I was so excited when I got this laptop. It was so powerful and ahead of the other machines, who wouldn't be excited! Initially, it performed great, ran well with Photoshop, Illustrator, Corel, especially gaming. I was disappointed in the weight, weighing in at 9 pounds for just the laptop and power supply. It was impossible to travel with (I had hoped for mobile power, but I got power that needed wheels). Traveling a lot for work and needing to do design on the road just became cumbersome. Once you add in your spare hard drive, mouse, headset etc. the airline won't even let you carry it on.It lasted about 1 month before it started crashing on simple programs like MS Word. Really? I was able to back all my data and files up to a Western Digital hard drive (those rock!). Just in time before the whole machine crashed. Even my keyboard wasn't working. I sent it back to Asus, and after testing it, there were a ton of hardware failures the wireless LAN card, the motherboard, one of the hard drives and the keyboard. Getting parts replaced wasn't too hard the first time.
About 4 months later, same issues. Still under a year old, I had all my important documents for work on the machine and hadn't backed them up for 4 months of design work (my bad). My hard drives failed and I wasn't going to just have them replace it again and lose all that data, I had to get my data recovered before I could send it in. They offered no technical support for that and when calling in to speak to a supervisor, it literally took me about 3 weeks and about 12 hours of being on hold (I'm like a bulldog when someone makes me that mad, so I refused to let go and give up). After finally getting through, she didn't say anything different that the peanuts I spoke to before and the only solution was to send it in and make sure I either back up my data or am prepared to lose it because they only replace parts. So I ended up having to go to an IT place where it took them 3 days (very expensive!) to get my hard drives to intermittantly work to recover my data.
Once recovered, we sent it in, they AGAIN replaced the motherboard, hard drives, keyboard, WLAN card. Turns out this machine runs hot and just fries the components. So after nearly losing my work data twice in under a year, and the amount of time it takes to get Asus to help (I give them a 0 in customer service), I would steer clear of Asus laptops. I will never buy one again. Unfortunately, they have the most flash parts out there I avoid the brand now, but it's hard and I cringe every time I have to support that company. We're building new desktops now to get more power and be able to cool the machines more efficiently, I opted to spend $200 more on a motherboard that wasn't made by Asus. But I guess if you can just throw it away when you're done and don't mind upgrading often or have important files you store, then maybe it's ok for you. In my opinion, it's a very expensive laptop to throw away, which I have done. Think "Office Space".
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