ASUS Zenbook Prime Intel Core i5 4GB 128GB SSD 13.3" FHD Ultrabook Radiant Silver (UX31A-R5102F)

Pros: Beautiful looking. The best looking LCD screen I have every laid eyes on...from ANY angle, HANDS DOWN! Doesn't show fingerprints. Stays Cool. Immense hibernate time.

Cons: Glorious in form, left things to be desired in function. Many unnecessary programs/bloatware taking up precious SSD space. I was unfortunate enough to receive one of these with the Sandisk SSD...and it may as well not even be a SSD with the way it performs. I will tell you how I knew, before I even ran AS SSD benchmark. I removed a few of the unnecessary programs from the laptop and then installed the few programs my fiancee needed to do what she does. After a couple days I asked her what she thought of this Ultrabooks Ultra performance. She replied, "It seems a little slow compared to my (old) dell." Her old dell was the Studio XPS 13, the first gen of XPS laptops. Which I had installed a 1st generation seagate SSHD into a couple years ago. It wasn't particularly slow, but this Zenbook PRIME should have easily been able to best it. I started playing around with it and noticed that simple tasks were taking longer than they should have. I ran AS SSD, with newest Intel drivers, got the following: Sequential Read - Write: 389.07 MB/s - 232.08 MB/s 4K Read - Write: 6.52 MB/s - 7.45 MB/s 4K-64Thrd Read - Write: 25.67 MB/s - 6.91 MB/s Access Time Read - Write: 0.571 ms - 0.531 ms Sequential times are fair, but this thing falls flat on its face after that. I'm pretty sure my Patriot Pyro from 6 years ago would have outperformed this ______ Sandisk SSD in the latter 3 tests. Aside from the lackluster SSD performance, the WiFi was at first disappointing. Disappointing turned into utter failure, literally. I tried everything I could to get the WiFi to work again after it stopped. I updated the BIOS, All drivers including WiFi, Uninstalled the WiFi card from Windows and manually installed drivers from ASUS's site, Windows troubleshoot/Auto Repair, and using the included Intel WiFi diagnostics tool. The Intel diag tool told me that I needed to power cycle my modem/router or that I have a problem with my internet connection. Being a nerd, the FIRST thing I tried was to power cycle my modem and router, LOL. I have 11 other WiFi capable devices in my household and they all connect just fine. When the WiFi was working, on either 2.4GHz or 5GHz, the SpeedTest.net results were worse than any other WiFi device in my house. Which include my 3570k powered HTPC, the old XPS Dell laptop, my ASUS K55A laptop, my ASUS eeePC 1215P netbook, and both our HTC Rezound cell phones. Compared to the other PCs in my house, the ping results were 5x higher(59ms compared to 10-12ms) on the Zenbook, while the download/upload speeds were between 50% and 75% of what the others were showing.

Overall Review: I am extremely disappointed in ASUS as a brand and the Zenbook name as a whole after my 2 bad experiences with this Zenbook Prime and the UX31E-XB51 I received mispackaged twice. I went to a local retailer and bought a Toshiba Satellite U945-S4140. I was impressed at the speed of the included Samsung 32GB mSATA SSD which I installed Windows 7 onto just to see how well it would perform. What is even better is the fact that the RAM, mSATA SSD, HDD, and WiFi cards are all housed under one cover which only requires removing ONE screw! This Ultrabook uses 2 RAM DIMMs so you get the speed/power of dual-channel DDR3, unlike the Zenbooks. I upgraded both the boot SSD and the included HDD to a SSD. Now my fiancee has an Ultrabook with dual SSDs! Sure this Toshiba doesn't have the s e x appeal of the Zenbook, but it worked properly out of the box. Plus if the SSDs, RAM or WiFi card fail, I can easily replace them...this can't be said for most of these items on the Zenbooks.

Pros: heviness thinness, boot times.

Cons: keybord: You cn tell by the horrible typing on this tht my keybord is broken fter bout 50 dys of use. bout third of the keys hve stopped working despite no hrd use. Hopefully they will replce it becuse it is impossible to use for college without these importnt keys. It just stopped working one dy out of the blue. Online forums show it is common issue with these lptops

Overall Review: Do not buy. This is usully g8 compny but this product is horrible. I'm very, very sorry for horrid typing nd being hrd to understnd but I cn't do better with these keys

Pros: Lite weight looks

Cons: Poorly built Sub par performance

Overall Review: Two screws fell out of the bottom, I contacted Tech support asking if they could simply send me two news ones. Their response was, Dear Customer, I'm sorry that screws are not covered under warranty. We can't provide it to customer. Thank you. An email survey will be sent to you within the next 5 days. Please be sure to rate the service I provided to you today. Best regards, Gloria ASUS Product Support Team I have been a loyal Asus customer for year, I have bought 3 laptops, 2 tablets, 2 routers, 3 motherboards, video cards and a netbook. I've had to deal with customer support a few times and they are terrible. I will finding new brands in the future. Actually I already have, purchased a new tablet today, and it wasn't an Asus.

Pros: This laptop is super thin and Full HD (1080P). I was not concerned with the processing power, since it is mainly for me to connect via remote desktop to my office computer. However, the i5 processor and the SSD have provided a very smooth experience. Stays very cool, even when sitting on a mattress without a cooling pad.

Cons: one of the screws popped out of the bottom. I had to buy a #4 torx screw driver to put it back in. SSD is made by SanDisk. I've read some bad reviews on their 120GB drives, but so far it's working for me. Had to do a factory restore once, but most likely due to conflict in windows updates.

Overall Review: It's not a touch screen and it runs windows 7. I'm ok with that because that was exactly what I wanted. My main reason for purchasing was that it's FHD so it does not resize my desktop when I access remotely. I was in the middle of a windows update when the system just hung. I'm glad I did not get rid of the hidden partition where all the restore images were held. I was able to boot into the Asus factory restore function and was back up and running in 20 minutes. Windows updates took another 3000 hours to complete however.

Pros: Everything but the keyboard and touchpad.

Cons: Keyboard and touchpad. The touchpad is not really bad but it does get annoying when typing because it is very sensitive and often disrupts typing. The keyboard is probably the worst keyboard I have every seen. It starts out fine but the product is poorly designed so the connector cuts in and out and sometimes the keyboard randomly won't work (last night almost half the keys cut out). The problem is this is a reoccurring problem that will arise again once fixed. ASUS will try and repair it but chances are it will stop working within a month or two. If you love dealing with constant repairs and shipping cost, go ahead and buy it but if not, don't waste you time because once 30 days is past, you are stuck with a very expensive paperweight that ASUS doesn't really want to be accountable for.

Overall Review: Please don't buy this product. ASUS has always been a reliable brand for me but not this time.

Pros: - Extremely Light and portable - Snappy performance, Long Battery Life (6.5hrs max, ~4.5-5 hrs with continuous, average use). - Win 7 64bit - Backlit keyboard - High resolution IPS screen - Good Price - Impressive Design on Screen Cover

Cons: - Very bad backlight bleed in black screen. - Problems with Loud/Excessive CPU Fan Speed (fan revs up and down unnecessarily, but only after coming out of sleep mode. VERY annoying in a quiet room - eg. lecture hall). Required BIOS Update to 215 and Updates to Intel Thermal Policy Software to fix. (Problem is well documented on forums but also required an extensive amount of research on my part to find this fix) - As the person below me mentioned, stock trackpad driver is AWFUL. Trackpad out of box is jumpy and you cannot enable edge scroll (only a two-finger gesture scroll was offered in settings). Cannot be fixed using ASUS's SmartarseGesture driver. Fix was to download generic ELAN trackpad drivers v11.7.8.5. After this, works great. - Poor graphics performance (no surprise here, wasn't expecting any better - not a gaming rig).

Overall Review: Overall a great, impressively thin and light laptop that comes with a few flaws that could have been avoided with marginally better quality control. The BIOS update to fix fan speeds and the trackpad driver update is a MUST, otherwise you'll have a miserable experience with this laptop out of box. - My primary use: for school.

Pros: Very Light, but still sturdy. key board is good, decent travel on the keys especially for something so thin. Screen is super crisp and bright used it in bright day light with no problems. 1080p fits a ton of code on such a small screen. Battery life is amazing compared to my fat old core 2 duo laptop. The price was great but that comes with buying a 1 year old laptop as the next gen are coming out.

Cons: Must be near sighted to benefit from extra pixel density on this thing. The track pad is horrific a Bluetooth mouse is a must for any serious work on this laptop.

Overall Review: The price is good because the next gen i5's are starting to roll out and this laptop has been discontinued.