ASUS 14.0" Intel Celeron 1000M 4GB Memory Windows 8 64-Bit X401A-BCL0705Y

Pros: Light weight, decent screen, very good touchpad responsiveness and size, advanced close-the-lid standby or sleep mode, decent battery life (3+hours with screen at full brightness). Windows 8.1 upgradable. Fan is quiet, unit doesn't get too warm. 14" laptops fit way better in most backpacks, in my opinion. Allows VGA or HDMI connections.

Cons: The physical click portion of the touchpad requires a bit more pressure than I like, and makes a loud clunky click--but it works. I just got used to touch-clicking, rather than using the left physical button. The rubber bumpers around the screen bezel are the kind that are prone to damaging the display if your notebook gets very compressed inside a backpack with a lot of books--be careful or slide some sort of spacer to prevent bumper-to-body contact when the lid is closed (and it may be squished in a backpack). Screen brightness is great indoors, suffers outdoors. May have to get an external CD/DVD drive (for like thirty bucks) to keep on standby. No Bluetooth, which is kinda dumb.

Overall Review: The Celeron 1000M CPU s a far more capable than I would have guessed, and handles complex 2D graphics easily. Online research indicates that it should handle some 3D graphics and gaming at lower in-game settings and lower frame rates, but I have not tried. The slowest part of this laptop is probably the HDD, which could be replaced by a knowledgable person with a small SSD. Frankly, this is a great schoolwork and web surfing machine in a significantly more compact and lighweight package than your standard 15.x" laptop--and a pretty good deal, since it has the full year warranty (unlike most refurb units).

Pros: Hardware works as expected, thus far

Cons: Right out of the box, before anything else was done, Windows 8 failed to update(wouldn't even start to download the updates). Long story short, there were several registry errors, and Asus Tech support's recommendations did not help whatsoever. After various troubleshooting steps including factory restores, and recommendations from Microsoft forums and Microsoft fixit tools, 100+ cmd lines, and hours of frustration with no results, I finally got it to work by using a sequence of random suggestions from said forums. The exact cause and fixis still unknown, as around 5am (up all night) after just gambling with dozens of random ideas, it started to work.

One may argue this is not Asus' fault (who knows, it COULD be caused from the Asus Bloatware that's preinstalled), but whether that's the cause or not, Asus should not be shipping a product with such fundamental flaws that requires advance knowledge to fix, even if its caused by software they do not own.

And IF its 100% due to windows 8, and not some poor configuration on Asus' end, then with this OS being as old as it is they should ship it with exact instructions on how to bypass the issues, or at the very least Tech Support should have the exact steps to fix it.

Please note that I followed Asus' exact recommended steps to get the computer, right out of a full factory restore, to work properly to no avail before attempting my own methods.

Overall Review: None