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United States of America, Baltimore
1 Level
732 Review
37 Karma

Review on πŸ’» ASUS VivoBook 15 Thin and Light Laptop, 15.6” FHD Display, Intel Core i3-1005G1 CPU, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD, Backlit Keyboard, Fingerprint, Windows 10 Home in S Mode, Slate Gray, F512JA-AS34 by Larry Breeze

Revainrating 5 out of 5

Excellent hardware for the price. Good for Linux, with some hurdles.

Let's start with the hardware itself. I was worried the screen would be as awful as some of these imply ratings. In my opinion, the screen is just great. It's probably not good in very bright sunlight or for video or photo editing. Otherwise, if you just want to work in the office or surf the web, that's good enough, and that's no reason to ditch this laptop. If you are already used to higher quality displays or have high demands on displays, stop being cheap and try to spend a little more money. I like the feel and look of the keyboard, but I don't really like its layout. It's unusual to fit a keyboard into a laptop of this size, but it's too close to the other keys. As a result, you sometimes press the numeric keypad instead of typing or returning. It's annoying, but not a deal breaker, and if you type a lot like me, you'll probably find that you can develop a kind of muscular/spatial familiarity where this becomes a rare problem very quickly. I bought this laptop to install Linux enabled. To make this possible, I had to tinker with the BIOS a bit. First you need to disable Secure Boot and some other settings in the BIOS. The next problem was that this machine doesn't seem to be able to boot from the microSD card slot at all. I was able to boot from the USB stick. After setting the onboard storage interface mode to AHCI in the BIOS, I was able to complete the installation and everything worked great. For the record, I installed the "elementaryOS" distribution.

Pros
  • Latest 10th Gen Intel Core i3-1005G1 Processor (4MB Cache, up to 3.4GHz)
Cons
  • Long wait