Thanks for this review. It showed me that $500 is too much to spend on a 720p laptop with a crap battery:
“Our Battery Eater test sucked down a full charge in one hour and 48 minutes. Switching to the light-load Reader’s Test only extended life to four hours and 22 minutes. The Peacekeeper browser test turned in a result of three hours and 45 minutes.”
You need to look at the current crop of laptops that utilize 4th gen Intel cores (Haswell). The battery life in them are radically improved. The macbook air, for instance went from like 7 hours to 12. And most laptops reviewed either have dramatically increased battery life, or significantly shrunken battery capacity (and produce the same longevity as previous models).
I bought a very similar model for my wife from Best Buy and while we were very pleased with the computer itself, the power adapter is a tiny vunerable thing that didn’t last 2 weeks of being plugged in/out regularly so it ended up going back to the store. I bought my mother the 12" version of this and she adores it though. I think it has the same plug, but something is different between the two, maybe because it’s a lighter laptop.
Low res panel and a touchpad offset to the right makes this a bad buy. I have to wonder why computer makers offset the touchpad to the right? It makes it way to easy for your right palm to touch the pad while typing and cause the mouse to jump around. DUMB design!
Left 
It’s centered on the keyboard itself with the numpad off to the right. Pretty typical set up for this style keyboard on a laptop. In “Proper” typing one does not rest one’s palms on any surface (or so I’ve been told) – I personally have found the big touchpads to be a PITA, you look at them too hard and the mouse will move.
Is the weight 4.6lb as the Asus website claims or 5.8lb as stated here? Same item (diff part number) with 500gb drive at Costco store for same price says 4.6lb weight.
@adr5, whining to woot and wooters is not going to change the resolution for mainstream laptops. Call it “low” if it makes you feel better but the fact remains, it is the standard resolution for laptops in this price range.
It is a mischaracterization to imply this laptop has inferior resolution vs. other comparable laptops. The resolution of this laptop is normal for a $500 laptop.
I couldn’t agree more. I have a Dell 15" laptop that’s 9 years old now. The resolution is 1600x1080 and it looks wonderful. These 15" laptops that use 720p resolution are just a joke. I’m in the market for a 15" laptop but I won’t even consider anything less than 1080p.
Been looking for something similar myself… looking at the spec sites it seems like Skyrim is a pretty needy game compared to civ 5 or starcraft…
try this guy out:
looks like those games “require” 512 dedicated graphics. This laptop would run them but only on lower settings.
Unless a PC has an non-integrated video card it will be put in the low tier “gaming” laptop catagory I think. Those games you listed will not much care for running these on this PC very smoothly, even on low. Plants VS Zombies ect should be fine though.