Great Laptop with Worst HDD. Do not buy it if you don't know how to install a NVME M.2 SSD. its super easy. Just have to remove the back cover and there is available free slot for it. I bought a Samsung EVO 970 250GB @ $79.99 only and added it and reinstall the OS to the SSD. Boot time now less than 5 sec. Check the performance screenshot. Very happy with the performance now. Best laptop ever, with lowest price. You can keep the 2GB HDD as the 2nd HDD for storage.

This laptop is awesome when it comes to running games. I play city simulator games as well as Sims 4 and my HP laptop didn’t handle them well. This one handles them perfectly. Plus it’s lightweight and then.

When I first bought this laptop the updates took a long time. I was out of town on slow wifi so i dismissed it. After I got home on my home network it was still updating. Way too slow. I figured after the updates, all would be well. Nope. Startup and operation were SLOW. Minimal info on the ASUS website as to what upgrade options are left me uncertain but I cracked the case open and saw the M.2 SSD slot. There is MINIMAL information online if this is possible to upgrade to. I took a chance and got a Samsung 970 EVO nvme m.2 500GB drive and installed it. ASUS should never degrade their brand image but putting such a slow HHD in any system. The new samsung v-nand SSD reduced boot time from 1:20 sec to 5 SECONDS! If you bought one of these with the 2 TB drive, do yourself a favor and GET A SSD

This is not the best laptop at this price, however 16 GB RAM and i7 make this machine very powerful. HDD with 5200 rpm causes the laptop to perform poorly and most of the times the disk utilization is at 100%, when you are doing some I/O intensive task. Be aware, initial Windows 10 update will take around 10-14 hrs and laptop would be too slow during this time. Touchscreen is good and responsive. Some strange issue with Wi-Fi connectivity, when it's unable to find any network. Faced this almost 4-5 times in a month. Googled it, and this appears to be due to Windows 10. No back-lit keyboard. Battery - charge lasts for around 5-6 Hours so far, which is not great but works for me. The best part is, smaller charger which resembles Cell phone charger. Easy to carry. Overall, a nice laptop.

I am writing this review after using this laptop for more than two months. I was planning to purchase new laptop as my old laptop which was Dell XPS L502X which I purchased in 2011 has become very slow . After searching online and going through all option I decided to go for Asus this time instead of Dell. I checked Best Buy and decided to buy Asus Q525UA , going through all the review customer had posted here about this laptop being slow and having 2 TB Sata HDD and no SSD . I would like to share the steps I did from beginning. I started the laptop and without installing antivirus I installed windows critical update so the load on HDD will be less and trust me that works wonder as my system boot time is 7 seconds and that is without any SSD . Touch screen is really nice and sound of this system is awesome. I am using MS office ,Adobe photoshop with Chrome for browsing and multi tasking is very smooth.I get battery life of around 7 hours. Backlight keyboard is also nice and bright. This laptop is really nice after using Dell for long time I switched to Asus and I am happy with my purchase .