ASUS R503U-RH21 Laptop Computer,4GB Memory Deals

By April M., Ahing-brooks "A.Brooks" (florida)

This review is from: ASUS R503U-RH21 Laptop Computer,4GB Memory, 500GB Hard Drive, 15.6", Windows 8 (Personal Computers)
This computer is really great for the price. It's good on battery life with the extended battery turn on option located on the screen if your battery starts getting low. The clarity of the screen is good for viewing the sites and it's lightweight construction makes carrying easy. I'm well pleased with my purchase and the delivery time was quick. Thank you.

 By Giraudlaw (USA) -
This review is from: ASUS R503U-RH21 Laptop Computer,4GB Memory, 500GB Hard Drive, 15.6", Windows 8 (Personal Computers)
I decided to give a chance to Asus after Sams didn't have a Dell to sustitute my HP that broke in less than 2 years. The reviews were good, so I bought it. My first impression was how cheap the material look and feel, not like my Dell and the HP. Other problem was that is a finger print magnet, always looks dirty. But what make me change it was the poor almost inaudible sound of the speakers, I need to use headphones to hear. Didn't like neither that the hard disk is in two partitions. It runs well the programs and the screen looks good, is windows 8 fault the software problems, but I expected more for an almost $400.00 computer and that brand. Finally, I found a Dell for $40.00 more, change it and now I'm happy. Not recommended unless it cost you under $300.00.

By Emma Kennedy "Book Addiction" (San Jose, CA) -
This review is from: ASUS R503U-RH21 Laptop Computer,4GB Memory, 500GB Hard Drive, 15.6", Windows 8 (Personal Computers)
At first I was a bit intimidated by this laptop but as I got more familiar with the Windows 8 concept I began to see that it actually made more sense in some areas. The probs I did have were more with getting used to Windows 8 than with the laptop itself. The laptop is great - I found the numbers keypad on it to be a great help to me, and surprisingly, it's lighter than than my older one. This is definitely worth it.

ASUS Republic of Gamers G75VW-AH71 17.3-Inch Deals

By Bradley Proctor -
This review is from: ASUS Republic of Gamers G75VW-AS71 17.3-Inch Gaming Laptop (Personal Computers)
So I noticed some weak reviews for this product and am quite disgusted. I bought this unit from Best Buy and have so far been impressed. I typically am a desktop user, in fact, I normally custom build my own rigs. I was in the market for a laptop, and didn't want to frustrate myself with custom building one so I shopped around a lot. For the price, it will be difficult to beat this machine. The only laptops that will come close (Dell XPS, AlienWare, and MSI) would all likely cost and extra $500-$1000. Every game I have played so far (Portal 2, Skyrim, etc) have ran on ultra settings with extremely great frame rates. Now for the Pros and cons:

Pros: Great heat displacement, it has two large exhaust ports on the backside of the machine. This keeps the heat off of the bottom and allows for "lap-top" computing. Processing speed is amazing. Cost is low, but shop around, I got it at Bust Buy for $200 cheaper (though the build is not exact to this model make your own decisions as to what you need). Back-lit key board is extremely neat. Large vibrant HD screen. Its not loaded down with a bunch of bloatware and demos. GTX 660M is a great GPU for most all (with the exception of the have to have the most expensive and overkill, melt your face GPU) users. Additional port for secondary HDD. Easy access for upgrades to HDD an memory. Ivy Bridge! This thing has blistering fast multi-app processing power!

Cons (and the reason for 4 stars): The biggest drawback for me is the 1TB HDD, as it is slow (5400 RPM). For this reason alone Windows Experience Index rated it a 5.9. All other ratings were mid to upper 7's. Shame on you Asus. For $130 buy a 128GB SSD from Amazon and up your computing potential. Just use the 1TB as a slave. It is bulky, but to be expected as it is a gaming lappy. Good luck trying to find a case that fits it.Lastly the power brick is enormous and the battery is lucky to give you 1.5 hrs unplugged. Again, this is a gaming laptop so this is to be expected.

Other thoughts: The pros highly out weigh the cons! For the price this Republic of Gamers laptop by Asus is a great investment.

 By Greg Siegel -
This review is from: ASUS Republic of Gamers G75VW-AS71 17.3-Inch Gaming Laptop (Personal Computers)
Everything you've read in the other reviews about its power is true. Portal 2, Skyrim, etc. all look beautiful on this laptop. The matte screen with full 1080p resolution is very nice and easy on the eye. The jet engine fans on the back of the laptop have allowed for hours of gaming without feeling like I could flip the laptop over and grill an egg.

Now, some issues. One is that the space bar is not as responsive as I would like on a gaming keyboard. If I have my thumb too far over to one side, it will fail to register the press. This being the jump key in a lot of games, one can imagine the annoyance this has caused (I've run straight off of platforms like a dork).

The major issue, however, is that the subwoofer will sometimes play when you have headphones in. For a while, every time I started a media source that had audio, I would have to pull out my headphones and reinsert. This is quite annoying when you are trying to play something in a crowded room, or when someone in your house is sleeping. I uninstalled the drivers and let windows install its own, but now it mutes the audio until I click mute then unmute again. I don't know what is going on with this audio chipset, but there appear to be some kinks to iron out.

The audio issue is not a dealbreaker for me, as the laptop really is quite nice looking with excellent performance.I am hoping an update in the future will make my $1300 purchase perform as it should.

By technojunkie (Pembroke Pines, Florida United States)
This review is from: ASUS Republic of Gamers G75VW-AS71 17.3-Inch Gaming Laptop (Personal Computers)
I'm not a super gaming computer geek, but i know computers well and am an avid console gamer. I like playing fighting games like SFIV and the like and I also love first person shooters, action games, etc. Well so far I am VERY impressed with this behemouth of a machine! Not that street fighter is the most graphically intensive game, but i was coming from runing on my macbook pro under bootcamp with windows 7. Night and day difference. I can crank up all the settings including 8x antialiasing and the frame rate is stunning. no lag whatsoever. full screen full resolution all the bells and whistles enabled. Just Cause 2 i couldn't get the same with everything maxed out, but you probably would need a higher end machine to do that. With everything maxed out i was getting like 20fps but when i turned off the GPU water effect and toned down a couple other things i was getting a solid 60fps on the in game benchmark tests. Batman arkham asylum and the newer arkham city look positively stunning and smooooooth. The picture is great on this machine and the sound is quite good especially with the subwoofer. The power supply practically needs it own carrying case! Seriously this is the biggest brick i've ever seen on a notebook. The keyboard is very nice as is the track pad. the buttons on the trackpad have quite a bit of travel and feel kind of soft, but not mushy. The track pad also supports two finger rotation and pinch to zoom and 2 finger scrolling and 3 finger aero conrol of the windows 7 windows ala macbook (although it's nowhere near as smooth as the mac, but i didn't get this machine for smooth window navigation). I LOVE the rubberized feel of the plastic of the case. I also love that the machine doesn't come with 100 pieces of "bloatware"
the 750gb hard drivecomes partitioned with about 300 (drive c) for OS and other programs and then a drive D (presumably for your gaming data) is about 400gb. There is still an open expansion bay for another hard drive I believe. Now remember, this is kind of the "bottom of the line" G75 with the 2gb graphics card (the 660) and the processors on the higher end units run a bit faster. So far the machine stays quite cool and it not even as noisey as my macbook pro (and not nearly as hot, you could make toast on my macbook when i was runing games in bootcamp). I don't know a lot about gaming machines but i've read that you can't just look at the graphics card or the processor but you have to look at everything together including how well the machine can cool itself because that can affect how well the gpu runs. I'm sure there are faster notebooks out there, but for 1500 bucks I am beside myself. I use an xbox 360 wireless controller and it works flawlessly, just make sure you download the 64bit driver from microsoft. For steam users, install it to the larger partition (the D drive). There is plenty of room on the 400gb partition. Even if every game you use is 10gb (which they usually are not) That's a lot of games with no external drive and you still have the C partition to store files on, plus you can always get another drive installed. I'm giving it 4 stars just to be conservative, but so far the only thing that's a bit off-putting is it's sheer size. it's much deeper than my 17 inch macbook and won't even fit (width-wise) into the sleeve of my 17inch backpack although it barely fits the length. I had to order an alienware backpack that accomodates the larger machines with the 17.3 screens. I travel A LOT and it is going to be really fantastic to have a complete gaming library with me wherever I go! Unless you're an uber-geek I would highly recommend this unit. Im sure it will do me for several years, but then again, technology is such that you're constantly kicking yourself for not waiting for the next better, faster, quieter, cooler, more power efficient thing to come along.

ASUS K55N-DS81 15.6-Inch Laptop (Black) Deals

By Michael Freed -
This review is from: ASUS K55N-DS81 15.6-Inch Laptop (Black) (Personal Computers)
I did a lot of research before finally purchasing this laptop by ASUS. The biggest selling points for me were as follows:

ASUS 1 year "360 Notebook Warranty" including 1 year of Accidental Damage/Handling and a Limited 1 year manufacturer warranty.
The AMD A8 4500M APU is super speedy. If you're purchasing a laptop beware that the A6 4400 has a 1MB L2 cache while the A8 has a BIG 4MB L2 cache. While the dual core is rated at a higher frequency the quad core is capable of handling multiple data loads simultaneously much more efficiently.
The Radeon 7640G has 512mb dedicated memory and is capable to pull from the system resources. While this machine CANNOT run games at the highest settings it does an excellent job of being able to run MOST games at low-med settings with high FPS.
4gb ram upgradeable to 16gb.

Pros: Low Price point, 1 year ADH warranty, fast quad core cpu, 4mb L2 cache, fast HDD, fast boot option, instant on resume function- 2 second wake-up from sleep mode.

Cons: Poor viewing angles on screen, plastic shell/case,

 By Jeff Bloom (Norfolk, VA) -
This review is from: ASUS K55N-DS81 15.6-Inch Laptop (Black) (Personal Computers)
I doubted this laptop would perform that well given its $399 price tag. Incredibly I continue to be blown away by its superb performance, it has quickly become my favorite (of six) computers to use! Even though it's comprised of plastic, it's light weight and superior performance leave me wanting little. Even with 3D games, the performance continues to astound me given the low price I paid.

I bought a 16GB memory upgrade for $85 a week later and it has solidly placed this laptop at the top of my techy toys list. I am dumbfounded by the sheer performance of this low cost laptop.

Pros: low price, above average performance, memory up-gradable to 16GB and out performs my MacBook that cost $1300.

Cons: Made of plastic and does not have superman powers..

By Alexander (CA)
This review is from: ASUS K55N-DS81 15.6-Inch Laptop (Black) (Personal Computers)
I recently bought a high-end HP laptop and also purchased this ASUS laptop (both from a sources other than Amazon). If I compare the two the HP was about 3 times the price but had a very fast i7 processor with high end graphics and a large disk and and RAM. The ASUS has a low end quad core processor, mid range graphics, less ram and smaller disk. But otherwise the machines have similar specs: same screen size, number and type of USB ports, HDMI & VGA, DVD burner, and card reader.

Why compare them you ask? What I am really comparing is the experience of buying an HP (a market leader) vs ASUS (a less known brand).

That is all background, now the interesting part:
* ASUS is rated highest reliability after 3 years while HP is rated worst. See Ton's Hardware for a nice chart.
* The ASUS does have a weird touch pad - as others have mentioned. This is the 2nd ASUS laptop that I have purchased and the both had unusual and/or confusing touch pads or mouse buttons. This new machine's touch pad suffers from sensitivity issues and also from the strange design of only having a single physical switch under the pad which means to click easily, you need to be near the center of the pad. But to determine if it is a right or left click, ASUS uses the location of your finger on the touch pad at the time of the click. Clever design idea but irritating to use. I normally use a wireless mouse so this is not a deal killer for me. ASUS, if you are reading this, just go with a normal touch pad with normal top mounted buttons that are not too stiff. Then you won't stand out in a bad way.
* The ASUS is usable right out of the box (assuming you can stomach Win 8). It has not bloatware like an HP and also comes with Win 8 straight, not the handicapped Win 8 Home version that HP uses. This is a huge plus for me.
* Finally, the display is better on the ASUS. Both displays are the same resolution and size. But HP uses a really cheap LCD panel that has poor contrast. The ASUS is better for contrast which makes text more readable. This is also a huge plus.

So whats the net-net? From now on when I shop for to new laptop, I will look to ASUS first and won't even consider HP (given their poor reliability ratings, bloatware, and poor readability displays). But I will also pay attention to the touch pad and the mouse buttons when looking at ASUS in the future given their proclivity of wandering of the tried and true path in this area.

ASUS X55C-DS31 15.6-Inch Laptop (Black) Deals

By bvjack -
This review is from: ASUS X55C-DS31 15.6-Inch Laptop (Black) (Personal Computers)
This laptop is just what I expected. not too light, not too heavy. Extremely fast start-up. It arrived on time and doesn't have all the unnecessary pre-loaded apps and programs that are on others. There is only one issue and that is the space bar. If you don't hit it in the "right" spot it does not advance the cursor. Maybe it's just the one I received, but I can see where the Keyboard is slightly raised in the middle and I think that is what the problem is.

 By Agustin (Denver, CO) -
This review is from: ASUS X55C-DS31 15.6-Inch Laptop (Black) (Personal Computers)
This is a great laptop! the tech specs are really good, it's fast and the design it's pretty neat and the keyboard is made of a good materials. the touch pad though... it could be better.

And Win 8 sucks sooooo much... 20 minutes after playing with win 8 I end up formatting the hard drive and installing an old copy of windows 7.

By Miles De Wind -
This review is from: ASUS X55C-DS31 15.6-Inch Laptop (Black) (Personal Computers)
Well this is not a high power laptop but it runs most things. If you want to play games on it works very well with simpler games like leauge of legends. That being said if you try to do more than one thing at a time its going to run slow. Real slow.

ASUS Zenbook UX31E-XB51 13.3 Notebook Intel Core i5 Deals

By Ivan J Garrity (Markham, ON & Dallas, TX) -
This review is from: ASUS Zenbook UX31E-XB51 13.3 Notebook Intel Core i5-2467M 1.60 GHz 4GB DDR3 128GB SSD Windows 7 Professional 64-bit Silver (Personal Computers)
Nice all around for price with excellent feature set with great Amazon service. Keyboard is frustrating and possibly a deal breaker for heavy users.

 By G -
This review is from: ASUS Zenbook UX31E-XB51 13.3 Notebook Intel Core i5-2467M 1.60 GHz 4GB DDR3 128GB SSD Windows 7 Professional 64-bit Silver (Personal Computers)
So my screen died 1 year and 3 weeks after purchase. ASUS will not cover it under warranty (1 year). Unless you want your purchase to break after a year, don't purchase ASUS.

By CO-Joe -
This review is from: ASUS Zenbook UX31E-XB51 13.3 Notebook Intel Core i5-2467M 1.60 GHz 4GB DDR3 128GB SSD Windows 7 Professional 64-bit Silver (Personal Computers)
Great profile. Nice machine once everything was set up properly. Keyboard is not backlit I don't think. I read about problems with keyboard, but our employee who is using it has not mentioned any problems. So far pretty good.

iPearl mCover Hard Shell Case for 11.6" ASUS VivoBook Deals

By Bria -
This review is from: iPearl mCover Hard Shell Case for 11.6" ASUS VivoBook X202E/S200E/Q200E TouchScreen UltraBook laptop - Aqua (Electronics)
I absolutely love this cover! It's exactly what I was looking for and fits perfectly! I highly suggest this if you are looking for something to keep you computer from getting scratched. The shipping was fast and well wrapped.

 By emillie an
This review is from: iPearl mCover Hard Shell Case for 11.6" ASUS VivoBook X202E/S200E/Q200E TouchScreen UltraBook laptop - Aqua (Electronics)
bought for my son - wish the color was brighter and more opaque rather than transparent ... however, that's preference - served its purpose .. still questioning quality to protect for drops but at least will do its job for scratches and smudges.

By Kristin Stacy (Lexington, MA United States) -
This review is from: iPearl mCover Hard Shell Case for 11.6" ASUS VivoBook X202E/S200E/Q200E TouchScreen UltraBook laptop - Aqua (Electronics)
GLOWS: It fits my computer wonderfully and is my favorite color.

GROWS/NEEDS IMPROVEMENT:
#1. Due to the legs that you can extend for it to rest at an angle, it does not sit flat on my table(when the legs are closed), and rocks if I have my screen open past 80 Degrees.
#2 Some may consider this good, but it is nearly impossible to get off. When I first put on the top part of the case, there was a sliver of paper between it and the computer that was quite difficult to remove without breaking my newly bought case (the case did not break but it was a 10 min. struggle).

ASUS 1015E-DS01-PK 10.1-Inch Laptop (Pink) Deals

By Recklessk (Los Angeles, CA USA) -
This review is from: ASUS 1015E-DS01 10.1-Inch Laptop (Black) (Personal Computers)
I hope this review helps anyone who is in the market for a netbook without the flaws of the earlier generation netbooks. Well I was on a quest for the perfect netbook and have used so many in the past. I think I've tried at least a dozen models only to find that there was some short comings with them. This netbook will be used mainly for traveling since it is a lot easier to carry and not as expensive as other ultrabooks or notebooks.

OK lets get to it. Here are the positives listed below.

Speedy for a netbook (2 to 3 times the speed of standard netbooks)
1366 x 768 resolution.
light weight
comfortable to type
hdmi, can output 1080P Blu Ray no problem
1 x USB 3.0
Was able to swap the HDD from a 320GB to a 1TB 9.5mm

OK now here are the negatives.

Memory not upgradable, onboard and not removable.
Pain in the A to access the hard drive.
No Bluetooth
Not a dual band internal wireless card
No gigabit lan : (
Did not boot from USB/used acronis 2013 to clone drive.

Before this model was released, I was so close to buy the Asus 1025CE model that featured bluetooth and removable ram. However I am glad I waited as the CPU speed and a nice 1366 screen resolution out weighs the other features of the 1025CE model. I am more than happy to sacrifice bluetooth and extra ram for a nicer screen and increase in cpu speed. For the money you cannot go wrong with this model. I would highly recommend this model or the next model 1015E-DS02 which will have 4GB of onboard ram.

Update 5/6/13

I have been using this netbook for a week and it works great. It has exceeded my expectations. At times however it can run a little warm and the battery life is not as advertised. On a full charge it will last me about 5-5:30 hours on the lowest dim screen. To me this is acceptable as many new ultrabooks do not even last that long. This will definitely hold me over for 2 movies during a plane ride.

 By Scott Alan Arbaugh (Hanover, PA United States) -This review is from: ASUS 1015E-DS01 10.1-Inch Laptop (Black) (Personal Computers)
I got this to replace my wife's Dell Mini 10 netbook. It just arrived today, so I haven't had much time to play around with it yet. Usually I don't buy Amazon products without reviews, but I took a gamble on this recently-released Asus laptop... and I'm glad I did.

The first thing I noticed was keyboard. It's definitely easier to type on compared to the Dell Mini 10. Having the separation between the keys helps a lot. The cursor keys are a little cramped, but what do you expect on such a small laptop.

The second thing I noticed is how much I dislike the touchpad. Seems to be par for the course on many netbooks. I frequently use the tap-to-click feature (quickly tapping to register a left-mouse click) on the touchpad instead of actually pressing down in the bottom-left corner. It would only register my taps about 80% of the time which was really annoying. I figured that this could be solved by trying different touchpad drivers. The laptop came preinstalled with the latest drivers from Asus' website. I tried the generic Synaptics drivers from their website. That helped with the tap-to-click, however, the pointer speed was way too slow, even when set to the highest speed. Also, I lost the Windows 8 gestures with the those Synaptics drivers. Next I tried the Elan drivers (did a Google search for 'elan touchpad driver windows 8', and it's the first link on asus.com). The Elan drivers did the trick. Everything works great... tap-to-click works 99% of the time, pointer speed is good at the default speed setting and the Windows 8 gestures work.

At first, when I read that this had a Celeron CPU, I was a bit wary. However, after using the Atom CPU-equpped Dell Mini 10, I have to say that this Asus is a bit faster even at a lower clock speed, but I'm sure the dual cores helps quite a bit. This machine also came with Windows 8 64-bit which I was surprised to see. I'm used to seeing 32-bit operating systems on netbooks. I'm sure that replacing the HDD with an SSD would make this a lot faster, so I might have to invest in that later.

The only thing I've really tested so far is streaming Youtube videos. This thing doesn't skip a beat, even with HD (all the way up to 1080p) videos running at full screen. The frame rate is smooth. I'm pretty impressed. Screen looks decent too. Speakers can get pretty loud without much distortion.

I'm happy with the build quality as well. There's a nice texture on the plastic surrounding the touchpad below the keyboard and on the bottom of the laptop. There's very little flex to the keyboard... it's pretty solid.

If you're looking for a 10" laptop for basic web browsing & productivity, definitely consider this one.

UPDATE 2013-04-30
After using this laptop for a few days, I'm still impressed. No new issues to report. Once my wife started using it, she would frequently trigger (by accident) the Windows 8 gestures on the touchpad. If you swipe in from the left, top or right sides, it triggers a gesture. I didn't see an easy way to disable these gestures. There are registry keys that you mess around with, but I found an alternative. There is another set of Elan touchpad drivers that work even better than the previous ones that I found. Just do a Google search for 'Elan touchpad drivers', and it's the link for station-drivers(dot)com. The driver version at the top of the list provides a bunch of configuration settings in the Mouse application for disabling gestures as well as many other touchpad settings.

I also read the other review about the difficulty in upgrading the RAM and swapping out for an SSD, which is unfortunate. However, the speed is decent enough as long as you have the proper expectations.

By BinaryMonKey "Eagle Eye" (South Bend, In) -
This review is from: ASUS 1015E-DS01 10.1-Inch Laptop (Black) (Personal Computers)
How to make this notebook run smooth and real fast:

0.(Optional).Search on google for classic shell and install.It will make windows 8 with a classic interface.

1. Search on google for "asus elan drivers" find the site, choose windows 8 64 bit click the link below "touch pad" then download and install from the 2nd link called "global" REMEMBER USE 2 fingers to scroll up and down.

2. Go to control panel > Programs and features and uninstall every single thing from asus everything! Including that hybrid crap that makes the notebook run 20 degrees hotter , don't worry windows 8 and nvidia has everything that you're going to uninstall.You'll have to reboot several times.

3. Go to control panel > Power options it should be set on "Balanced" below there is a link "More options" click on it and choose "High Performance". Close window.

4. Go to control panel and open " Mouse" click on top on the panel "Choose pointer speed" and move the setting to a higher point.

5. You're done. Enjoy the fastest notebook available.

I was skeptical at first about this little thing but I am blown away. I own a few laptops including a last generation vaio. For what you pay here 250 bucks you get a really nice machine. I am running 3ds max with no issues in this thing.I saw some people writing in these reviews stuff like it can be better or whatever. its the perfect machine for this money. Its comparable to the ultrabook I have at speed and that's got a solid drive in it! I thought for sure I was going to replace the hard drive in this one with a solid but it is not necessary at all. Boot time is around 30 seconds . Windows 8 interface sucks but the os itself is way better than anything on the market extremely stable , I install classic shell and run it with a classic interface. As for the people who complain about this product spend a hundred more and get the 350 dollar ultrabook from asus for heaven's sake. the battery is as they say around 7 hours .Screen is excellent I seat outside on the patio and I can see it perfectly. the keyboard very responsive and adequate for your hands. The mouse pad is big enough and responds accordingly as in the instructions. the built is solid with a nice piano finish on top. It is not thick just perfect. The fan blows warm but if you know about computers celeron chips run a little hotter. but nothing weird. if you complain about that get yourself a laptop with an atom processor at less than half the speed. I bought a pink one for the wife today. Overall a fantastic product. Thumbs up to Asus