Hello Everyone!

I recently purchased a UL30VT from Amazon. I’m just going to give you my first impressions of the unit so far compared to the UL80VT right now, but I will be publishing a full fledged review of the UL30VT shortly. I would also be publishing a comparison article between the UL80VT and the UL30VT, which will include hands on pictures with the two laptops side by side and stacked up on each other.

My first impression of the UL30VT is that the chassis is very solid with no creaking noises coming from the palm rests, which was expected as the UL30VT has been placed in an entirely different chassis without the optical disc drive. The only complains that I have about build quality is that when I pick up the laptop I can feel the plastic on the bottom of the laptop bend in noticeably. If you squeeze, you will noticed the bottom plastic flex. I don’t think this would ever become an issue that would cause the laptop to break down so I wouldn’t worry about this. The keyboard has only extremely minimal flex and is certainly better than the UL80VT in this department. The screen is also very similar to the UL80VT in that it is bright but doesn’t have the best contrast ratios and suffers from a narrow viewing angle.

As far as the compenents inside, they are nearly identical to the UL80VT, but differ in that it included a 500 GB hard drive (compared to a 320 GB in the UL80VT), bluetooth (not inluded in UL80VT), and smaller battery compared to the UL80VT (you’ll get about 2 hours less with the UL30VT’s battery). I have also noticed that the UL30VT gets only slightly warm (the same way the UL80VT did). I have played games with it on my lap and it never got uncomfortably hot.

In terms of size, there is a noticeable difference in size between the UL30VT and the UL80VT, but it is minimal in my opinion. They are both very thin and light systems. If you need an optical drive and don’t mind risking getting  a creaky palm rest (that is fixable), I definitely recommend the UL80VT to you. If you don’t need a optical drive, I would most certainly recommend the UL30VT to you since it will provide you with the same performance in a noticeably smaller package with a give and take in features.

Oddly enough, so far I’ve had a number of driver issues with the UL30VT that have caused a number of games to crash and/or become non-responsive. I did not run into these issues with the UL80VT. I also was not able to update the drivers from Nvidia’s website because the Nvidia driver installation said that it could not detect any compatiable hardware. I ended up installing the drivers from the Asus support website but these also had some problems. The main game the drivers have had issues with is Left4Dead 2, which crashes the moment actually get into gameplay. This is just a bump in the road, however, and is certainly a fixable issue. You can expect identical gaming performance from the UL80VT and the UL30VT since it has the same hardware under the hood.

You can currently purchase the UL30VT on Amazon. I am not aware of any place else. Here is a link:

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