Samsung - ATIV Book 8 15.6" Touch-Screen Laptop - Intel Core i7 - 8GB Memory - 1TB Hard Drive - Bare Metal

This laptop is an all around wonderful performer. Regardless what qualms or hesitations people have with Windows 8, I feel like it's a fantastic medium for multitasking, today. The side-by-side windows allowing you to access two programs at once is extremely convenient for, say, Skype conference and Excel, Word, Power Point, etc. As stated previously, the laptop handles all applications and multitasking swimmingly. That is, of course, until the disk space is being overwhelmed by more than one program updating at a time (taking up disk space...in other words, slowing productivity down to nearly a halt). Here's the Major, but not deal breaking flaw: the 1 TB HDD. If you are going to put out laptops that are meant to compete with the Macbook lines, why would you hinder your consumers so much with an HDD (and a horribly slow one at that)? Now, I know there are people that could care less about whether or not an SSD or HDD is important. Don't get me wrong, having an HDD as a data drive is the way to go (back up your computer, store your music and videos, store games, whatever), but if you're going to be buying something as superbly built as the Ativ Book 8, why for the love of this generation of speed and instant gratification would you put in something so slow?. To reiterate--and I'll add that I might be somewhat jaded from having installed an SSD on every computer I've had--some people don't care whether it's an HDD or SSD, and that's fine, but if you are serious about purchasing this product, consider buying a good SSD, cloning the contents and physically installing it into the system. Now that we're through the brunt of it all, this is an absolutely fantastic machine, and I would recommend it for school, business, writers and come-and-go gamers. The price might seem steep, but it's, overall, a great investment. NOTE: I tried to give the hard drive a chance, I really did. AND for anyone that cares, Intellimemory should be uninstalled immediately. It's a great idea, but doesn't work well on a slow hard drive. And if you're interested on which SSD's to purchase, there's hundreds of them; however, I prefer Samsung 840 series (128GB, 256GB, 512GB), though the Pro line will give you that crazy speed you hear about. Alright, I'm done talking.

I need a computer for personal and business use. Since I am a Windows UI programmer I need to be able to run Visual Studio and other CPU intensive software. This computer run it all without any problems whatsoever. The screen is really clear even with the 1920x1080 resolution. I can see a lot of source code, or Word document, or Excel spreadsheet, or Photoshop image and still easily read the text. The keyboard is a dream to type on. I love that you can set up the track pad to not work when you have another pointing device so when I hook in my USB external mouse I'm not always fighting with the track pad. Did I mention that the screen is bright and sharp? There are a few applications I uninstalled, but overall there wasn't much bloat. It cold boots in around 13 seconds even without an SSD. The battery life is very good. I get around 7-8 hours of typing time on a charge. It's super easy to go in and out of airplane mode (one keystroke). I don't really like the backlit keyboard. I find it difficult to read because it's not bright enough, but it's really easy to turn it off. I thought about buying a Mac, but this is better and has a touchscreen and the price was over $500 less even with a huge hard drive. It's not as light as I might have thought, but not really that heavy considering all that it does and all the power it has. Overall, I don't regret this purchase whatsoever.

When I first began shopping for a laptop, I was mostly looking for something that could play my games while still having everything I needed for college. I originally looked into the Mac but found the price to be a bit steep and the upgrades to be a nightmare. When I saw this laptop, it was love at first site. I find the design extremely attractive while having everything i could ask for in a laptop. The Samsung plays all my games (which include World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2) on high to ultra graphics which makes me a very happy camper. Overall I would highly recommend this to anyone looking for the total package without having to give an arm and a leg or sacrifice the ability to add more RAM.

I was looking for a new laptop to complement my new Windows 8 tablet. I decided on the ATIV Book 8 after reading others' reviews and exploring a few alternatives in-store. Overall, the computer is fair value for the money, but suffers from Samsung's use of their own software for a couple of key functions. For example, you can only update the drivers via SW Update, which has been giving me an error message that no one at Samsung can explain. Similarly, their backup/imaging software provided an error message and Samsung was not able to explain how to resolve it. When contacting Samsung's support via chat to resolve the errors described above, their recommendations were to un-/re-install the software and then to refresh my system, and finally, do go through a full system reset. None of which resolved the problems. As a result, I have 1 outdated driver and am using independent software to for backups and system recovery.

The Samsung ATIV Book 8 15.6" Touch-Screen Laptop with 8GB Memory and 1TB Hard Drive is an excellent value for the price. This was my first non-Dell computer purchase, and I am not disappointed. It is easy to set up and customize, has a lighting fast processor, and has a beautiful, crisp display coupled with stereo quality sound. The backlit keyboard makes ease of use at night a breeze - no more tilting the the screen down to light the keyboard. The touch screen is responsive and easy to use, so between the touchscreen and touchpad, I don't even use a mouse with this laptop. This is the first time I have not used a mouse with a laptop. The Samsung Book 8 is also very thin and lightweight, which makes it easier to pack and very portable. The battery life is impressive, lasting up to 7 hours, depending on the work the laptop is performing. Great machine!

This is my first laptop ever, I wanted something I could use for the demands of a research based grad program with a lot of field work. I like the keyboard a lot, the screen is great and I can see it outside too. I am really happy I went for the touchscreen after reading the reviews about using Windows 8 without it. Windows 8 isn't so bad once you slightly alter your paradigm about it and the touch screen does really help. The screen also feels really durable, it has a pretty/durable aluminum body, isn't too heavy, has a good processor, is pretty quick running and has a great battery life. I don't game or anything so I haven't tested it on that front. so far it has done everything I've needed it to without a problem. I do think a 256GB SSD or hybrid would be the only thing that would make this computer better. My husband got a Mac Air and he's a bit jealous of my PC! This is definitely the right computer for me for half the price of a Mac Pro.

My wife's old computer was no longer working well and I was looking for a 15 inch laptop for her. Before getting this laptop, I tested 15 inch MacBook pro with retina display as well as Lenovo y510p. So I will compare these 3 laptops in this review: For the value, retina MacBook is over-priced and you can get two ATIV book 8 for that price. Lenovo y510p is the cheapest. However, for whatever reason, it doesn't feel like a 1000-dollar laptop in hand. By comparison, ATIV book 8 is well designed and feels like a premium laptop. For the display, retina MacBook is the best. It's perfect for reading papers. Both ATIV book 8 and y510p use 1080p display, but y510p doesn't support touch screen. The texts on ATIV book 8 are generally sharp to read, and the touchscreen is very responsive. For the performance, all the three computers are really fast in general. Although equipped with 5400 rpm hard drive, it doesn't feel slow to load apps. The computer starts very quickly after uninstalling bloatwares. For the convenience, ATIV weighs 5.6-lb, y510p weighs 6-lb, and retina MacBook weighs only 4.46-lb. My major concern is that the computer runs hot at the bottom when idle, which is not comfortable to use on lap. To summarize, retina MacBook is perfect for reading and photo editing, but retina field on computer is too young and I didn't know how long it can be used. y510p is good for gamers, but the bulky design as well as lack of touch-screen capability are not welcome features for windows 8. ATIV book 8 is the best 15 inch windows laptop you can get for work and home use so far.

I narrowed this laptop and another unnamed laptop to my top two. Unfortunately I could not find anywhere that stocked the other to be able to check it out in person. The long battery life is great. The aluminum on the lid and top of the chassis is nice and solid. The bottom is silver painted plastic. It looks nice, in fact I didn't even notice it was plastic at first, until the bottom somehow got scratched; not sure how. It seams like if anything should be aluminum, it should be the bottom where it's likely to get banged and scratched. The silver key's I don't like so much. The backlit keys can also be annoying. The brightness is automatically adjusted based on the ambient lighting around it. It kicks on when the light level is fairly low. But at that point, it's just a distraction, and the symbols on the keys are actually more easily distinguished without it because the lettering appears blackish without the light which has better contrast than the blue light in these conditions. It's annoying that there is no way to disable it. People are going as far as putting tape over the sensor to stop it. It's kinda lame that you are given controls to adjust the intensity, when it automatically readjusts based on the ambient lighting every few seconds anyways. Startup time was pretty slow. This has to do with the slow hard drive, but also a lot of the programs that auto run in start up. The keyboard feels like it's relatively high quality; no noticeable flex. I did find typing on it uncomfortable though because of the fairly shallow travel and wide spacing. I'll probably get used to it. I hope to dual boot linux and windows 8, but the older version Series 7 Chronos, had a firmware bug which cause it to permanently brick when booting linux. It's assumed, but not completely verified, that bios updates, and updates to the linux kernel have fixed the issue, but I am not willing to be one of the first to test it. I sort of wish I would have waited a little longer and inspected closer the other laptop I was looking at; which was a hundred dollars cheaper, has a full aluminum body, a better graphics card, and more trust-ably stable firmware.