Asus P42F Notebook

The P42 from Asus deviates from the boring looks of business laptops. It has a glossy 14” LED backlit screen that produces vibrant and vivid visuals. Unfortunately, in a bright work environment the display is prone to glare and is a fingerprint magnet as well. As business laptops generally have anti-glare, aka matte finish screens so the use of a glossy screen is odd and should be considered before buying. The build quality of the laptop is sturdy and the brushed aluminum surface accentuates the elegant design.

The touchpad is accurate with the multi-touch working without any lag but the mouse keys require bit of an effort to press which may take some getting used to. The keyboard gives a nice and tactile feel with good key spacing and one useful feature is the palm proof technology which doesn't move the cursor when the palm accidentally brushes the touchpad while typing.

While the 2GB RAM does limit multi-tasking, the i3 processor helps cover up for it and provides with some snappy performance. The laptop scored 1331 3Dmark and 4769 PCmark in our benchmarks which makes it an average performer in the synthetic benchmarks. Office productivity and less graphic intensive applications run without a fuss. The bass and depth produced by the Altec Lansing speakers are commendable. In the battery mark test, the battery life topped out at 1:34 hours which is plain pathetic for a business laptop and is the biggest negative point for the notebook.

Bottomline: The P42f is a step in the right direction by Asus which just needs further refinement and tweaks to become a rival to the Lenovo Thinkpad series.