Pros: Love every thing about it

Cons: bloatware

Other Thoughts: to bad this bad boy isn't for sale anymore.

Pros: Excellent, very fast and solid laptop, a lot of features are supported, a little unusual touchad with extra functionality where we could use 2 or 3 fingers. And it's all configurable for sure. I easily installed 16 GB RAM and have fun now being able to start several virtual machines simultaneously. If not that, I usually start a RAMDRIVE with 4-8 GB and redirect all temp files to this drive, plus I use it as a system booster. The RAM drive shows me about 4.250 GB/sec read/write, which is incredible. The hard drive is quick enough, but I made it little slower whe I enabled encryption, which I like to have. Screen... it works, but there is nothing special in it. It could be much better, but I realize it would consume more battery plus it would be more expensive.

Cons: Keyboard is a big pain. I spent over a month trying to get used to it. It's solid, but the main complaint - the key locations. The function keys are worst I've ever seen. Plus the text on these keys is very small making them hard to understand and locate. If you finally get an association between these keys and number keys it will help you, but not very significantly. The right side of the keyboard including navigation keys, insert/delete keys was designed by someone who just came to this business and has no idea how a standard layout should look like. You will feel sick for the first few weeks trying to use your usual blind style typing and missing the keys that you wanted to click. Very annoying!!! Other than that - nothing serious. An optional backlight for the keyboard would be a brilliant solution! I want it so much! Also after I got this laptop I noticed another model with BD. The only difference between two models was $20 and I'd rather buy the one with the BD support than mine.

Other Thoughts: Light and powerful with very solid case. Bloatware, like others complained? I reinstaled the entire system from scratch ad had couple troubles trying to resoove the software dependencies and get everything working. There is a predefined order of the software to be installed, or it will never work. I also made one mistake first. After I got USB3 working I decided to install the USB drivers that I got from the ASUS web site. Oooops, USB3 was lost. Only later I realized that I need to deinstall the USB2 drivers in order to get working USB3. USB2 was found later and win automatically installed the required drivers. The video drivers are the mess. Yes, they work, the video is great, but, to my surprise, it shows that I have both Intel and NVidia hardware. and the Intel drivers show me a very limited amount of dedicated VRAM, like 64 MB. Instead, NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M shows the whole amount of video memory. I'm not sure why it was done this way.

Pros: I love the speakers and how it adapts to your headphones. It does not blow you away when switching between headphones and speakers. I use this for school stuff and to do some video editing. Works like a dream and battery life pretty good. Slick design of the outer shell. I7 processor is swift.

Cons: Larger battery would be good and less annoying bloatware but that is the price you pay now for any machine.

Pros: Super Fast. Palm Rest stays cool. Keyboard does not have any flex issues. Full size keyboard with number pad. Beautiful Screen. Sound quality of speakers is very nice. Lowest volume level is louder than my last laptops highest volume. I maxed out memory to 16gb. Runs amazing. Has cool features like change bios post pic and sound to whatever you want. has 2 year warranty and one year ADH. also if you register with asus you can send off for an extra year of ADH. Runs pretty cool in my lap. Worth the money!

Cons: Bigger than i thought it would be. Looks like it could be a 17" screen. Also makes it a little heavier but I dont mind. I mean it is an i7 in a laptop.
doesnt have a back lit keyboard which i really wanted but i couldnt resist this unit for the price and specs.

Other Thoughts: comes partitioned on 2 drives. not an issue - burn the recovery cd's then run the setup it will ask you how you want it partitioned. now mine has 1 large disk.

Pros: Powerful quad core processor with Turbo Boost (sandy bridge)
Battery life is surprisingly good for this much power (can get around 4 hours with normal use)
Probably thanks to Optimus
Good speakers and sound
Solid video card can run modern games on higher settings
7200 RPM 750GB HD
Atheros Wireless so that should play well in Linux
Good cooling system if you're right handed
USB 3.0

Cons: Resolution is a bit low, the XV1 (I think) is a good option if considering this laptop.
Optimus and Linux do not get along very well
Some may not like the keyboard although I don't have any problems with it and I'm a speed typer.
No recovery disc or OS Disc - took 6 DVD's to make recovery. Probably standard, but disappointing.
Tons of bloatware - be careful removing it as it will be easy to disable the hard function keys on top. You'll probably need to re download ATK or something.
Big for 15.6 inches

Other Thoughts: Overall it's a pretty powerful laptop at a good price. I would take a look at the XV1 too as it may suit your needs better if high resolution is important. If you're a big Linux user I would maybe look for something without Optimus, although perhaps it will be working in Linux relatively soon.

Pros: Good battery life. Fast. i7 SandyBridge processor. Runs remarkably cool for that much power. Nvidia discreet graphics. Massive hard drive running at 7200 rpm. No problems with this thing at all so far. A nice bonus for me is that you can set it so that the touch pad is disabled any time a mouse is attached. I am a bit clumsy and was forever bumping the touch pad on my old notebook, and that would send the cursor off to somewhere else in my document than where I needed it to be. Very frustrating, but not with this one. Battery life is decent. I forgot to plug it in one morning and ran for almost three hours on the high power setting before I got a notice I was almost out of juice.

Cons: It is physically a little bit bigger than I expected a 15.6" laptop to be. When it is closed, you'd swear to look at it that it was a 17" model. Also, there is a fair amount of Asus bloatware preloaded. Not sure I'll use any of it or not.

Other Thoughts: Some others have complained about the hard drive being partitioned into two drive letters. Drive C: is approximately 250 GB and drive D: takes up most of the rest of the drive space. Not a problem for me. I can keep my data on the D: partition & not have to try to relaod everything if I ever have to reinstall Windows.

Pros: *Sturdy Design
*Great heat management (It's hottest is my old laptops coolest!)
*Keyboard has nice feel
*Touchpad is actually pretty good, multi-touch and I usually hate touchpads.
*No visible screws anywhere on the case which is a nice design touch.
*USB3.0!
*I'm more of an AMD guy but can't beat the Core i7 in a laptop!
*The 4GB of RAM is via 2 2GB sticks which leaves 2 empty slots. Makes for an easy upgrade of RAM.

I love the overall look and design.

Cons: *You have to be careful about what bloatware you take off. Uninstalling all the ASUS software will probably cause you to lose the functionality of the dedicated volume buttons. To fix this, you will have to get the ATK driver package off their website and install that. I actually had to do it twice before it worked right but all is well now. The way ASUS did their drivers could be MUCH better.

*The screen color looks a bit light colored like the brightness is maxed out but adjusting brightness and/or contrast doesn't really fix it.

Other Thoughts: I bought this to replace a roughly 5 year old HP Pavilion that finally died beyond repair. ASUS seems to be a great replacement.

It probably would work a little better if the power connector was at a right angle but I consider that a pretty minor thing.

Overall, great laptop, worth the money!

Pros: I had my eye on this, and the G53JW-XN1. I went with this as I am not a dedicated gamer, and I figured I would utilize the Sandy Bridge and HM65 chipset more than the video card difference, and I absolutly love it. Had it for just over a month now. Not only does it have the nice "shiney" effect, but very sturdy feeling as mentioned in the earlier post. I put in the Home to Pro update as I use this for work in a domain environment, put the 2008 admin tools on it with some fun network tools and cant beleive how this thing asks for more, on top of the monitor tools and other multimedia apps that are currently running. This is very quick to load, coming from XP that is. I havnt done heavy processor tasks while on battery, but I have had it running multiple office programs, multiple remote desktop sessions and a couple webpage monitor programs, and the battery has lasted over 4 hours on the media setting. 4 Memory slots, only 2 are used.

Cons: I am used to a 17" screen, so the 15" is a little strange, but very clear. I wish there was an option for a backlit keyboard, but I wonder if I would ever need it.

Other Thoughts: Run with Graphics Processor... heard good things, but never checked it out first hand yet.

Pros: The CPU is Powerful, its more than you will ever need. It has USB 3.0, HM65 Chipset, and the best ram you can get. The speakers are amazing for a laptop. It sounds good with Pandora. The touch pad is nice and responsive. The laptop overall feels strong and well crafted. This Sandy Bridge Intel CPU beats the i7 950 and uses half the power.

Cons: The only thing i think it could have had is a better screen. Higher resolution for Auto Cad. It also could have had an e-sata port on it. Battery is okay, lasted about 3 hours with the Intel graphics. Better than my old laptop with a Core 2 Duo. Bloat Ware!

Other Thoughts: The Nvidia GeForce 540M is wonderful for anything you throw at it. A better alternative would have been the GeForce 550M. It has DDR5 instead.