Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is one of the cheapest 14" touch screen laptops available (<$800 total). While this is the first touch screen laptop I used, I have/had several other laptops: Acer, Dell and Toshiba. I can say this Asus is the best among them. The screen's display quality is good and the text is clear and easy to read. The stereo speakers have good and enjoyable sound for music and movies. The laptop is thin. This makes it possible to slip it into a thin bag. Fan spinning is noticeable but still pretty quiet. The keyboard is good and easy to type, with no problem so far. The microphone picks up voice well. It does have slight echo and a little muddy for voice but voice is loud and clear enough. Windows literally takes only a few seconds to boot. I have never seen it this fast. I get battery life of 4.5 to 5 hours, not the best. But the charger is compact so it is easy to carry. The BIOS has password settings for restricting access to HDD and IO ports. The password can protect HDD content so that others cannot easily assess data even if the drive is taken out of the laptop when stolen/lost. While only one of the three USB ports is USB 3.0. This can be extended by using a USB 3.0 hub if more Super Speed ports are needed. The touch pad does cause the cursor jumping around but it's easy to disable by FN+F9 keys. With touch screen, I rarely need touch pad. There is no internal DVD drive. This makes laptop more compact and reduces the extra space and weight for something rarely used. For occasional use of DVD, there are many choices of cheap USB DVD drives. A small enhancement could be made to allow the FN to be sticky or ON by default so that volume and other controls can be done by single key press. These controls are more frequently used than the function keys. Hopefully Asus will make this possible in their keyboard filter driver. There is no built-in Bluetooth. So a USB Bluetooth adapter is necessary. Despite a few limitations, the laptop is well built. Windows 8 is fast. And the touch screen works really well. Updates 1. Sometimes the system was unresponsive with very jittery mouse pointer movement. This happened multiple times a day, lasting maybe a minute or longer. I tried uninstalling and re-installing Asus utilities, and found the problems mostly went away after uninstalled the Asus Power4Gear Hybrid Utility. 2. I added a 4GB memory module (DDR3 4GB 1666MHz for $30). This is a really worthy upgrade as it improved system performance noticeably by eliminating memory swaps to disk and by caching files in RAM for quick (instant) relaunches. The whole back cover is hold in place by 10 screws or so and they need to be removed. Once the back cover is removed, you should be able to see the open memory slot for installing the RAM module. After installing it, I can see the Windows Task Manager reports "Memory 8.0 GB DDR3".