ASUS Ultrabooks

What You Need to Know About Asus Ultrabook Computers

Asus is among the most well-respected names in computer manufacturing. Asus Ultrabooks include a range of laptops that are designed to be sleek and lightweight enough to compete with the portability of netbooks and tablets, but with the full power and storage capacity of a laptop computer.

It is a high-end laptop that is designed to be as small, light-weight, and portable as possible. Manufacturers accomplish this with smaller components and by excluding features that are usually unnecessary.

Intel established the Ultrabook category. To qualify, a laptop must meet their patented standards. Some manufacturers opt to make them even more impressive. Asus' ZenBook 3 is less than half an inch thick, and it weighs two pounds. It has a 4.0 MHz i7 Intel processor, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD drive, and ships with Windows 10. In fact, the Asus ZenBook 3 and ZenBook UX310 are on Tech Radar's top ten Ultrabooks list for 2018.

Intel's basic requirements are:

• With up to a 13.3-inch display, the laptop must be less than 0.7 inches thick.
• With a larger display, the laptop must be less than 0.8 inches thick.
• With a touch-screen, its thickness can be up to 0.9 inches.
• It must have an Intel ULV, low-power processor.
• Battery life of at least five hours is required.
• Resume from hibernation must be less than seven seconds.
• SSD or HDD must be combined with SSD, with a transfer rate of at least 80MB/s.
• It must have at least one USB 3.0 port.

Really, nothing. It has the power of bulkier laptops. You rarely need a CD or DVD drive, if ever. If you occasionally do, you can plug one in through a USB port. It uses SSD storage rather than a mechanical hard drive, for size and for improvements in reliability, speed, and noise. The keyboard is often shallower than that on a standard laptop, but many do have nice keyboards. Very often, the keyboard is backlit, which would be an added expense on a standard laptop. The Intel ULV platform includes integrated graphics, so there are fewer options for high-performance gamers, graphic artists, filmmakers, and photographers, but the size reduction is impressive and useful, and Ultrabooks are certainly performance machines. Batteries are usually not removable.

That depends. Your core processor, RAM, battery life, and portability needs all depend upon your intended uses. Asus offers the ZenBook and VivoBook lines of Ultrabooks, each with a wide range of options.

• Travel
• Business
• Writing
• Web research
• Anything for which portability would be beneficial