: It escapes me why Asus would build a good midrange machine with M.2 support, and then cripple it with a mediocre 5400 RPM hard drive

Told them I had it for 2 days and it is a brand new machine and that they should support it

So, I further installed a 1TB M.2 into that slot and now have a powerful machine running 8th Gen Intel processor along with 32GB of RAM and 3TB total of SSD.

Always loved ASUS and they build amazing machines.

It does not have a back-lit keyboard beware looks like a nice machine for price but without the backlit keyboard i cant use it

Considering the price point, it is hard to beat this laptop at being a snappy, competent machine for navigating windows and productivity applications

Ample and capable machine

I love this machine

If you don't need a touchscreen/stylus, it's hard to imagine a much better machine for the money.

Oh and this is a BEAUTIFUL machine and the lid is amazing.

Very good machine

The ASUS has plenty of storage capacity and is a fast machine.

i am not a gamer or heavy data user so this machine is perfect for vids and photo editing.

So far, this looks as if it meets my needs as a good "work machine

Great machine at a great price

This machine is a great disappointment

I love that I can upgrade it and both the memory and the SSD and this will be by far the best machine I've ever owned.

All in all, an excellent machine that does everything I want it to do.

I really liked the machine but for a bit more I upgraded to the vivobook S model--which has the backlight keyboard--and I got the model with no hdd but a larger M2 SSD.I would strongly recommend the $509 model as it is not that difficult to open up the device and install your own M2 ssd.

If you are strictly on wifi then this is an amazing machine, however if you need stronger bandwidth, faster buffering, quicker downloads, then you'll need to buy an extension like a RJ45 to USB 3.0 to be able to get a hardline connection to get better speeds

Despite the hard disk drive, this laptop is a pretty powerful machine

Clone the disks (automated step by step process)8 enter bios (F2 and power) and select m2 as first boot device9 no trouble with windows licence, you can wipe the HDD via "disk managmenet10 completely delete all the partitions of old HDD use Diskpart applications for the command line,now you have a proper FAST machine with an extra 1TB storage drive, it is 5x faster in nominal terms but it feels 50x times faster in reality.

After adding an SSD and a fresh install of Windows, this machine is perfect for my needs

I would say with the SSD drive installed it is a very formidable machine on par with much more expensive ones.

VERY good machine, specially once you throw in an SSD, had my doubts until I did

Its a nice machine for the price, especially if you want to add an ssd to it.

Enjoy this excellent machine!Update

Fantastic laptopp, I dualboot Ubuntu and Windows and it is such a great machine, especially if your'e in school like me.

This is a great machine for everything that I do

Great budget machine - much easier to upgrade than YouTube videos suggest

Great machine with even greater potential.

This machine was SO SLOW.

Ugly: Nothing; an attractive, well-designed machine

It a fast machine

VERY good machine, specially once you throw in an SSD, had my doubts until I did

(I did that, as well as with router and printer).

The i5-8250 is surprisingly fast and runs as fast as or a bit faster than the 2630QM in the G73SW

I rarely write reviews, and have NEVER returned a laptop or other electronics (unless they simply aren't working) as I do my due diligence in research ahead of

That is what I will do, so the real price of this laptop <as truly wonderful as it is> is what you pay PLUS the price of an SSD + the cost of having someone with the skills replacing it . . . if you can't do that yourself

While the replacement came in within a day or so, which was amazing, it had the same exact issue, as well as not being able to switch sound to TV when connected to HDMI on Netflix

It boots from cold nearly as fast as my iPad, seems to handle most of what I throw at it

the Sleep-to-Wake is as fast as

It is certainly very light in weightsleek looking designIt has 8th gen Intel processorIt has USB C portCons:Made out of Plastic no metal anywhere, although plastic on top looks like metalIt does not have back lit keyboardWebcam is garbage, 'really bad' if you are ever planning to use it for video