Pros: Excellent specifications for the money. Just across the board. Bright screen, good graphics performance, HDMI, Blu-Ray, etc. This system is loaded.

Cons: In my opinion, the system is ugly. The unit actually looks nicer in person than it does in pictures. Still, there are too many competing colors and textures. The overall result is a system that looks like a jumble of parts without any real design focus. The keyboard is bad. I dont have the flex problems with mine that others have reported, but as you move left to right on the keyboard, the keys suddenly get tiny when you get passed the letters. In particular, the right shift key is so small its not worth using. The culprit here is the number pad. Completely unnecessary. Give me a normal sized keyboard without the pad and this is a much better system. The touch sensitive keys at the top are nice, but one of them two of them are hardware switches for the wifi and bluetooth. If those buttons stop working while the cards are disabled.. then what? I would feel more comfortable with physical switches.

Overall Review: At the end of the day, its the specs that matter. All of my gripes about the keyboard.. who cares? I have an external keyboard plugged into this thing 90% of the time. I bought it for gaming, not writing term papers. Sure its ugly. I considered an Alienware system. It was the same price, but ALL of the specs were lower. Less ram, slower proc, less powerful video card.. but it looked pretty! Seriously, think about what you are buying and why you are buying it. I dont go to LAN parties and I dont hang out at Starbucks. I didnt buy a laptop to impress people with how pretty it is. What I bought was a VERY POWERFUL laptop for an amazing price. And at 7 pounds, this is a relatively light weight system considering its 17". The Alienware laptop I looked at was 15" and 7 pounds. Their 17" I looked at was 9.5 pounds! This is an amazing system for the price.