huge battery life, wireless N, and it's light. As far as I am concerned, this is the perfect netbook on the market. If you are looking for one, give this a serious look.