For what you get, this laptop is a fantastic deal.To start, the general build quality is what I expect out of a premium piece of technology. It is very thin and light yet sturdy with the majority of the laptop being made out of aluminum with the only large piece of plastic being on the bottom of the base of it as well as the keys on the keyboard. The keyboard layout is full sized, with a 10-key section, but it is scrunched incredibly close to the regular keys. After a day of data entry, I did finally get used to it.The screen on this laptop has gotten a bad reputation from the previous model of this laptop, but all of my uses has shown me that the screen is just fine. When at full brightness, everything is crisp and clear. Fonts in Microsoft Word are great as well as photos and graphics in Photoshop. When I unplug the power and the screen dims, it can start to get a little fuzzy to see fine details, but it is far from unusable. The hinge for the screen and lid is relatively stiff and will likely take two hands to open. Rest assured, however, that it will not fly open in your bag or flop about as you move around in your chair.The speakers on this laptop had me confused for a little bit as they were incredibly quiet, even at full volume. However, once I started playing with some of the included sound software that ASUS includes it got a lot better. The speakers are still small laptop speakers and can sound a bit tinny with certain sounds, but they are defiantly usable in the case you don’t want to use headphones. It is strange that the speakers are located on the bottom of the laptop, and this may add to some of the issues about perceived volume and quality, but I ended up forgetting about it with things generally working how I intended them to.The performance of this laptop is very superior, especially when considering its price. A brand new 6th generation Core i7 processor, a Nvidia GTX 950m, 8 gigs of RAM and a 256 gig SSD make it very snappy in any task you throw at it. From the time the power button is pressed to being able to launch a program only about ten seconds have elapsed. Once it is started, Photoshop or any other Adobe program takes just under three seconds to launch with Office programs performing similarly.Along the lines of hardware, I was curious about some of the brands of components inside of it. The SSD inside of this laptop is a Micron m600 (Micron is the parent company that produces Crucial hard drives and memory as well as Lexar brand flash memory cards). The memory is Hyundai and the onboard graphics is an Intel HD graphics 520.Battery performance is some of the best I have seen for a full featured laptop. When utilizing the battery, having the screen at its lowest intensity, using the onboard graphics processor and just browsing the Internet or typing a document, it is incredibly efficient. The battery can last upwards of eight hours with those operating conditions. If the Internet is not needed, putting the laptop in airplane mode can extend this even further. It is worth noting that when the laptop is being used in its lowest power state it produces almost no heat, allowing it to stay on bare legs without a problem for extended periods of time. When under full load and using the discrete graphics card it does produce heat but so little that I have not heard the fans wind up to something that I would think is annoyingly noisy by far.Although this is a fine piece of hardware that can see anyone through many years of service, it is worth noting some of the nuances about it that I have noticed after using it for a week.While mentioned before, they keyboard is full sized but scrunched, I don’t know if it is missing some of my keystrokes or if I have just not fully acclimated to it yet. That issue aside, the stroke length of the keys is quite shallow, something that can be annoying at first but can become unnoticeable after some time using it. The backlighting feature is nice, nearly being expected by laptop users, but when it turns off or on, the fade up and down of the lighting can be abrupt or flickery, far from being an operation issue, just something I noticed. It is nice to note that there are three brightness settings for it as well.The track pad is similar to that which is found on laptops currently for sale. It is a single surface with a button built into the bottom of it. The left and right buttons are included in the main pad, but recognized with a single short vertical line near the bottom. Generally speaking, the touch pad works as expected with few navigational issues. Clicking the button is fine and seems like it requires just the right amount of pressure so that it is not pressed accidentally while driving the cursor. While typing, it is not in the way and placed in such a way relative to the keyboard that I have never accidentally hit it on accident. Lastly, the manner in which the touch pad is connected to the chassis of the laptop has me puzzled. Although the chassis flexes very little when picked up by a corner, the bottom of the touch pad seems to protrude from the surface of the base slightly. It is nothing so drastic that it completely lifts off the laptop, but it creates a significant amount of space that a fingernail can fit under it. When the laptop is placed back of a flat surface or not being articulated, the touch pad is in its normal position.The software that comes preloaded in this laptop is what is to be expected. There is a little bloatware from ASUS themselves as well as a few things from Microsoft that comes with Windows in addition to an introductory offer for some third party antivirus software. All of this was easily removed, and while it was still installed, did not seem to impact performance negatively. A couple of notes about a few things regarding the software image that ASUS put on this laptop: when installing the Adobe CC products, I kept getting install errors. After I did a little reading, I found that one or more of the preinstalled Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable packages were corrupt. It was a relatively quick process to fix this so it was not too annoying. The second thing is the OS was set to defragment the hard drive once per week. With a solid state drive, this is a definite no no as it will cause unneeded writes to the drive and will shorten the useful life time of the drive. Once purchasing this laptop, it is a must to correct this.Lastly, and this is by no fault of ASUS, this laptop is being sold as having a dark blue lid color. When I opened the box of mine, it did not look blue at all, it was unmistakable gray. Honestly, it is not a deal breaker for me at all, it looks just as stylish and functions just the same. When inspecting the carton that it shipped in, ASUS even labeled the laptop as having a gray color, not blue.All in all, for the price of this computer and what you get, it is a fantastic piece of equipment, capable of handling just about whatever you can toss at it. Notwithstanding the few oddities that accompany it, a user can expect to be very pleased with this computer and what it has to offer, especially when the price is taken into account.Edited for spelling and grammar.