ASUS ZENBOOK U500VZ review in half a year

In pursuit of profit and in the face of fierce competition, giant companies launch new products every few months, delighting us with new technologies and transcendental capacities. All of them look very attractive in graphs and processed photos, but how does this race affect the quality of the devices and the service life?


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In January 2013, I purchased the ASUS ZENBOOK U500, an ultrabook at the time, which is practically the top one - a sleek metal case, a large and high-quality FullHD IPS screen, a very powerful Core i7 Ivy Bridge with four “valves”, SSD + HDD, GeForce GT650M, and about such pleasant things as a full-size keyboard with add. digital block, long battery life and do not want to remember.

What can I say - the embodiment of a dream, the outside satisfies aesthetic delights, and inside completely covers my needs as a software developer. The final touches were the expansion of RAM in a single slot and the installation of a second 256-GB SSD Plextor M5 Pro instead of a noisy HDD.

The next pleasant step was the quick installation of Ubuntu 12.10 and its tuning, of course, was not without troubles, some of which were solved by installing a newer kernel. But I had to give up on adjusting the brightness of the screen with standard keys in favor of a special script that was executed when pressing the suitable combinations (it’s good to be a programmer) and didn’t make the touchpad responsive, so I had to get a USB / Bluetooth mouse, despite the fact that my main tools are console and vim.



In the process of daily work, I repeatedly encountered atypical noise of the cooling system, when one of the coolers suddenly began to pop and seemed to beat against the bottom aluminum cover, creating frightening vibrations. Unplanned shutdown and anxious waiting usually solved this problem by searching the Internet, I found a lot of people suffering from this problem. Despite the fact that I carefully wore a laptop only in a branded bag, its case was covered with patterns of amusing scratches that even a Macbook Pro would envy, and due to the strong contrast of the color of the cover and scratches, they stood out significantly compared to the same MP. But all this seemed to me insignificant trifles.

A week ago, when I left work and closed the lid of the laptop, I pulled out the power plug from the connector in the laptop and from there a small round plastic flew out, which I couldn’t shove back, and the laptop completely stopped turning on. Stuck the plug back into the connector, I heard a low-frequency squeak in the power supply. The next day I took it to the official ASUS service center in Kiev, where they explained to me that the sound in the power supply is “protection mode”. Signing the receipt, gave it to the diagnosis. Frankly, it was nice to go on an unplanned weekly vacation. While lying, to be without the results of their work for an indefinite time, to substitute people in time, frantically search for a replacement - you do not wish a good person. The result of the diagnostics was information about the broken power connector (Wow! I indicated this fact in the column “cause”), for which repair it is necessary to replace the entire motherboard, the repair itself was declared non-warranty and offered me to take it back. Just like that.

What do you think, will I buy anything else from this manufacturer?

ps
Constantly reading Habr, I have repeatedly encountered complaints about various modern equipment, even if my modest post will lie in the treasury of collective knowledge and help someone decide when choosing a brand.