Asus X53U-SX181D Laptop (APU Dual Core/2 GB/320 GB/DOS)

I brought this laptop at a local store as flipkart doesnt ship laptops to my location. But as soon as i got home i was disappointed to learn that the c50 amd processor doesnt support windows xp, i tried installing linux and it didnt even support that.....so finally i had to settle for windows 7. The next pain in the a** thing was to connect my hp printer to this laptop as the driver installer for win7 just crashed and stopped working. After painstakingly searching for hours on hp support forums, got to know you need a patch for the amd processor to install the hp software.....got it configured in the end though. The AMD radeon graphics processor on this machine is a misnomer as it is being marketed by the stores as a graphics card but the fact is that it is not even a dedicated graphics processor but this laptop series has what AMD callls an Accelerated Processing Unit or APU wherein the graphics chip and processor is linked. The Usable RAM on this device is about 1.6 GB as the rest of the RAM is used up by the graphics chip. Now talking about the performance...i have installed office 2010 and it runs with a bit of lag....videos quality is ok....the processor is adequate for casual office computing only. I would say that its a better option to netbooks at 19k as it has a full size keyboard, awesome looks(looks better than dell laptops costing 40k), DVD drive.....AMD graphics chip. I would have opted for the pentium dual core laptop which is about the same price as this one as that would support windows XP and run it much faster, but it wasnt available in my city and i couldnt buy it from flipkart as they dont ship laptops to my city. Im planning to add a 2GB RAM in the hope of improved speed while running office etc. Haventt played any games on it yey...so no comments. PROS: Awesome Looks. DVD Drive. Priced slightly above netbooks. Integrated AMD graphics chip(dont confuse it with a graphicxs card) Full Size Keyboard. 15.6" screen. CONS: Just 1Ghz processor Doesnt run Windows XP. Problems for some swares/drivers with AMD Brazos Processor

I did not buy this from flipkart but thought of helping co-buyers with my review. ASUS delivers a great laptop for a great price. The built-quality is just what ASUS is famous for. I am happy that I now have a quality alternative to the crapy Dell and HP laptops. Usually laptop optical drives are not very good. ASUS takes care of this with a stellar DVD drive. Performance is great except of cource in core 3D games and 3D applications like AutoCAD. Otherwise its very good for MS Office, Internet, HD multimedia and all 2D applications. The best part of this laptop is that you can install XP using the drivers available here: http://www.laptopish.com/795/asus-k53u-xp-drivers/ The post says K53U but works just fine for X53U. I hope that this was helpful.