ASUS K53 Series K53E-BD4TD Notebook - A Grade Intel Core i5 2430M(2.40GHz) 15.6" 4GB Memory DDR3 500GB HDD 5400rpm DVD±R/RW

Pros: Fast Laptop for the price. Decent Battery Life if not kept at high performance. You can squeeze some life out of this laptop by upgrading the amount of RAM in it. It'll play some newish games but none of them particularly well. The latest Counter Strike runs very well on it, but that's not really saying much. Games like the Witcher 2/Metro 2033 won't run any higher than 10-20 FPS regardless of settings and tweaks.

Cons: - The Screen is pretty bad overall. Luckily I just use the HDMI port to view movies via my HDTV.

- The Battery charge port broke about a month after purchasing. I have to lean the laptop on it's side so the weight of the laptop shoves the cord into the port in order for the charging to occur. And given the fact that playing any games or watching HD Movies requires the Laptop to be on High Performance, the battery life drains very quickly.

- I've never bought a refurbished laptop before, so I can't say this happens often. But my hard drive wasn't fully formatted back to default settings. My laptop used to show up as "Michelle's PC" (my name is not Michelle) until I manually changed it myself. It was almost like someone just went through and tried to manually delete files from the previous owner instead of a full format, which worries me about what type of information could have been left on some of these being sold.

Other Thoughts: - Buy extra Ram.
- I upgraded to Windows 8 and it seems the battery life is about 40-60 minutes longer.
- My particular HDD came pre Partitioned. So I have a C and a D drive. I have a problem with this for two reasons. 1. I've always found two partitions to be pretty useless, especially with only a 500 GB hard drive. And 2. It, once again, leads me to believe that maybe the hard drive wasn't fully formatted back to it's original factory settings.

Pros: none none

Cons: screen went bad keyboard and now wifi pice of junk should have known better to buy asus

Other Thoughts: asus is junk!!!!!!

Pros: fast, good display, nice keyboard

Cons: touchpad stop working after 6 mos

Pros: Fast and legible.

Cons: Hard drive crashed within 8 months.

Pros: Fast, responsive. Great ASUS laptop

Cons: None

Pros: This computer will do all the basic things, has a big screen and a good keyboard.

Cons: The screen is terrible, bad viewing angle and horrible color representation. Whites are blown out at any acceptable brightness and contrast setting. Don't buy this to watch movies. Good for productivity. Battery is lasting a long time.

Other Thoughts: Spend the extra 100 to 200 dollars and get a better screen if this is your go-to machine.

Pros: Fast, i5 processor, good battery life.

Cons: The screen is poor quality all the way around. Bad viewing angle, blown out contrast, unable to calibrate to anything even remotely close to accurate color representation.

Other Thoughts: For a general use computer, this is a solid buy and good value. The battery lasts a long time and the screen is 16:9 format so the 15.6 inches is very wide. That is about the only good thing I can say about the screen, though. It is substandard for a modern laptop in every way. If you just want to see what you are doing, great. If you want to do any multimedia work or even watch movies, you probably want to see if another 100 bucks can get you something with a better screen. I'm keeping it because those tasks are 4th on my list, and I can live with the screen for word processing, emails, and work related tasks - the main reasons I bought this. When I say live with the screen, that is exactly what I mean. Other small complaint is no Bluetooth, but a 10 dollar adapter will solve that problem, just would be nice to not have an adapter sticking out of the computer. Weight is a manageable 6 pounds or so, but you won't mistake this for an ultra portable computer either. Did I mention the screen is awful?

Pros: -Great price
-Great specs
-ASUS makes amazing gear, no exception here
-Looks simple and clean
-Has all the ports I need
-Etc, etc, etc

Cons: -The keyboard has a lot of give, but I am a button smasher. I am also OCD about everything, so it may be nothing.
-The touchpad is great, but the buttons are super stiff. I really don't like them at all.

Other Thoughts: I got this for about $420 (refurb), and I dropped an additional $140 on a quality SSD and 8 gigs of quality ram. You can't beat this laptop for what I spent on it.

Pros: Good Specs for the Price. Very quiet. Looks sleek.

Cons: After 35 days of use i got two splotches of dead pixels on the screen. Not that big of a deal at first. Next day those two splotches turned into a large line of dead pixels going down the left hand side of my screen. I guess that's what i get for buying a refurbished product.

Other Thoughts: Be warned when you buy refurbished products. I've heard stories of them coming out fine but i guess this ones a no.

Pros: very light - nice raised keyboard design and i-5 speed. I added a matched pair of 8gb ram since DDR3 is so cheap these days.

Cons: I had an issue with the charger staying plugged in and contacted the manufacturer - Asus - and received a very polite English speaking rep. which was nice and sent the laptop back to Asus on Thursday and received the repaired laptop on the following Thursday. It turned out to be a defective power cord which was replaced and now my daughter's laptop is good to go.

Other Thoughts: I have purchased many refurbished electronic products over the past few years and I honestly can't complain too much about any of them and I will continue to purchase these items which are almost always in pristine condition although they arrive in a plain brown box.