Customer Ratings & Reviews

Best size, operator friendly, fast, and very light.

This computer is very fast compared to our old one.

I finally had to breakdown and purchase,a laptop for my new job And I co uldnt be more pleased with my purchase. Jay sold more on this one and he knows hos stuff. Thank you for helping me,navigate the maze of through the maze of laptop choices. Excellent customer service!!

I bought this computer on sale for less than five hundred dollars and have been using it for about a month and a half. The speakers are okay but am surprised how it handles files. For a student, this computer has enough power to do the job and for the price, though to find a better deal.

I am a full time college student, and chose this laptop for the brand name and parameters it offered, as well as the price and the lightweight aspect of it. My textbooks are heavy enough without adding a bulky laptop to my backpack. It runs great and does everything I need it to!

This laptop is functional as the speedy and multifunctional one with its 128 GB internal SSD Hard Drive, which might enable multifunctional and speedy work. For those who write the paper by analyzing data, this might be a good laptop compared to its relatively cheap price.

BACKGROUND: I have a Dell XPS 15. 1TB SSD, quadcore i7. As much as I love it, it was annoying to lug that thing around to work, school (grad student), and back home. Plus, the battery life actually sucked. So I was looking for a new lightweight laptop with good performance and still would get the job done. I also was trying to spend $400 or less. I found it on Bestbuy for openbox geeksquad certified for $389!!!!! What a steal. I needed a laptop for simple web browsing, media, word processing, the occasional photo editing, and superlight steam games. I’ve had this for two weeks now. Here's the breakdown on what I thought of this laptop. THE GOOD THINGS: + Lightweight: this thing is a perfect "ultrabook" type size and weight without the ultrabook price. Its not the thinnest ever, but it is thin and light enough to not be too noticeable in a backpack full of other notebooks and folders. For students and people constantly needing to travel or carry around a laptop, its perfect + Keyboard: I LOVE the keyboard on this. It has a good layout (except for the one thing youll read later in this segment). The travel on it feels extra satisfying and the keys bounce nicely and dont feel like your fingers are typing on rocks (*cough* butterfly keyboards on macs*). Plus its backlit with 3 different levels of lighting. Its odd the specs say the keyboard is NOT backlit but it definitely IS. This laptop has a “rising hinge” that elevates the laptop about 3 degrees. Its supposed to be for better ergonomics, but honestly I dont feel a difference. It helps with cooling though so thats a nice plus. The biggest and only gripe I have with the keyboard is the placement of the power button. Why put it right where I expect the DELETE key to be????? If you use CTRL+ALT+DEL a lot, or use the DEL key a lot in general like I do…..this is annoying. You may end up turning your laptop off midway through a work session. Put the power button somewhere less intrusive please ASUS. + Performance: 8th gen quad core i5. At around $400, you really cant find anything better than that. It only boosts to 1.8ghz unfortunately (wouldve been nice to see 2.4+), but you really cant complain at this price point. + 8 GB ram: When it comes to light gaming (3d minigolf games) and photo-editing, I have to close everything else. With my Dell, I have 16gb of ram and I never have to close anything to keep performance up. With 8gb, to maximize my photo editing, I have to close most chrometabs (less than 5) and maybe leave one for music. However, this goes down as a positive for this laptop because 8gb of ram is just fine for pretty much any basic task. Knowing what youre going to use the laptop is a very key thing to think about before you buy it. If youre just using the laptop for schoolwork/movies/occasional single heavy task, 8gb is just right for this price range. WAYYY better than useless 4gb. So if you want to be photo/video-editing, word processing, playing music, and have 10 chrome tabs open all at the same time....you might wanna spend more. I dont know if you can upgrade the ram on this thing, but if I can, I might try to go up to 12 if I can. I dont think the ram is upgradable though, which is a bit of a shame. + 128gb SSD: fast startup and decent read/write speeds. Its not PCIe NVme, its SATA 3 M.2. For the less tech-savvy, that just means its not as fast as it could be. But any SSD >> HDD everyday. Im not going to be doing crazy file transfers very often, nor am I going to be putting a ton of files on this. ALERT: 128GB IS NOT A LOT OF SPACE. Please know this before buying. I just needed to have enough storage to do windows updates and store a casual amount of files, a few pictures and videos from my phone or gopro. If you need more storage, obviously this is not for you. However, you can always plug in a 128gb microSD card to double the storage, so thats nice. I have done that myself already. + Wifi: One thing to be very careful in looking for in a “budget” laptop? Make sure the laptops wifi card is AC capable! This one is thankfully. OTHER THINGS TO NOTE: - ***The screen***: So a many critcial reviews for this laptop say the screen is the worst thing ever. First of all, Id like to make this very clear. The screen is NOT BAD whatsoever. In fact. For this price point, the screen is actually fantastic. I will never understand people who think that way. You spent under $500 for a laptop....why are you expecting an ultra HD 4k OLED 144hz touchscreen????? The fact this laptop has full hd (1920x1080) and not the crappy HD (1366x768) is a blessing. At this price range, its actually completely surprising and amazing that this laptop is full HD. The BEZELS are the best thing about the screen! Coming from my Dell XPS, Ive been spoiled with thin bezels, and I cant look at bigger bezeled laptops anymore without cringing. Love these thin bezels. Like someone else pointed out though, this is a TN panel screen, and not an IPS display. I did not know, see, or read that anywhere in the description of this laptop I could find. What this means (for those who dont know) is that the viewing angles are not ideal if youre not looking straight on the screen. Once you start offshifting your perspective, the colors get distorted its look ugly. However, as Ive said a bunch of times before, you have to adjust your expectations for this price point. Youre getting FULL HD resolution! At 14” size, that means great sharpness and zero blurriness or pixelation. No the viewing angles are the best, but how often are you looking at your laptop from off axis? At under $500, Im very much okay with less than impressive viewing angles for great resolution + thin bezels. - I/O or port selection: Now this point Im making here is not that the I/O is bad, its just not very good. Theres a good selection of ports, they just arent the ones you really should be getting in 2019. I couldnt read or find anywhere if the USB-C port on this laptop was thunderbolt 3. This led me to assume that it wasnt, and I was sad to find out that, surprise surprise, it is not. It is just a simple USB 3.1 type-C port. Which means you cant use the port to charge, connect to external displays, or use for any sort of peripheral that does more than connect to a USB hub. Now while I’m thankful for the two USB 2.0 ports, the fact that neither of them are the blue USB 3.0 ports is even more disappointing. I dont know why the card reader is microSD only. This laptop is certainly thick enough for that to be a full size SD card reader. Again, not really complaining because its nice to have the microSD card reader, but….its just disappointing again to not have a full size SD card reader when you need it. The brightest spots of this port selection is the full size HDMI and headphone jack. I’ll always be happy to have both of those. - Battery life: If you have been reading my whole review, youll know that my Dell XPS was not a great battery supporter. With all the beastly specs, comes with power consumption. The battery of this laptop is certainly, definitely, absolutely BETTER than my XPS. However, in general non-compared terms, its just average battery life. Unplugged, at right around 50% brightness, I lasted about 6 hours before the battery saver and “plug-in” alert kicked in at 15% capacity. This was just with normal web browsing, word processing, and a lot of youtube. Because of the youtube use, this is pretty good. Way better than the 3-4 hours I get on my XPS with literally 0-10% brightness. ASUS claims 10 hr battery life, and I believe thats probably at 15-20% brightness or less, and much less youtube than me. Conclusion here: its good battery life. Not great. It’ll get you through the day. The best part though is the very small power cable/brick! Its lightweight. You’ll need a very open and empty plug because the brick is attached to the prongs, but its definitely a lot nicer to carry around than my giant XPS power cord. BIGGEST NEGATIVE: Just about the only objectively negative thing I have to say about this laptop? ***THE FANS***. I dont know what it is, I’ve updated all the drivers, and updated windows and tweaked all the bells and whistles. And for some reason, the fans on this laptop run rather noisy. Not LOUD. But louder than they need to be. I had a word and chrome with TWO tabs and the fans were ramped up to seemingly about 70%. I checked the CPU usage and it was fine at about 25%. So why are the fans blasting away like Im editing 4k footage??? Sometimes Ill have a single chrometab open with literally nothing else going on, and the fans will kick in. To some people, this may be a deal breaker. But again for me, I adjust my expectations to the price point. I got nearly all the specs I wanted for under $400 so I really cant complain. Plus cuz its open box....this couldve been the reason for the return. Happens randomly. Its annoying but not a deal breaker for me. BOTTOM LINE: If youre looking for a budget (~$500) laptop, and know for a fact you dont need to store a crazy amount of files or do heavy CPU-intense work, this laptop is near perfect. Even at its full price (currently $459.99), this is an absolute steal. + SSD + 8gb ram + full HD screen + backlit, great keyboard + ultrabook-like portability + 8th gen quad core i5 You simply cannot go wrong. Dont listen to the people complaining that the screen sucks! Its actually a very good screen, and I dare you to find a better one with this resolution for under $500!!! Plus if you buy from bestbuy, try a geeksquad certified open box model. It'll be cheaper and have great warranty support. So overall….... -1 star the disappointing ports, overstated battery life, and weird fan issue (maybe just a singular occurrence). But 4/5 stars for all the other great things about this laptop. Highly recommend.

The laptop works well. No real complaints. I like a lot of its features. It does not have a touch screen. We really wish that we would have bought something with a touch screen

I primarily produce 1080p gaming videos using an Elgato HD60. This isn't 4K or cutting edge but for my purposes I'm very happy. I use a 2T ext hard drive and Shotcut free editing software. Again, not the latest and greatest but this laptop is working great.

It’s a nice sleek laptop with the necessities. Doesn’t have a cd and when typing is problematic since it seems to not understand not to continue a letter. Something might be wrong with that. Overall, good for students.

My only complaint about this laptop is that the power adapter runs really hot. It makes a great Linux box. I have Linux Mint 19 installed, and it runs like a champ.

This laptop saved my life! This computer is great for programming and doing school work! Thank you to the person who helped me to choose this laptop. I recommend this computer for anyone that is currently in school (both in class and online).

its worth it for the price. It's very light and it has a nice clear bright screen. The only i don't like this one doesn't have a ethernet jack?

This is a great 14" laptop with a sturdy feel and it is easy to use. I like setting it up and it was very responsive with the Intel Core-i5 processor, 8GB memory and a SSD. Worth the open-box price!

Great slim laptop, good battery life so far and it was a floor model. 1080p screen is crisp and it makes a great travel laptop since it has a fullsize HDMI to connect to TV's and projectors.

Bought it for a malware analysis laptop. It works well, had an issue where it was bricked after installing VMWare Player. Reset fixed the issue though. Good for the money.

Great laptop for someone on the go. Light, small and still powerful enough to get the job done. Could use another usb port, but not a huge problem. I'm happy with this reasonably priced laptop.

We've had this laptop for several months now. It's a great laptop, light weight, easy to use, good battery life, does everything we need it to. Would recommend.

I was looking for a lightweight, thin laptop to use mainly for schoolwork and this works perfectly. Runs very well. Battery does not last quite as long as I would like but that’s minor.

I'm so happy with this laptop because it's light, good looking, reliable, and fast performance. With the ram of 8GB, it's still ok for graphic or drawing.