Pros: Crisp & bright 1920 x 1200 screen, fast & efficient processor, 4gb ram, decent graphics card, fingerprint reader, robust & comfortable keyboard, good speakers, excellent wireless reception, 2nd hard drive bay, HDMI & eSata ports, overall build quality. 2 year warranty.

Cons: Fingerprint magnet. No compact flash slot. Larger & heavier than some other 17" notebooks, due in part to the speakers this thing has. Ugly styling; why don't they just give us a cleanly-designed machine like Apple does? And why do PC notebook manufacturers have to put those darn stickers all over the place?

Overall Review: Very good value for the money - a powerful desktop replacement suitable for most, unless you're a hard-core gamer in which case you probably won't be satisfied with the graphics performance - but a super graphics card would have jacked up the price of this machine and it would no longer be such a good value. You'll need the M70SV-1A HD bracket from Asus if you want to install another hard drive. I installed two 7200rpm drives in raid-0 and use the 320gb drive in an external eSata housing for backup & storage. With this configuration it is a really good video & photo editing machine. Configure an equivalent Apple and you'll pay twice as much for a lesser machine: no HDMI or eSata ports, no 2nd hard drive bay.