Pros: - 17.3" screen 1920 x 1080 - setup was quick and easy; automated with Cortana voice recognition - illuminated keys are easy to see - keys were not noisy - key press action was just right - competitively priced (discounted)

Cons: - smaller battery compared to Titan - gaming graphics card uses more battery power - touch pad is tedious compared to a mouse - power button did not respond until I plugged in battery charger (battery was at 100% charge)

Overall Review: I narrowed my search to MSI or ASUS for a laptop in the goldilocks range. Instead of economy models by Acer, HP and Lenovo, for example, or a more expensive, fully-optimized notebook by Alienware, for example. Also, MSI and ASUS are motherboard brands, so they have earned my respect in more ways than one. Head to head, MSI performance tends to edge past ASUS in benchmark tests lately, so that was another plus. At the same time, if a similar deal was posted for an ASUS laptop, I may have purchased one. To me, they are that close. But MSI also has slightly higher quality hardware inside. Found this deal posted on slickdeals.com, and I jumped on it ($670). Because I was looking for a gaming laptop, which I do not plan to use for gaming. For example, gaming laptops tend to have ample I/O. Again, since I was not gaming, this model had all of the options minimized (see below): - Intel Core i5 9th Gen instead of Core i7 - CPU speed: 9300H (2.40GHz) instead of 9750H (2.60GHz) - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti instead of GTX 1660 Ti or GTX 1650 or RTX 2060 - Video memory: 4 GB instead of 6 GB - SSD: 256 GB instead of 512 GB - RAM: 8 GB instead of 16 GB One thing I would have preferred was an AMD CPU, but Intel Core i5 9th Gen is good. Another con would be the trackpad, well, any trackpad actually, because they are tedious. I prefer a mouse.