I purchased this computer (S56CA-WH31) for me to use at
college, and have been configuring it for him for the past couple of days. Here
are a few of my impressions so far:
The overall construction is very good except for one
issue - the DVD tray extends out from the side of the laptop by about 1 mm. One
on-line reviewer noticed that the fit of the DVD tray was off in his review
model also, but I am surprised that this got through into the production
models. It is not a big issue, but it definitely
detracts from the look of the aluminum body.
The screen is bright and clear and has good viewing angles. The keyboard is
nice and big and works well with my hunt and peck. The large scroll pad is
nice, and I am liking the imbedded buttons more than I thought I would.
The operating system is Windows 8 core (not pro).
There is an ASUS-branded software DVD player, so I
didn't have to upgrade to pro to get the windows media pack for DVD play as I
feared I might have to. There is no utility to create recovery DVD's even
though the paper manual refers to one called AI recovery. There is a Bluetooth
module, so the "reviewer" who says that there isn't one is wrong.
The 500 GB hard drive is partitioned into a number of
system and recovery partitions and a C: system partition of about 186 GB along
with a D: data "drive" of about 258 GB. I used the Windows 8 disk
manager to first remove the D: partition, expand the system "drive"
to around 400 GB, and then used the rest of the space for a 39 GB D: drive just
in case the recovery software expects to find the D:
drive there.
I installed Start8 from Stardock to get a start menu back on the desktop, and
have ordered a 4GB SODIMM to expand the memory up to 8 GB - I figured more memory would be useful
especially with the imbedded HD-4000 graphics.
I don't know what the reviewer who was complaining that this was a
"slow" computer was talking about. It has a windows
experience score of 4.8, which is not bad for an I-3 without turbo-boost
and with imbedded graphics. It won't play highly graphics intensive games, but
that's not what I bought it for, not should you expect it from the online
specs.
so why i like asus.