Beholding The Ultimate Force

Terrible Photo of ASUS TUF FA507RC A15 Gaming Laptop.

It's very rare that I get an opportunity to talk about something good in my life and, after some of recent events in the last few months, I think it would be right to highlight this optimistic anomaly. As I've mentioned in July 2023 Update, I've recently witnessed another coma of my old Lenovo G505s laptop. It is during these few days when one of my good friends decided to express his generosity by offering to buy a new laptop. He actually suggested that before, but I just laughed it off to myself and forgot about this.

When this suggestion was brought up as I was talking to my friends how problematic my situation at the time was, I agreed to give it a try. We both looked into Microless as an option (he called them and I read what people in my country had to say about it). Everything seemed good, so I send over all the information he needed to make an order, and we just had to wait. My only hope was that it would have more than 4GB of RAM and Wi-Fi support: I didn't feel like I had any right to actually ask for anything rather than a bare minimum. There was also some worry about the duty-free importation and stuff.

Anyway, it seemed like there was a reliable way ahead of us. And so, after twelve days of waiting for mysterious package, a courier delivered to me (I thought I would have to pick it up myself) what turned out to be ASUS TUF FA507RC A15 Gaming Laptop. He did mention that laptop would have 16GB of RAM and 512 GB SSD, which was already more than I could've dreamed of. Imagine how stunned I was once I realized what kind of device I ended up getting... That is pretty much what this "article" is all about.

Common Notes.

As someone who spend many years with Windows 10 and appreciated some of its features, I didn't really care about its successor. However, switching over to my new laptop meant becoming a user of Windows 11 Home and bid farewell to Windows 10 Pro. To be specific, I have Windows 11 Home Single Language version and I think that's the first time I've heard about something like this. I already thought about switching over to English version of operating system, so I suppose that worked out in my favor.

Initially I had suspicion that Windows 11 would challenge me in all sorts of way, but moving over to this version of Windows ended up being pretty easy and quick. While I do still miss Tiles, I don't mind this version of Start menu all that much. This operating system as a whole gives off huge Android/mobile OS vibes (which does make sense, considering its origins) and this doesn't bother me nearly as much as I assumed it would. If anything, I suppose this made things more appealing for me since my ASUS MeMO Pad ME172V kind of made me biased towards ASUS positively.

On that note, I will say that Windows 11 version of File Explorer is kind of annoying because I can't use Delete key for, well, deleting multiple files at once: I have to use this odd context menu (or an actual Delete button in File Explorer) for that. I should probably look into enabling proper version of context menu by default, there has to be an option for that. Besides that, there's currently no annoyance I've experienced on that front... Actually, scratch that. This issue I was talking about in this paragraph seemingly fixed itself now. It does remind me to complain about how calendar doesn't show time with seconds though.

Going back to "laptop keyboard" is great since I sort of missed those. Mechanical keyboards are pretty awesome (especially the Corsair Strafe RGB MK.2 Silent I've been using), but I have a soft spot for laptop ones. The fact that this laptop has English/Arabic keyboard didn't matter at all: I still was able to easily select both English & Russian layouts and my mussle memory so far didn't prove the need for cheat sheet. I had to select United States layout since United Kingdom one has some strange symbol placement. Besides that, I guess I could only mildly complain about volume keys as they seem too sensitive, but that's probably just a matter of getting used to it or somehow adjusting them if possible.

There's nothing much I can say about my routine use of this laptop aside from it being perfect. Windows Security & Updates are shockingly fast. My Internet could still be improved as I believe we have only Wi-Fi 2.4 and could have Wi-Fi 5 enabled. The process might be annoying, I'm not so sure. Everything works fine as is though. Having Discord app installed is nice. Knowing that I can have updated drivers is pretty awesome. Still need to get more familiar with ARMOURY CRATE, MyASUS, GeForce Experience and other seemingly useful apps to see what I can do with them.

Gaming Notes.

Since I'm currently a proud owner of gaming laptop, I just have to talk about how video games run on it. There's basically nothing I can say on technical side of things as I'm just not educated on this front, so all I can say is "this is freaking insane". Every game I've checked so far didn't offer any challenges: all of them run perfectly:

• Stardew Valley.

• Ion Fury.

• Quake (Re-Release).

• Minecraft: Bedrock Edition.

• Heroes of the Storm.

• Ghostrunner (Demo).

I'm aware that vast majority of listed titles aren't exactly demanding (at least, in the eyes of general user), but realizing that all the ping issues and recent crashes in Heroes of the Storm were likely caused by aging hardware of Lenovo G505s. Not to mention that seeing Ghostrunner not just play, but run well was pretty satisfying as well. While I don't really have any "demanding games" in my digital libraries, I just have to start playing DOOM 16 in the near future. My previous plans were to finish perfecting Stardew Valley and start cheesing the rest of Terraria's achievements, but I can make some adjustments.

Not only have I played all those games, but I've also successfully streamed all of them to a small group of friends in private Discord server and there were no problems there either. There were no stutters on my front and the streams themselves reportedly ran incredibly. Just going from worrying about Stardew Valley overheating your machine to stream a game like Ghostrunner is mind-blowing, and I can't overstate how exhilarating it is.

Conclusion.

That's about it, for now. It's just the first week of my experience with ASUS TUF FA507RC A15 Gaming Laptop. There's still much I need to do, test and experience to proper familiarize myself with my current mechanical partner. Despite this, I'm feeling very confident in the future where this gaming laptop would prove itself in all sorts of things. In all honestly, that exact thought is both pretty exciting and kind of terrifying.

Getting such a huge upgrade means that there're some new opportunities open to me. The excuse of "oh, my laptop is old and weak" just don't work anymore for me, so I can't use such excuses to shut down random ideas in my mind. One way or the other, barrier of entry into future possibilities has been lowered for me and that's something I would have to really grapple with for some time. Well, I suppose we will see where it's going to lead me.

Okay, I don't want to leave this "article" on an ambiguous and/or somber notes. This is a happy moment to cherish me, after all. You know, that feeling of "excited child" you really want to savor, especially as you're getting older and those moments strike you as a pleasant surprise when they do occur. I think we all can agree that those are magical moments. What makes it even better is another reminder that I'm surrounded by great friends. Even though many of them are from different cities and countries, they're very close and having each other's backs in all sorts of ways. Now that is truly awesome.