For the past few nights, to my surprise, I have been very pleased with it… now it’s not anything fantastic, it has its flaws.

By the way, that is my Asus N10J-A2 Netbook in the photo, for size reference.

Pros

• Made out of wood with a nice dark finish (My camera made it look light cherry, but it is more like a cocoa powder color).
• Light and thin and can fold up nicely and slide under the bed.
• Has a tilt function and has a lip on it to hold things in place.
• Also has an area for your mouse if you have one.

Cons

• The wood is most likely particle board.
• The lip wasn’t glued in ( So I’ll have to re-glue it).
• You have to reach around behind it to set the tilt height.
• The legs don’t lock to the open or closed position.

Conclusion
I am digging it so far, I have to re-glue the lip on, but that’s an easy fix. Also I think If I tighten the screws that hold the legs on I can add more tension to them so they stay open and closed better. For $15 dollars plus change I’m pretty happy with this purchase, I know now that I like using the laptop tray table and maybe someday I’ll even upgrade to a more expensive one when this one gives out. Until then happy computing!

I did a little looking around on ebay and came across a disgustingly cheap sony dual shock knock off.  After sifting through a few different brands I settled on the Shocks Joystick made by some chinese company, ShenZhen something something.

For 9 dollars shipped I figured what the heck I’d try it out.  Ordered it on friday and got it on monday.  The packaging was ok, it was easy to get into no cutting involved.  The controller itself seems decent, all the buttons are nice and clicky, the dual joysticks move and reset themselves correctly.

The driver install was real tricky, I could not for the life of me to figure out what driver I needed on the cd they supplied.  I spent about two hours trying to get the right drivers installed, trying ones I found on the web, and no luck.  Windows 7 would only recognize one of the dual joysticks.  I just about decided to give up and decided to uninstall all the seventeen drivers I installed, and after all that it started working.

So here is my advice if you get one of these gamepads see if windows will correctly identify it first before installing the wacked out manufacterers drivers.

All in all I am happily playing Assassins Creed on my PC and it cost me a whole 9 dollars, how great is that.

Here is a snippet:

“When it comes to the Radeon HD 4890 it is hands down the fastest single-GPU graphics card that AMD has every produced. It performs significantly better than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB and runs cooler and uses less power at idle. There really is not much bad to say about the card as it is also priced lower than the GeForce GTX 275. Add in the fact that it has already proven itself to be an overclocking monster with a core clock frequency of nearly 1GHz with the stock cooler and no voltage adjustments you have a clear winner for all the Radeon fans out there…

Check out the full story at Legit Reviews.

News of these new cards being released into the wild is hitting the net, so check out these other sites for more info.

ATI Radeon HD 4890

• HotHardware
• Bjorn3D
• TweakTown – Sapphire Version
• TweakTown – Gigabyte Flavor

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275

• HotHardware
• Bjorn3D

My System Specs:

• Asus N10J-A2
• Intel Atom N270 CPU – 1.6GHZ Dual Core
• Nvidia GeForce 9300M GS 256MB
• 2GB Ram
• 320GB Hard Drive
• Windows 7 Ultimate

All the benchmarks were taken with the netbook on AC power and the Power4Gear Hybrid software on High performance with Turbo enabled.  (Turbo gives a 10% overclock.

These are the system specs taken with CPUid 1.50.

This is the task manager showing the current resource usage.  At idle the N10J would sit about 50% ram usage and cpu usage would bounce between 5-10%.

This is the Experience Rating run in Windows 7 Ultimate.

These are the GPU Rendering and Processing benchmarks run in Sisoft Sandra.

CPU Arithmetic benchmark.  It’s a little bit above SiSofts included N270 benchmark due to Turbo mode being enabled.

This is the Cache and Memory bandwidth benchmark.

And finally this is a Power Management Efficiency benchmark.

In conclusion,
I really think the CPU is the bottleneck in this system.  The GeForce 9300M is not a top gaming card but after trying a whole bunch of different settings and resolutions in Need for Speed Carbon I could not for the life of me get the FPS above 25-30.  Switching res and graphics options didn’t appear to raise or drop the FPS much at all.  It would really be nice to upgrade the Atom N270 but I’m not sure thats possible on this motherboard, I will have to do some more research on that.

So sit back and enjoy this little review of the GoPro 5 Wide and a couple of videos made with the camera.

First Impressions
I opened the box and found my camera neatly tucked inside some bubble wrap.  I was expecting a much larger product box, but pictures can be deceiving.  I proceeded to remove the GoPro from its packaging.

This thing is much smaller then I expected.  The case is pretty hefty and supposedly watertight to 100 feet.  The motorsport version also comes with a bunch of little attachment thingies, and a giant suction cup armature.  I wish they had made the product box a little easier to get into, I am the kind of person that likes to save boxes, for when I put things on ebay.  Unfortunately the box was pretty much destroyed after I got done with it, they packaged it up very strangely, it sure did look pretty though.

Lets see how it performs.

Usage
Here is a pic I took with the GoPro.

As a digital camera… I was not all that impressed, It definitely won’t replace my Nikon Coolpix 2500, on account of the wide angle lens making pictures look stretched and out of wack.  It does have a timelapse function, where it can take 3 consecutive pictures, or you can set it to take pictures in 2 or 5 second intervals.  That could be neat for timelapse intros, but than again that is not its main purpose in life, it was built to take action footage.

Here is a video I took skiing at Bromley mountain.  Keep in mind that it was mostly cloudy and the top half of the mountain was pretty dense with fog, I’d guess that visibility was less than 50 yards.  The only editing I did was to chop me turning on and off the camera, and I encoded them to be bandwidth friendly.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here is a video I took on a nice sunny day, I started out on the roof of a parking garage and drove through the garage so you get some nice Light vs. Dark video shots.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Audio
So far I am unimpressed with the audio quality on the camera, in the parking garage video I was talking and playing the radio all at different volumes.  I had the camera audio set to Hi and it was suction cupped to the inside of the windshield less than a foot from my face.  Even on Hi audio the camera takes very poor quality audio, it seems to only capture bass and vibration noise.  I did some testing with the camera in the Lo setting and it was too quiet, It barely captured any audio at all.

Battery Power
The GoPro 5 uses 2 AAA batteries and the manual suggests using Lithium Ion for their weather durability.  I am still searching for some AAA Lithium Ion Rechargeables but am not having any luck, so for now my 600Mah Nickel Metal Hydride Rechargeables will have to do.  I did try using some regular Alkaline AAA batteries, but they were dead after about 20 minutes in the camera.

Conclusion
As you can see this camera really needs all the sunlight it can get, today’s low light conditions really brought the video quality down a few notches.  I had this camera mounted to my helmet via a sticky pad and it was rock solid on there.  I messed with the Hi/Lo audio settings a bit throughout the day and come to the conclusion that the Hi setting is pretty much going to be my default setting.  For what you get for a sub 200 dollar video camera is pretty outstanding.  I don’t plan on taking pictures with it, only video, and the audio quality isn’t really too much of a concern to me, I’ll probably just dub some music over it anyway.  I’m happy with it so far.

PS – If you look hard enough, you can find this camera on ebay for 150 dollars shipped.

First Impression
The size of the Asus N10J is really amazing, it has a smaller footprint then a manilla folder and weighs in at just a few pounds.
My system specs are:

• Atom N270 CPU
• 6 cell Lithium Ion Battery
• 10.2 inch WSVGA screen
• Nvidia 9300M GS 256MB
• Integrated Intel Graphics
• 320GB Harddrive
• 2GB of ram
• Vista BIZ for the OS
• 802.11N WiFi and Bluetooth

After using Vista for a week or so I was about ready to lose my mind.  Vista is utter garbage on this machine.  I don’t know what it is but the boot and shutdown times were ridiculous.  There were times when I would power up my machine and it would say, Loading, for 30 minutes or so.  I don’t think that is the N10J’s fault, I believe it to be Bill Gates fault.  I promptly went to my boss/network admin and told him I wanted to put XP on my machine.  He replied with a, No keep Vista, I replied with a, Nah I think I’ll put XP on instead, He further insisted I keep Vista, so I installed XP and dual boot into Vista when he’s around.  With XP on the N10J I’m happy as a clam, it really runs extremely well and I have not had a single crash yet.  Setting up the Native SATA driver was a bit of a hassle but with a little help from the folks over at N10User, I had it working in no time.

Battery Life
I’ll give the battery it’s own paragraph here because I’m really surprised at how long it lasts.  On this specific model I have the ability to turn off the 9300M video card and use the integrated Intel Graphics on the motherboard.  This is a great advantage and I have had this laptop on and running for 6 hours and still had about 30% juice left on it.

UPDATE
Someone mentioned they were glad I had some info about the battery life on this machine, so I figured I could go a bit more in depth, cause I’m awesome. For testing I charged the N10J up to 100%, unplugged it, powered it off and rebooted. I left it running for a bit then played around with it to find a screencasting program. Without further ado, here is the screencast showing current battery power after 2 hours of normal use on DC power.

UPDATE 2
I ran some Passmark Benchmarks at the request of a commenter.

HD Playback
The N10J comes equipped with a HDMI and SPDIF out to allow HD playback on an external device.  I did hook this up to my 42inch 720P Panasonic Plasma, but was not very impressed with the quality.  I may just be spoiled but my ATI3870->HDMI->Plasma kicks the pants off the N10J.  The HD vids look great on the tiny screen though, and they run very smooth after a bit of tweaking and offloading to the 9300M GS.

Actual Daily Use
So far this netbook has really performed well for me, much better than the twice the size toshiba.  I do alot of firmware updating and schematic reading for the machines I service.  PDF reading on this netbook is a little on the tough side, you will definitely will have to use the zoom in/out feature and alot of scrolling, but it’s nothing that will deter me from enjoying the rest of the N10J.  The absence of a DVD drive can be annoying at times, but there’s not too much you can’t accomplish with a bootable usb stick.  My machine also came equipped with a webcam installed in the lid and a fingerprint scanner, both of which I use rarely if at all.

Gaming
The N10J is not designed as a gaming machine but I have installed a few games and am pretty happy with how it performs.
So far I have installed:

• Need for speed Most Wanted -  Runs excellent with settings on medium to full.
• Need for Speed Carbon – Same as MW, runs great on medium settings.
• Codemasters DiRT – Could not get this to run well at all, at minimum res with settings on low I was pulling maybe 15FPS.
• NHL 2009 – Runs great on
• Syberia – Older game, but it runs just fine.
• Diablo II – The classic diablo, runs fine.
• GTAIII and Vice City – Very playable at medium settings on both games.
• Call of Duty 4 – This game requires a few tweaks, but there is a modified config file (Yitch3), out there that make it run at over 50FPS.

Final Thoughts
I believe my company spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $800 USD on our new netbooks, but I have seen the same system with 1GB of ram and a 160GB HDD go for less than $400USD.  There are really only a few issues I have with the N10J… Vista is crap, buy it with XP installed if you can, the absence of a DVD drive, and the Native resolution of 1024×600.  I can understand why they would’nt include a DVD drive, it would be almost impossible to fit one in such a small platform, but the weird resolution is a bit strange.  I’m not sure I understand why they couldn’t just make it 1024×768 and be done with it.  Many programs today won’t run at less then 1024×768 and gaming takes a bit of tweaking to get them to look right.  Only thing I can figure is that they got a honey of a deal on 1024×600 screens.  I think if you’re using the N10J as a work/play laptop you’ll be more then happy, but there’s no doubt in my mind I would never be able to use this as my main system.

Hope this article helped you in your future purchases, and if you have any questions or feedback please leave a comment.