Vizio Thin + Light CT15-A1 15.6-Inch Laptop

First off, let's just get this out there: paper spec-wise, few other laptops can compare to this laptop in my opinion. Laptops with 15" 1080p IPS screens are very few and far between, and then weighing just 4 pounds and being very thin is icing on the cake. The rest of the system is pretty average for this price range nowadays, but if you haven't experienced a screen like this you might just not realize how big of an asset it truly is.Now, the caveats: the first sample I got had a rattly fan. It was very noticeable, and made me worry that it might break after a short amount of time. Wanting my laptop to last more than a few weeks, I returned it and got another which was quick and painless, but it definitely did not inspire confidence in Vizio's build quality. My second CT15-A1 is fine, but I'm strongly considering the 3 year aftermarket warranty that Amazon offers just in case it has problems down the line. Not only is this laptop priced very aggressively, but Vizio is brand new to the laptop space, so it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect some growing pains with early models. Subjectively, the laptop feels like it's actually built very well. The aluminum body is stiff, and there's very little screen flex. The screen hinge is stiff without being too stiff. There are no obvious build quality defects like bumps under the keyboard or that kind of thing (which I had with my previous Dell XPS M1330).With that out of the way, I do have to say that I truly love this laptop. It's crazy lightweight for the specs. The matte 1080p IPS screen is beautiful, and when calibrated with my X-Rite i1 Display 2 (using the Lacie Blue Eye software), the average dE is less than 0.2. Read: this display is capable of near perfect reference color reproduction. I can do Adobe Lightroom work on this laptop without color reproduction concerns any more, in fact I moved away from a separate monitor to save space on my desk and for a little extra cash.The keyboard is very nice tactile-wise. Before I got this laptop, I was using a mechanical keyboard with Cherry Blue switches. So I definitely appreciate the benefits of a nice keyboard. And while the keys aren't the same as a mechanical keyboards', they're still nice. The travel is pretty limited but there's good feedback. It's not too loud but also isn't silent. Everything's laid out pretty nice, although I'm not a fan of the arrow key setup and I hate the complete lack of home/end/pgup/pgdown navigation keys. I think the default option of the F1-12 keys acting as special function keys without needing to hold fn is an excellent decision. I only ever used F5 for refreshing a page, which can be accomplished by ctrl-r, but on the other hand I need volume, playback, and brightness control very often. One thing I have noticed that could be a problem: sometimes it seems like key presses aren't noticed, and other times it seems like I unintentionally double press a key. I'm a very fast typer (about 90 words per minute on a 1 minute test), so it could be that I'm just being really inaccurate with a new keyboard, but if you're concerned about this I would check for a trend in other reviews.The touchpad is okay at best, and if it's having a bad day it's absolutely terrible. This is my first multi-touch touchpad, so my experience here should be noted as very limited overall. I like the gestures, and scrolling usually works pretty well. I really like that the entire touchpad clicks in for a left click - no more need to keep my left hand on the click button. I dislike that the default option for touch to click is "on". This was an amazingly stupid decision that wreaks of limited to no end-user testing. It makes typing almost impossible because there's no palm detection and merely brushing the pad moves your cursor. But thankfully this can be turned off, and as I mentioned previously the push-in-entire-pad-to-click design makes it unnecessary anyway. As another reviewer mentioned, sometimes the touchpad decides to just take a break and turn off. Other times, it decides to get all coked out and just randomly go around the screen, in no clear relation to what I'm actually trying to do. I'm not exaggerating. It's just completely broken in that respect. I have the most recent drivers and occasionally this happens with just no warning at all. It's infrequent enough that it's not critical, but it's pretty pathetic. Finally, it should be noted that there's no off button for the pad. I feel this is OK with touch to click being set off, since then the pad shouldn't randomly click unless you have a habit of bending your wrist to go between your hands and pressing down pretty stiffly, but it's still something some users might be concerned about.So, basically, plan on using a trackball or a mouse with this laptop.The ports are a little limited. Just two USB ports and only HDMI kind of sucks. Lots of projectors are still behind the curve and only have VGA, but the D-Sub connector is huge so I can't blame VIZIO for leaving it out.The headphone audio is really nice. I would consider myself a practical audiophile - I don't believe in $500 power cable snake oil, but I appreciate a good DAC and good pair of cans. In that regard, the audio from this VIZIO is pretty respectable. There's none of the hissing that you get with truly awful DAC/amp combos, but it's also nothing to write home about and the gain is pretty low. Shouldn't be a problem unless you're planning on driving expensive high impedance cans, in which case you're probably the type of person to have an external DAC/amp combo anyway.Also, cool feature sidenote: like smartphones, the laptop detects when headphones are plugged in, and it remembers the difference between last speaker volume and last headphone volume. So otherwise, you can have the speaker volume set to muted but the headphone volume set to average so you won't disturb anyone but still not have to mess with the volume constantly.Finally, the OS experience is very nice. Turning on from standby is instantaneous. Turning on from hibernate isn't blazing fast but still only about 20 or 30 seconds. Turning on from being completely off or restarting takes about probably only 15 or 20 seconds. Not having bloatware is a godsend. This is the first prebuilt I've ever bought where I didn't do a Windows fresh install first thing. I just uninstalled the Bing and Zune crap and I was good to go 30 seconds later. Also, as a sidenote, there aren't ridiculous brand stickers plastered all over the place. The CT15 has a great design that's very nice to look at, and they obviously cared more about the user experience than absurd brand identity/advertising when they were designing it.Final geek note: I haven't tried yet, but I see any kind of hardware changes being difficult or impossible. The entire underside of the laptop is a single piece, so there's no easy-to-access hard drive, RAM, etc. doors. This is frustrating, especially since I'd like to drop in a 512GB SSD in a few months since the prices keep dropping and 128GB is a little small, but I would research into this more if you're considering the laptop and need this capability.Anyway, to summarize, this is an amazing laptop for the price. The screen is superb, and doesn't even require a "for the price" qualifier. Everything else is pretty average, with nothing being terrible except the touchpad depending on how much you plan on using it and if you're OK with messing with the settings (very easy to do). The internals are nice, but you might not be able to change them (research this if it matters to you). It's indeed very thin and light, and again at a great price. I recommend it, but consider the quality control risks before buying., and if you're willing to also carry around a mouse or a trackball.Really I would have given this laptop a -1 star for the touchpad, and -0.5 stars for the one I had to replace. But since you can't do out of 10 ratings, I think a 4 is more appropriate because the rest of the laptop is good and the screen is greaet.

The notebook is awesome, fast, thin and light with brilliant display.The touchpad is a little bit cockeyed, but with wireless mouse, it's not a problem.Cool design and fantastic IPS display!Update after using it for 1 year:Touchpad and keyboard are really awful and low quality. SSD drive died exactly after 1 year of using without any symptoms ahead.I was using a laptop around 1 hour per day for internet surfing.VIZIO, you have to think more about details your customers will never forgive!Think twice before going with VIZIO...

Given that Windows 7 laptops aren't easy to find nowadays (no new ones are being offered,) and given that my daughter requested a VERY light laptop to take to college, this one was the one I settled on, despite the notoriously bad touchpad warnings. We discussed it ahead of time, and agreed that a wireless mouse would be acceptable, given that the rest of the features were good.I bought one, it arrived as described, and was actually a surprisingly good little laptop, with the only significant disclaimers being that the 128Gb solid state drive is arguably pretty small (although replacements are apparently available, if you're not opposed to DIY projects,) and the touchpad is, indeed, pretty bad. It likes to double click, instead of single click. It gets confused about light touches, and then leaps about sometimes. It needs special software from Vizio to manage its more entertaining properties, which cannot be managed straight from the control panel. However, to be fair, apart from the double clicking issue, it did not perform as badly as some of the reviews stated.After getting it set up and ready for my young one's college experience, I decided I liked it enough to get one for myself, so I ordered a second one. Within 10 minutes of opening the second one, I was having a LOT of trouble with the touchpad. It would get stuck, refuse to move, wait for 5 minutes before it would start again, etc.... all of the worst things described by other reviews. I grabbed a spare USB mouse and plugged it in, when it got too stuck to continue, in the middle of setting up a backup job. It was AWFUL. So, why the five star review?A trip to Vizio's website, from which it was exceptionally easy to navigate to the right drivers, produced a page of updated drivers, including one for the Touchpad, which was the only one Vizio listed as "recommended"... and for good reason! The driver installation was a little hinky (the installer installs a second installer, which must then be run to actually update the driver,) but, one reboot later, the touchpad actually WORKS.To anyone having trouble with the touchpad on the Vizio Thin and Light models, I wholeheartedly recommend the driver update, straight from Vizio. I know that driver updates are often a waste of time when troubleshooting random things, but, in this case, it makes ALL the difference, and takes less than five minutes. After updating the driver, I removed my USB mouse, and have been enjoying the laptop, as it was meant to be.Bargain basement price, beautiful screen, fast (though small) SSD, HDMI output, and exceptionally light == a good laptop! Just be prepared to update the touchpad driver, and install the free version of Macrium Reflect to burn a bootable USB drive for regular backups and better bare-metal restore functionality than the recovery partition. (Macrium backups on this, before installing more than Firefox and MS Office, take about 15 Gigs for a full backup, so one of the $20 small form factor 64 Gig Samsung USB drives turned out to be a useful solution.)