Asus - 15.6" Touch-Screen Laptop - Intel Core i3 - 4GB Memory - 500GB Hard Drive - Gray

Asus, in my experience, has been a phenomenal brand. When I purchased my first Asus laptop, I knew I was purchasing a quality product. I was blown away with how solid the construction and performance of it was. My mother needed a good laptop, but was on a tight budget. I am ultimately in charge of deciding what technology my household purchases and adopts. However, in this case, I decided to let my her find one that she felt suited her needs. I gave it my seal of approval and it was purchased. After looking around, and having found plenty of her primary, albeit cheaper choices out of stock, we began our quest for this one in red. She's enjoyed this laptop very much, as have I, thus this review is written with the intent of describing performance of her use, along with some of mine. Style so unique, everyone will take a second look. This laptop comes in two colours; white and red. Walking up to the laptop section of a Best Buy store, it immediately caught our eyes. Coloured laptops are especially rare, and while on the box it appears with a pink hue, I can assure you, this one is red. It's bound to pique a few people's curiosity, and often times people have wanted to get a closer look. The back keyboard keys compliment the red surroundings very well, making it look modern and unique. The circle ridges on the plastic cover help hide fingerprints well. Sound so loud, you can probably leave your speakers at home. My personal ASUS laptop was built to perform. Unfortunately, the sound wasn't as powerful as I had hoped. On this red laptop, however, the sound is phenomenal. ASUS included their SonicMaster technology. The sound is rich and accurate, and can get louder than on most laptops I've used. ASUS uses large speaker resonance chambers which help provide a wide frequency range and deeper bass. Anti-Glare Display with crisp picture. The display is crisp and vibrant. The viewing angles are a bit limited, so you won't have a semi-circle around your laptop when you're watching a movie, but for most uses it's an acceptable range. It doesn't feature a touch display. Asus includes a suite of technology called Splendid which adjusts the display's contrast and colour saturation. This gives a much better experience when watching movies, for example. Keyboard. This laptop features a full-size keyboard and number pad. They keys are island-style. They keyboard if very comfortable to type on. The keys are perfectly spaced and prevent key float. Touch-pad Usually when I review, I like to include the Touch-pad in the keyboard, however since many of the negative review feature the touch-pad, I decided to separate it. Part of the learning curve on this laptop, aside from Windows 8, is the touch-pad. It's a multi-touch gesture-enabled touch-pad. It's designed to make using Windows 8 easier. You'll want to configure the Smart-Gesture software to suit your needs. I suspect many people are having trouble in this area. Using multiple fingers and/or swiping from different areas bring up menus or options. Once you get used to multi-touch gestures, you won't be able to live without them, but learning them can be a little frustrating if you're not a quick learner. Fortunately you can turn off and reassign most gestures. Ports, Jacks, In or Out; You're covered. The left side is busy on this laptop, It has the only two USB ports (you may want to consider buying a USB Hub) one of which is a blue 3.0 and the other 2.0. You also have the HDMI port, which works wonderfully to connect your laptop to your TV or projector, as well as VGA to connect to an external monitor or projector. This computer features a combination headphone and microphone jack, Ethernet port, and the fan left. The Ethernet adapter has an interesting design, it's similar to a clip to allow the laptop to be thinner, it works nicely though. On the right, you have a Kensington lock slot, and a media card reader sits on the front. Networking, to move around or not to move around. The laptop comes with a Qualcomm Atheros AR9485 Wireless Adapter compatible with Wireless B/G/N. Up to 150Mbps on Wireless N. This adapter has great reach, where my non-ASUS laptops say 3-4 bars @<60Mbps, both my ASUS devices have 5 bars @>60Mbps. It also features a Realtek Gigabit Ethernet adapter. Battery Life is average with no notable differences. The 4-Cell battery, will give you about 3-5 hours of battery life, depending on what settings you have enabled. I average about 4 hours. Webcam As with most integrated Webcams, they're not meant to be for photo-shoots. The .9 mega-pixel camera is noisy, but en par with most webcams, and front facing cameras. It's great for video conferencing, but you'll probably want to stick with your phone for most of your self portraits. Configuration With a 1.8 GHz dual-core Intel i3-3217U processor, along with the Intel HD 4000, chip you won't be winning any benchmarks, nor playing the latest and greatest PC game. (I'll be explicitly clear, this laptop is NOT designed to be a gaming laptop, up your budget at least another $200-400 for that.) 4GB of RAM ensures you'll have solid performance under a moderate load. Windows 8 boots up quickly in about 15-20 seconds. 500GB gives you enough space so you can keep all your documents, pictures, software, music, etc. with you on the go. Asus's IceCool technology keeps the laptop cool under pressure. Unless you're pushing the hardware to it's max (like trying to render a Full HD video in video editing software -- which this is not the computer for) it'll do a great job at keeping the device cool, especially if you're using active cooling rather than passive. Bundled Software This laptop's bundled software is pretty minimal. Asus includes their own utilities, which I recommend you keep to take full advantage of what your laptop has to offer. (Especially the Smart-Gesture utility, the Maxx Audio, the Splendid Suite, and the ASUS Install utilities.) Also ensure you allow Windows Update to complete all updates and upgrade to Windows 8.1 ASAP. You also have a 30-day trial of Office 365, Kindle app, Netflix app, Music Maker jam, Fresh Paint app, some Microsoft Apps, and WildTangent games. Multi-Language Support Unlike many other laptop brands, ASUS has included various language options in their OEM software. When you set it up, you can choose the language appropriate to your use.

I don’t write reviews that often but felt the need to from reading the bad ones. Not sure why people are complaining so much about this notebook. It’s worked flawlessly for me. I’d recommend it for anyone looking to get a new budget friendly entry/mid-level notebook. Just had a friend purchase one due to my recommendation. You can’t beat it for the price. I come from 20 years in the IT industry and do research before buying any product. The unit is thin and fairly light. Its only crutch is the 5400RPM Hard Drive. However, overall speed (mainly boot time) is increased with the Windows8.1 update. So make sure you perform all updates as soon as you can. If you really want to solve any speed issues swap out the stock Hard Drive for an SSD Hard Drive. I just did this and it’s worth the cost. At least consider it at least in the first 6 months of ownership. I also purchased a wireless mouse. Would have gone with the external Logitech T650 touchpad but plan on moving over to Linux and due to lack of the driver did not. Steps taken: • Performed all Windows updates. Continue scanning, performing and rebooting until all Windows updates have been done and there are no more (took about 3.5hr to perform on a 50Mbit download connection). • Proceeded to the Windows Store and installed the Windows8.1 (3.7GB - took another 1.5hr). • Checked and performed any additional Windows updates until there were no more to be done. • De-installed all unnecessary applications (aka Bloat ware) that wouldn’t be used (do not un-install WinFlash). Reboot as necessary. • De-installed Norton anti-virus trial and installed the free AV of my choice (Avast). • (Optional) Updated BIOS by downloading the latest version from the ASUS website and then used WinFlash. Unit came with version 215. Latest available on the ASUS Support website is version 217. • Installed several other applications as needed. • Migrated from stock 500GB Hard Drive to a 250GB SSD drive. Steps used: De-installed 500GB drive from inside unit and placed in external USB dock. Installed 250GB SSD drive inside unit. Used drive imaging software (Paragon Hard Disk Manager) to create a bootable USB thumb drive with the needed applications. Hooked up 500GB in USB dock to USB 3.0 (blue) port and booted to the bootable USB thumb drive in the USB 2.0 (black) port. Performed drive copy from original drive to new drive (this will move over all partitions including the restore partition). After this completed, rebooted the system and all came up fine. Additional input: The stock hard drive in my unit is an HGST 500GB 5400RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s drive so it has a SATA III (6.0Gb/s) interface and is backwards compatible. For memory (RAM) there is an open slot (next to the hard drive) under the bottom cover that is empty. So the installed memory is either on the system board or in another slot under the main bottom chassis cover. I have not removed that cover so I’m not sure. You should be able to drop in a 4GB or 8GB RAM stick to bring it up to 8/12GB respectively. I couldn’t get a good read on the speed of the memory but believe you’d use a 204 pin DDR3 SO-DIMM – DDR3 1600 (PC3-12800) for the addition. System resources show used memory at 24% / 1GB out of 4GB. So right now I don’t feel the need to upgrade this. The wireless network adapter is a Qualcomm Atheros AR9485 (1x1) 802.11 b/g/n. It will only operate on the 2.4GHz channel and it’s supposed to have a max connection speed of 150Mbit. I’m running a NetGear WNDR3700v3 802.11n Dual Band Gigabit(2.4GHz/5GHz) router flashed with DD-WRT and cannot get the wireless connection to go above 72.2Mbit on the laptop even after making any needed adjustments in the router config. This is probably an isolated issue on the router side and is not a deal breaker as I tested it on a Trendnet 802.11n router and was getting a 150Mbit connection. The onboard gigabit LAN connection screams. When doing a file transfer test on the home gigabit network from server to the laptop it sustained 113MB/s and a 4.5GB file transfer took 39 seconds. The onboard USB 3.0 connection is even faster. When doing a file transfer test on and external USB 3.0 hard drive from the drive to the laptop it sustained 160MB/s and a 4.5GB file transfer took 26 seconds. Battery life is ok but that can be expected from a 4-cell battery. After migrating to the SSD the battery life increased. The processor seems to run cool and the unit does not get hot when sitting on your lap. The external AC adapter is not large or bulky. The old 500GB drive that came out of the unit can now be put in an external USB carrier and used for file backups, etc. Sound quality from the internal speakers is fair.

I've had this laptop for a week, and I have to say no complaints from me! Most of what I've seen in terms of bad reviews have to do with windows updates, which is an issue with Microsoft and not the laptop itself. The other reviews I've seen talk about the limited RAM size of the laptop (RAM= Random Access Memory. Basically upgrading this allows your computer to handle more programs at once, and to process faster). I gotta tell you, it takes 2.5 seconds to upgrade this thing! A monkey could do it, it's that easy. This laptop is inexpensive for a reason. Laptop producers like to charge huge amounts of money for RAM space, and because this one has less RAM it is less pricey. Easy solution is easy: buy a RAM card. It is super inexpensive to upgrade RAM. A four gig will run you around $50 and an eight gig comes in at around $80. And the best part, you can put it in this laptop yourself for free. On the bottom of this laptop there is a rectangular compartment with two screws. Unscrew the screws and push the rectangular compartment down until it clicks and remove it. Inside the compartment there is a small rectangular opening that's about 4 inches long. Take your laptop sized RAM card and insert it into the opening, making sure that the small slot on your RAM card fits into the matching tab in the opening. Push until the RAM card is flush with the back of the opening. Then push down on the bottom edge of your RAM card until it clicks into place. And voila! Super convenient RAM upgrade! Unfortunately you cannot remove the 4gigs of RAM that the laptop originally comes with, so there's only one slot to add a RAM card. What ever size RAM card you put into the slot just adds on to the 4gigs that are already there. So if you add a four gig card, the laptop will then have eight gigs of RAM and so on. You don't need to do anything else to access the RAM, the laptop will do it auto-magically. By itself, I'd rate this laptop a four stars for its price point. But after I shoved an eight gig RAM card in there, it definitely jumped up to a five! My advice? Buy a RAM card. You can do it with your next pay check if it's easier for your wallet. Also, check out my awesome video review!

I purchased this laptop for my father. He is not a power user, so this will last him 5+ years easily. In the box you get the laptop, power adapter (small wall wart type), and short quick start guide (that basically just tells you to turn on the laptop). The laptop battery was almost completely drained out of the box, which was a bit alarming as they usually have at least a 20% charge (usually closer to 50%). I feel like a screen cloth would have been a nice add-on. The power adapter isn't as robust as I would like it to be, I have a feeling the cord may slice or fray easily, and the plastic casing doesn't seem like it would hold up to too many drops or blows, so pack it away carefully when traveling. The size and weight of the laptop is ok for using around the house. While it is not ultra portable, it would not be too much of a pain for traveling, though there are better choice laptops for that. It is not quite a desktop replacement, though it does seem bigger than some 15" laptops I have used over the years. It seems very sturdy and looks great. The grey is appealing and the texture of the laptop body itself has a good feel. The next best thing to aluminum casings. The screen is bright and vibrant. The touch screen is a nice touch (haha). Though fingerprints do show pretty well, especially with the brightness down; thus, screen cloth would have been a nice add-on. From what I gather of Windows 8, a touch screen seems almost necessary. It comes with a Intel i3 (Haswell I believe) processor, 4GB ram and a 500gb hdd. The i3 is powerful enough for most common tasks, but do not expect to do too much gaming or easily handle large tasks if you are a power user. There is a similar spec version of this laptop with a Pentium in it for $50 less, I think the extra $50 is well worth the upgrade to an i3, it will be able to handle more tasks in the future, and is much better at multitasking and power management. 8GB of ram would have made this thing future proof for the next few years, I will probably end up putting in more down the line. The 500GB hdd seems snappy enough, I did not notice a huge waiting time for the computer to power on. Swapping out for an SSD or SSHD will help make things snappier, a possible future improvement as well. The battery life is decent if you turn the brightness down some. It will last you a few hours easily. The keyboard and trackpad are responsive and have a nice feel to them. There are better ones out there in much more expensive laptops, however, for the price range of this laptop (<$500), you would be hard pressed to find something better. Out of the box, it has Windows 8 on it, but luckily Windows 8.1 is a free upgrade. However, expect to leave it on overnight to download and install the many updates required before you can install 8.1. I am not a fan of Windows 8, but that is not a fault of the laptop itself. Conclusion: Overall, this is a pretty decent laptop, and you would be very hard pressed to find a better one for the price range. Similar spec laptops in this price range often do not include the touch screen (which is very nice to have with Windows 8). I think with a boost in ram in the next 2 years or so, this machine should last you anywhere in the 4-6 year range. If you are a power user or gamer, then go for something more powerful with a quad core and dedicated graphics. However, for the majority of people, this laptop will be more than enough. Also, do not skimp and go for the pentium version for $50 less, you will regret it in the next few years. I am a power user, so this would not be enough for me, but for my father, this is perfect. This is great for students (non-engineering/technology majors), small offices, and the average user.

I purchased this laptop after reading several of the reviews praising the how well the computer performed. One individual went into much detail explaining in how he did the windows updates and then the Win 8.1 upgrade. All went well for me except that the fingerpad/trackpad became extra sensitive after the upgrade to 8.1. It became so sensitive that I was ready to return the computer for something else. I did some google searching to see if others had experienced the same problem and what could be done to resolve the issues. Specifically, what was happening was that the finger gestures were triggering something on the screen not even near the cursor. It was so sporadic and not allowing me to get anything done and was driving me crazy. I did find that quite a few people were having the same problem after upgrading to Win 8.1 with no reported success from Asus to get it resolved. I did find one person that indicated he resolved his problem by uninstalling the Asus Smart Gesture Driver and rebooting. Then downloading the old version Asus Smart Gesture Driver 2.2.0. So I tried this and now I am a happy camper. I did try version 2.2.5 and same problem so back to 2.2.0 I went. The boot time did speed up after upgrading to Windows 8.1 and so far the computer seems fairly fast. I did load Google Chrome and have a much better browsing experience than with IE. I get approximately 4 hours life out of a full charge on the batteries. If I had not resolved the fingerpad issue, I would not have kept the laptop. Now I am satisfied and would recommend it to anyone willing to put forth the effort to correct the fingerpad problem after upgrading to 8.1. I do see some of the other reviewers indicating the same problems with fingerpad so hopefully this will help them too.

I bought this laptop on Saturday, March 29th. I was happy with my purchase for the most part, aside from the fact that right off the bat i needed to install 91 important updates... but whatever. That wasn't a big deal. It took most of the night but I was still able to play around with the computer, so I wasn't too concerned. After installing the updates and upgrading to Windows 8.1, I got to really play around with the laptop. It's got great sound, the graphics are exceptional, but it can be a bit laggy at times. It ran Sims 3 relatively well at least. Overall, this was a big upgrade from the (different, more expensive brand) laptop I purchased 3 years ago. However, and I'm going to hope that this experience is one in a million, after 4 days of little to moderate usage, I got an error saying that Windows had detected a problem with my hard drive and I needed to back up my information and replace my hard disk. I ran a disk check thru the Command Prompt and used Defraggler to see what was up, and indeed, my hard drive in my brand new laptop was failing. I was severely disappointed to say the least. So today I took it back to the Best Buy store I purchased it from and exchanged it. I was going to go with a different brand, but the laptops in my price range were all out of stock, so I'm giving this laptop another shot. Really hoping I don't get disappointed again, there's a lot of things I really like about this laptop and I'd hate to have to take it back a second time.

So, this is a laptop I purchased that originally wasn't going to be. After not having the model that I wanted of another brand, I finally settled on getting this one and I really don't regret the purchase! This is a very nice sized laptop, but is not too bulky or heavy as my previous ones. Full sized keyboard, HDMI, a working webcam. There are a lot of really neat features on this computer, especially for the price. It's got a beautiful display, and I have to say that while it can be sensitive, the touch-screen on this thing is really awesome. Makes it all feel really high tech... again, for a low price. I am an artist, and typically use this laptop for hours on end with multiple programs up at a time, so this thing can really handle a lot going on, especially some of the larger ones that take up more memory. This is a big plus for me. There's a bit of pre-installed software that I could honestly do without, but it's easy to remove. Now the only drawbacks of this computer are te sensitivity of the little menu bars on all sides of the screen. Should I accidentally move my mouse too far to the side, the menu slides over and gets in my way. But this is usually easy to avoid. The real trouble with with the touchpad. The touchpad works, and does a few cool things that I haven't seen a touchpad do before... but I can't say I care for how easy it is to accidentally do something you don't want to do (and then not know what you did or how to undo it), and it's a bit of a pain to click as it's just one solid square of plastic. All in all, though, this is a fantastic computer and I am very much in love with it.

Couldn't beat the $319 Deal of the Day price for the specs on this laptop. It streams Netflix, Hulu and YouTube video without a hiccup. I wanted a portable backup computer to supplement my old WinXP/Ubuntu Desktop. It recognized my HP 1315 PSC printer and found the correct driver online. Install was fine. Couldn't stand the metro tiles, so installed Classic Shell and all was well. I was able to find all the System, Control Panel and "My Computer" stuff without a hitch. I did some light photo/video editing to test the machine, and it is soooooooooo much faster than my old computer. Asus Smart Gestures allows you to adjust the touch pad and customize how you use it. Even with adjustments, it has slowed down my typical 60+ wpm typing speed a bit. You'll have to adjust your finger/palm placement for the touchiness of the touch pad. The Win 8.1 update took 5.5 hours from download to install, but over ethernet it installed w/out problems. It did somehow uninstall the McAfee trial that came with the computer. I used an AVG trial for a quick fix. You can make your recovery "disk" with a jump drive pretty easily. Make sure you do this and image this thing after your 8.1 update. I'll add more RAM if I need to later. I've had it almost 3 weeks...so far, mostly so good! CAVEAT TO RECOMMENDING TO A FRIEND: This is NO GAMING laptop. Buy this only if you need a light weight Windows-based laptop. Otherwise, 1) if you mainly do FB, Facebook games, e-mail and web browsing or 2) use a Chrome browser and are Google-based: get the Asus Chromebox for $179. I'd also recommend my mom's lightning fast Chromebook that totally rocks for $200!