Brent : I must say, this laptop was a great purchase and I have zero regrets. Its a touch on the heavy side for a laptop this size, but the trade off is an easy one; its feels incredibly sturdy. There are couple of issues that are definitely not make or break, but are quality of life wishes and things to maybe consider:
- Windows 8, while not as awful as it is made out to be, is pretty bad. The curve is somewhat steep moving from Windows 7, but not insurmountable. Red a guide before the purchase and pick one up frequently as you use this machine. It helps.
- The WiFi does drop out when you close the lid and open it up. a quick toggle of the airplane switch turns it back on. This can likely be controlled via some of the device/power options, it its so incredibly minor, I haven't even poked around.
- The Catalyst control panel is a bit confusing, but once its sorted an properly set up, the switching between graphics cards is seamless and the Radeon sings and the heat output is not that much greater.
- The speakers are on the bottom of the laptop. Odd choice, I thought, but I usually (if not always) have headphones on.
- The bloatwaree is fairly easy to remove.
J. Shain (CA) : The weakest link is the hard drive, but for the price it's a pretty powerful laptop. To get a laptop at this price with an SSD, you would be sacrificing processor, graphics, quality, and/or etc. I can live with the hard drive, seeing how its one of the only things that can be changed for a noticeable improvement in performance without having to replaced the laptop itself. I much rather have a better spec laptop and just replace the hard drive down the road with a more affordable SSD then having to replace a lower spec laptop because it's just not cutting it anymore. Even with the limitations of the hard drive and some optimization, boot up time is about 45 seconds give or take and opening up programs like Photoshop takes less than 15 seconds. However, if you use sleep mode often and reopen a program you previously exited out of then it only takes a few seconds to do. I currently favor capacity and getting an SSD that meets my needs is cost prohibitive.
Gunder : Just received my laptop and am really impressed. Though much heavier than my wife's series 9, this laptop is very sleek and well built. I did have the same wifi issues as the others. After trying many suggested fixes I was finally able to resolve the issue by rolling back the driver to the Microsoft version. Three days later and not a single dropped connection.
