Asus Vivobook 14 Thin, Lightweight and Portable Laptop, AMD A9 CPU, Radeon-R5 Graphics, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, USB-C, Windows 10

I am an IT pro and bought this for family. For the price, you are buying great specs. The only sacrifice is FullHD for normal HD, naturally, for the performance upgrade under the hood. This device is solid, fast, and thin for the price point. No problems - would buy again. 5 stars.

My daughter’s old laptop finally gave up the ghost after losing a fight with a glass of water. I was considering getting a Chromebook since her schoolwork is mostly in Google Docs, however she wanted to be able to do some lightweight gaming and photo editing.Overall it’s great deal for the price. Not flashy, but solidly built. The keyboard has a tad bit of flex but nothing I haven’t seen in laptops double the price.It’s fast enough for basic tasks and the Ryzen APU is capable of playing decent games at the lower-than-HD native resolution. You’re not going to be playing with super smooth frame rates on a 1080p monitor, but for lightweight gaming it’s ok.The screen has decent viewing angles, and the trackpad is responsive, although it doesn’t support multitouch scrolling which is a bummer. Connectivity is decent with Ethernet, enough USB ports, and pretty good USB throughout.The adapter that came with it has a jack that is incredibly flimsy. It took a minor spill off my coffee table and happened to land right on the jack from about 10 inches up, onto a soft carpet, and the jack broke clean in half, so I had to order a new adapter. The laptop itself took the spill like a champ though.One word of warning - upon setup, the system wanted to upgrade to the most recent version of Windows 10 before proceeding. This upgrade did not go well - something happened during the setup that caused the upgrade to fail and I had to install a clean copy of WIndows from a USB stick. However my teenager was doing the update without guidance from me, so I’m willing to concede that it could have been user error.The good news is that the USB installation went smoothly (after a few hiccups typically involved in doing a ground-up Windows install from USB - getting into BIOS, making sure boot priority is set correctly, picking by the right partition to install to, etc). The system is running fine, drivers installed ok, and the bonus is that it has no vendor bloatware, so it all worked out for the best, a few hours of fiddling notwithstanding.If it had multitouch scrolling and a more robust adapter jack I’d have given it five stars, but I’d still recommend it as a good system for someone looking for a Windows PC with serviceable performance.

Getting this laptop was a huge drama to say the least. When I first received it an Amazon Locker (whoever hasn’t tried the Amazon Locker delivery option needs to due to convenience and security of delivery) turned out to be a disaster. I opened the package and noticed that there were finger prints all over the laptop and there was no plastic wrapping the charging cord which I found odd since I purchased this as NEW not old. When I powered it up (after charging it for a few minutes) it turned out that the laptop was indeed used. As shown in the attached photo, this was someone else’s computer. Must be an inside job because someone who didn’t like their own computer (Kathleen Davis, whoever you are, hope you get caught) switched it with my new laptop. I couldn’t even log into this computer and wipe it clean. It was on a locked screen and so I called Amazon immediately to see what could be done. I was leaving town in a few days and needed this laptop ASAP. I returned it the next day and they sent out a replacement immediately that day. I received a replacement laptop a few days later right before my flight and it was in working condition and brand new. The amazon customer service rep was very nice and helpful. They apologized for the problem and immediately replaced it with a new laptop because as shown in the listed item this is supposed to arrive to you as new not used so make sure this is accurate when you receive this.As far as the laptop itself, it gets the job done for a decently priced laptop. The battery doesn’t last very long. Maybe about 2-3 hours and the battery indicator saying how long you have until it gets to low power mode is not accurate. I’ve had it say I have 5 hours left. In reality I only had 2-3 hours left. So keep your charger handy. Make sure to run defrag and disk cleanup often. I installed Adobe Creative Cloud software on this laptop since I am a Graphic Designer and the laptop kept restarting while I’m working and I would lose all of my work even if I am just running nothing but Microsoft Word. Once I ran defrag it helped and no more resets so keep this in mind. As mentioned, I run Adobe products like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, etc and it works pretty well. It does not take too much time to open the software and it reacts quickly with your commands and opening of files. Just keep cleaning your computer often and you shouldn’t have any problems. Try not to run too many programs in the background if you are working on large files just in case because this is a laptop not a regular tower computer. A couple of annoying factors: (1) there is no backlight for the keys so it can be hard to see at night.(2) There is no indicator of when the Caps Lock is on. No light on the key itself shows if it’s enabled or not.(3) The trackpad is extremely sensitive. When you try to scroll down with both fingers it suddenly decides to zoom in to 200%.I bought this laptop for the price and capabilities. For a PC this is good to have on the go and gets the job done even for designers. I wish the screen was slightly bigger but then it wouldn’t be as light.Only main reason I gave it a low rating was because of the crazy mixup in the beginning, the anxiety this caused me when I had to worry about traveling/moving on such short notice, and the three annoying factors I highlighted above. Otherwise everything else is fine and the laptop works well even for graphic designers and photographers who like to run Adobe products.UPDATE: It's now 2021 and I purchased this in 2018. I used this pretty extensively for Adobe products and maybe that took a toll on the laptop after a while. I kept having to clean it often including with CCleaner because the computer started to get slower and slower after 2 years. Sometimes it would take forever to even just sign in to the computer. And to load up Zoom? I had to give myself half an hour just to load it up along with any other programs. I had it checked by Geek Squad and there was no hardware issue. I eventually wiped it clean and upgraded to another laptop but this ASUS laptop seems to only do good for the first 2 years of use. If you use it for regular office/school work and don't use it for Adobe products then it may last you longer. If you're a designer, marketer, video editor, or photographer, look into another brand and something better than ASUS.

I had a problem with the battery life on this laptop. I went through the diagnostics and updated drivers but eventually sent it back to ASUS for a once-over. They of coarse wiped the hard drive and installed a new battery. I can't say I am happy with the battery life, so it stays plugged in most of the time and serves my purposes. After about 6 months of use, the touch pad stopped working, but with ASUS help I re-installed the drivers and it was resolved. ASUS has been very helpful, I don't know how it will be after the 1 yr timeframe.This model is pretty small and there are many websites that don't format well on this small screen which if frustrating. I had planned to connect a larger monitor when the unit is stationary so the size wasn't a concern. I was a little worried about the A9 processor, but I don't use this computer for high end apps so it is working out just fine. I'm happy with my purchase.

This laptop is snappy once it gets up and running, the only bottleneck is the 5400rpm hard drive. The fan comes on more than you want but you will only hear it if you are in a quiet room or do not have headphones in. The display gets bright enough to use almost anywhere but viewing angles are not the best. The keyboard is very nice to type on and the trackpad is very responsive to gestures. The battery life is also pretty decent, I am getting a full days use at school with a full charge. the speakers are clear but they do not get too loud, so headphones are a better option. The laptop has a nice place for your palms to rest and does not get warm at all and it is made of a nice almost soft touch plastic. Ports are good too, usb 2.0, usb 3.0 and usb type C, a HDMI port, SD card reader, Ethernet jack, and a headphone jack. This laptop is also very lightweight, I do not feel it in my bag when I'm carrying it. I like this laptop very much and I am happy with my purchase.

Redoing my review!As I have now had this laptop for just about 2 years it is a waste of money. It is incredibly slow! Can’t even have more than 3 tabs on my browser without it slowing the entire laptop down. There’s TONS of space left on it as well and I have cleaned it all out. Even sent it BACK to Asia to get them to correct the problem and it’s still slow as can be. Problem was NEVER fixed.

False/misleading advertising: it says "14-Inch HD 1080p Display", but beware ! that's not the case. The resolution is lower than 1080p : 1366 x 768. (this is the reason of my two star review).For my usage, it wasn't really important, but if that's something really important for you, please look elsewhere.The fan is very noisy, but under normal usage it does not run much.For linux users: you will need a recent kernel, else you won't get the full usage of the CPU and your fan will always turn. Newer kernels fix this by allowing higher and lower frequency adjustment (the IDLE frequency is lower, saving some battery and turning off the fan). Driver wise, nothing has to be installed (tested with openSUSE tumbleweed and openSUSE leap).Not really tested much on windows, but for what I used it it felt laggy. Linux does not seem to have this issue, so it seems to be a OS / driver issue more than a hardware one. (so we can hope that a future update would solve it).

Purchased this for my son 3 months ago. Now once it's shutdown for more than an hour it will not turn on unless the power cord is plugged in and the power button is pressed and held for more than 2 minutes. When it's on the fan is constantly running high and the whole system hangs for a long time. I have owned several laptops over the years, this one is by far the worst one I ever owned. I don't recommend anyone to buy this laptop.

Not a huge fan of this laptop - although it has decent specs and could actually run games like Fallout Newvegas, it's pretty slow. I was pretty frustrated trying to operate 4 tabs on google chrome. I do not recommend this laptop for anyone wanting to do more heavy computing or that has had a core i7 before. You will go mental!