There are TONs of laptop brands out there, and I was leaning toward getting an HP or a Levono, but an Asus laptop with an i5 and a 1T hard drive shows up locally for a pretty darned good price.
What is the hive's experience with those computers?
There are TONs of laptop brands out there, and I was leaning toward getting an HP or a Levono, but an Asus laptop with an i5 and a 1T hard drive shows up locally for a pretty darned good price.
What is the hive's experience with those computers?
Either my wife's computer or mine is an Asus (the other is an Acer).
They've both been fine for the past 4-5 years. They're both about to be on their way out. Wife's was worse because she clicks on spam and it has had a virus or two. But I'd buy one.
I'm using one right now. It was made by the same people that make Apple stuff in China. It is a good brand. I have a couple of Lenovo products at home. OK, 3 or 4. They are good too. I would not buy anything with "HP" on the label.
I really like Asus gaming stuff. They used to make mobosand things for gaming rigs, and decided to go into business for themselves. I am particularly enamored with the rog line.
Shoot. This is an Acer, not Asus. My bad. Made by Foxconn when you crack it open. I have had Asus stuff and always been satisfied.
Dr. Hess said:I would not buy anything with "HP" on the label.
I will second that emotion. I bought a $400 HP laptop as the basis of our club's T+S system. It works, but it's crap.
Asus is a fantastic hardware vendor, I've used their bits and pieces for better than 20 years now. I have several of their machines for personal use and they're the vendor of choice for my company's laptops.
I have desktop hardware of theirs that I like, but no direct experience with Asus laptops.
The family runs a few Asus laptops and desktop. They've all been solid machines. Mine's about done though. Got it when the i3/5/7 processors came out, what 5-6 years ago? It's starting to give me grief.
I've had an HP. I'll agree, never again.
I've bought a fair bit of Asus stuff over the years. Running right now under my roof, I can think of at least one motherboard, a monitor, and a USB wifi dongle. None of it is particularly new, and all of it still works. So they get a passing grade in my book.
If I could get an Asus laptop for an attractive price, I certainly couldn't take the Asus brand as a negative in any way whatsoever.
My home laptop is an Asus, and my gaming PC and my dad's gaming PC have Asus mainboards. All have been pretty reliable, although that laptop is almost 8 years old and the RAM module, DVD drive, screen, and of course battery needed replacement over the years.
I'll echo what others have said, I've been using their motherboards, video cards, and other components for many years. My last Chromebook was an Asus, and my wife and daughter both have cheap Asus Windows laptops that work flawlessly. Good value for the money, IMO.
what's making me a little nervous is that reviews on both amazon and best buy have some interesting chronic problems with what appears to be the hard drive.
And it appears not to actually be an option, as it's in-store only, but there isn't one within 250 miles. ugh
alfadriver said:what's making me a little nervous is that reviews on both amazon and best buy have some interesting chronic problems with what appears to be the hard drive.
And it appears not to actually be an option, as it's in-store only, but there isn't one within 250 miles. ugh
Supplier problem, there were quite a few systems that had failed hard drives due to issues with their suppliers. IBM TravelStar and DeskStar drives were crap for a while for example. Keep you system backed up like you should and research the particular drive used in the system for reliability/failure rate and either plan on replacing it or leveraging the warranty to replace it when/if it fails.
alfadriver said:what's making me a little nervous is that reviews on both amazon and best buy have some interesting chronic problems with what appears to be the hard drive.
And it appears not to actually be an option, as it's in-store only, but there isn't one within 250 miles. ugh
Well, hard drives are easily enough replaced. I swapped out the molasses-slow 5400 rpm drive in my daughter's machine for an SSD last year.
As for not being able to buy in-store, we live in the same area, our local Best Buys carry Asus.
Tom_Spangler said:alfadriver said:what's making me a little nervous is that reviews on both amazon and best buy have some interesting chronic problems with what appears to be the hard drive.
And it appears not to actually be an option, as it's in-store only, but there isn't one within 250 miles. ugh
Well, hard drives are easily enough replaced. I swapped out the molasses-slow 5400 rpm drive in my daughter's machine for an SSD last year.
As for not being able to buy in-store, we live in the same area, our local Best Buys carry Asus.
Asus's are available, yes. The special one that I'm looking at isn't within 250 miles.
In reply to alfadriver :
lol- now one shows up in Utica and Gratiot store around here. Maybe one will show up tomorrow here in Dearborn or Ann Arbor. 
We had some issues with our son's ASUS Chromebook (the flip model). The display stopped working completely after about 3-4 months of intense use. I'm not sure if it's related to the ability to flip it like a tablet, or just a defect. They replaced it under warranty without an issue.
My other son had the identical model and his brother stepped on it, cracking the screen. Within nine months of our purchase, we couldn't find parts anywhere, they were no longer available. We ended up buying a used one on eBay with a good screen and I swapped them over (not too difficult).
The parts availability issue would likely make me look somewhere else the next time we're purchasing something. Again, these were Chromebooks and not laptops, so not all of this may be relevant to your purchase.
In terms of value, functionality, and performance, we liked them very much.
I agree with Stefan's approach to the HD semi-issue (heck, if it's cheap enough, preemptive replacement?). I tend toward Lenovos, generally, but I don't go through computers fast enough to have a big sample size. I'm on my second or third Thinkpad not counting a couple of work-supplied Thinkpads.
I was able to get the LCD for mine when it was 6+ years old (it had a few dead pixels that grew into a huge dead black spot after a flight, maybe the screen was "punctured" somehow and the liquid crystal was getting sucked out?), so I haven't had any problem finding parts.
I have a gaming laptop from ASUS, great rig and I like how they pared win10 down to almost nothing. It looks and acts like 7
Win10 is about as fast as 7 out of the box, but it has many more privacy-invading features for you to disable...
MS really tried to make me by a mac, but in the time they made me mad, Apple has done literally nothing with their computers. Whereas Windows machines have gotten updated hardware.... So no I'm back at square 1 for the OS.
We've used Asus stuff for years at work and I have multiple Asus products that I am very happy with. I always recommend Asus.
alfadriver said:MS really tried to make me by a mac, but in the time they made me mad, Apple has done literally nothing with their computers. Whereas Windows machines have gotten updated hardware.... So no I'm back at square 1 for the OS.
Ready to join the Linux master race? 
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