Well. The N10 “netbook” from Asus.

If history has taught us anything over the thousands of years besides you should never accept a giant wooden horse for a gift or remake a horror film more than once, it’s that making something completely pointless is still pointless even if the said thing is good. Things like the ‘charge while you play’ adapters for the wireless xbox 360 controllers, yes lets take a wireless device and give it a wire to make use of… well yes you get my point. Stupid.

The point I’m getting at is the whole “netbook” idea in general. I see no real need for them; they are a needlessly small version of a normal laptop which runs Vista more slowly than the average laptop anyway (or PC since Vista is a POS!). I awoke to the delivering of the N10 one morning with the hope of being able to try some games on it. While this was possible, it was somewhat undesirable. I played through the first couple of levels of Condemned criminal origins on medium settings and the laptop chugged along reasonably well, but fell flat on its face when the screen had more than 1 character on it; which sadly meant 90% of the game. At this point I got bored and passed the N10 to my loving girlfriend who proceeded to play through Indigo Prophecy on it in ONE SITTING. Anyone who says girls don’t game, you are wrong.

On to the main features of the netbook, the overall look is nice. It has a stylish, neat and tidy exterior and some sexy looking blue lights which contrast the black interior keyboard + screen very nicely. Brownie points here Asus, your designer knows what he’s doing. As for features, there’s a TON of software included with the N10. Mostly though, it’s stuff that the average person would never ever use such as fingerprint recognition (seriously). All of which just seem to make Vista run even slower than normal. (more than 3 minutes to startup and be on the desktop without the egg timer icon.) The processor inside is somewhat underpowered for everything that is going on. Windows Vista sucks the life from the poor old 1.60GHz cpu like a gigahertz vampire.

There really isn’t much to say about the N10. It’s a small, underpowered netbook with a heck of a lot of pointless software included, that would have benefitted a lot more from running XP. The half-decent graphics card included is a good idea, but falls short because the rest of the specs are low-end. And for the price of around £500 you may aswel save a few more 0’s and get a macbook or a proper gaming laptop.