Picture and sound are excellent, nice to have a USB 3.0, no bloatware and all the bells an whistles of a much more expensive unit. ASUS produces most of the parts themselves, guess that's why the price is so low. Can't go wrong with this one!
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I've had this laptop for a few months and I've been very pleased overall with the quality of the build and the value. The only issue I've had is with the jumpy nature of the trackpad, but there are newer drivers available online that will fix the issue. Both the Synaptics and the Elantech drivers appear to work and playing around with different ones got my issue under control.As for the specs, they are bare-bones, but workmanlike. Stock, this would be a fine device for kids or a college student. I actually purchased it to upgrade and found that I could change the following:
1. Swapped CPU for a Core i5-2450M. This is a technical upgrade that requires nearly full disassembly of the base to get at the motherboard. It will void your warranty but it does work. The BIOS has the microcode for the new CPU and works perfectly.
2. Swapped network card for a dual-band 803.11n/Bluetooth combo card (Intel N-6230; soon to be further upgraded to an Intel N-6235 with Bluetooth 4.0). Asus does not whitelist the Wifi so this worked perfectly. As an added benefit, the function toggle automatically recognized the Bluetooth portion and allows you to toggle that as well.
3. Swapped DVD for a Sony Optiarc Blu-Ray Burner. The screw mount keeping the drive in place is under the keyboard, but it is very easy to remove.
4. Swapped the stock keyboard for the chicklet keyboard from the K53 series. This fits perfectly, exhibits none of the flex or imprecision of the original.
5. This comes with 2gb of memory soldered to the board and one open slot. Asus claims a maximum of 6gb of memory, but I've added an 8gb stick and it recognizes and utilizes the additional Ram. Sisoft Sandra indicates that the motherboard can actually handle up to 32mb of memory, so when 16gb stick become available I am going to give one a try as well. Right now, the 10gb works great!
6. Swapped the standard 4-cell battery (was getting about 2.5 hours on a full charge) with a 6-cell version from a Asus K53...now I'm seeing more than 4 hours of run time.
7. Swapped the HDD for an SSD. This is a SATA 3 motherboard so be sure to get a SATA 3 SSD to recognize the full speed benefit. The stock hard drive is partitioned to 119gb for the C:\ Drive and the remainder as a D:\Data drive. I purchased a 128GB and the cloning process went smoothly. For the easiest cloning process, I wouldn't recommend anything smaller than the 128gb. If you don't want the Blu-ray, you can also buy a optical drive bay 12.7mm adapter and put your old hard drive in there for additional storage. I would prefer the optical drive and an external USB data drive.
8. Yeah...I went ahead and upgraded to Windows 8...boot times are incredible. I added Stardock's Start8 to make the desktop act like Windows 7 and I couldn't be happier with the performance.
All-in-all, I now have a laptop that has many features that can only be found on models costing 2 or 3 times more than I spent combined.
Best Deals for Asus X54C-RB01 Intel Celeron 1.7GHz 15.6" 2GB 320GB W7HP 64
If you are after a low end laptop, ASUS is the way to go. It's sturdier than cheap Dells and... well, I don't think anybody else makes cheap laptops worth talking about at this point. I've had the previous generation of this (X52) for over a year. It's dead now due to a massive water spill accident and I got X54 to replace it.
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