Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I spent about a month looking for a good mid-range budget laptop with both a decent CPU and an SSD drive. This fit the bill perfectly. I have used many ASUS monitors over the years, but never a laptop from them - although I have always felt they are a reliable brand. Pros: 6th Gen i5 processor SSD storage drive 8 gigs of ram Very little bloat ware. Only removed a few piece of software Very snappy and good performance for the bit I used it (removed a bit of crapware, installed basic software before it was given as a graduation gift) Price vs Performance I feel hits the sweet spot with this laptop. Light, easy to carry in a backpack. USB 3.1 C Several USB 3 and USB 2 ports. Wireless AC Bluetooth 4.1 Very quite - but no power indicator. Cons No removable battery, if the battery starts to degrade you are stuck with it. Mostly plastic housing, but what can you expect for the price? Power button does not light up when turned on. Normally wouldn't mind, but the laptop is so quite when you turn it on, its hard to tell if its on. This was a graduation gift for someone going off to collage, so I wanted a laptop that would preform well at word processing and school work, while still getting good battery life so she can use it all day. I wanted a SSD drive, 6th gen CPU (for both preformance and lower power use) and to have 8hrs of batter life. This was a hard order to fill while staying in the $500-$600 price range that I had agreed on with the other person paying for 1/2 the laptop. I found most of your "budge" $300-$400 laptops where not worth the price when looking at the specs. Very low end CPU's that would stumble over basic task. Lower amounts of ram, but then they brag up a "1TB hard drive", but is a 5400 RMP bottom of the light drive. On the other end of the spectrum we have high end laptops that start around $700 and where overkill for school use. Finally started looking for Business class and mid-range laptops, which was still someone of a crap shoot giving me products between $400 POS laptops and $1200 laptops with a dedicated GPU that was not necessary in this case. Finally found this guy, and he fit the bill perfectly. I hope the battery life holds up and the goes the distance. I wish I could make this product easier to find for people looking to get a midrange laptop.