a4nandez :I upgraded from a laptop that was five years old so almost anything would seem amazing next to my old dino. But, I think I can say that unless you are a hardcore gamer or for some reason you feel that you absolutely need an optical disk drive, you will be very satisfied with this laptop just as I am. Yeah some people are being really nit-picky about viewing angles and such but seriously, it's not an issue unless you're a paraplegic and can't adjust the screen angle (you have to do it every time you open the laptop anyway). I am very, very happy with the battery life. I can use it at school for several hours and still return home with 20% battery left...it's so nice not to have to bring a charger all the time. It's incredibly slim and light. I get compliments on it all the time. The only thing I'm not super excited about is the hard-drive capacity; it's marketed at about 125gb but when you open the computer for the first time you quickly find out that after the OS, you only have about 60gb for yourself and the SSD is not easily upgrade-able like on older laptops. Nothing an external can't fix and it'll probably keep me from cluttering it up anyway. But at the end of the day, all these things are just minor trade-offs for having an otherwise very slick, slim, and light laptop.
skappy7 :I read the reviews on this laptop and decided that it honestly couldn't be that bad, and I was right.
I understand what the reviewers are saying. The colors DO wash out if you tilt the screen forward or backward. However, tilting the display far enough to uncomfortably wash out the screen poses bigger problems, like the fact that the screen is at a horribly awkward angle. It was fine out of the box, but I calibrated the display (took 3 min) and now it's quite good.
Back to the good, this laptop is THIN. It's hard to appreciate its size until you truly see it. At 15 inches, it's easily one of (if not the) thinnest 15 inchers on the market. It doesn't hurt that it's a looker too.
The windows experience index is 5.9, with the lowest being the graphics (5.9) which is expected. The rest of the specs are in the high 6's or low 7's
I recommend working your way through a clean install and getting all the crap off, considering you don't get too much harddrive space with all of the preloaded crap.
I love this laptop, and gave it 4 stars mostly because of the bloatware, and that windows 8 is meh on a laptop without a touchscreen. However, it's certainly a great laptop and the reviews don't do it justice
Mike:So I've had this laptop for about the past week and I love it. I've read a lot of the reviews on here and most are relatively accurate, but here's my full assessment: I got mine from vernaltech
The Good
- 6-8 hours of battery life with heavy use of Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and Google Chrome simultaneously
- Really light and sleek design that's much much better than the hefty Toshiba A505D I had before
- It doesn't heat up much at all, especially when kept on a hard non-insulating surface. Insulating surfaces (i.e. your bed or lap) tend to heat it up much quicker
- Boots up in about 12-14 seconds
- The wi-fi has not cut out for me yet (this is the New Series 9)
- 8gb RAM
- Trackpad is awesome and works perfectly fine for me (only issues came up when I mistakenly rested my other palm on the pad...just have to get used to it)
The bad:
- 128 GB SSD which actually = 60 gigs out of box
- Text and image display on the screen isn't Amazing, but is manageable
- Speakers strangely on the bottom of the laptop...doesn't really make sense to me, but I use headphones and external speakers 99% of the time anyways so not a deal braker.
