The Box

What better place to start than the box? It’s pretty neat and is shaped like a briefcase with a handle. It contains the laptop itself in a protective paper thing and it’s charger.

Looks & Build Quality

The lid is made from black glossy plastic, and is a magnet for fingerprints. It has a silver ASUS logo in the centre. The inside is made from dark grey plastic, made to look like brushed metal. There’s is some screen flex, but it’s nothing major.

Screen

The screen is only 1366x768, which is fine (at least to me), but I know others will get turned off by this. Unfortunately, it has poor viewing angles but this is forgiven by it’s decent colour reproduction. It can get pretty bright so you should be able to use it in near direct sunlight.

Keyboard/Trackpad

One place where ASUS obviously didn’t cheap out is the keyboard, which is a joy to type on, providing a surprisingly large amount of key travel. It has a slightly weird layout so the number pad fits, but once you get used to it I’m sure it’ll be fine. Unlike more expensive laptops, it isn’t backlit, although the screen usually lights it up enough to use in the dark. The trackpad is fairly large and supports various gestures.

IO

On the left there is the charging hole, an Ethernet jack, VGA, HDMI, USB 2.0 and a USB C port. There is also a Kensington lock.

The right has the DVD drive, a USB 3.0 port, headphone jack and an SD card reader.

There are no ports on the front or the back.

Hardware

My model has the following:

• CPU: i5 6200U
• GPU: GeForce 940M
• RAM: 8GB DDR3 (1 or 2 slots, up to 12GB)
• HDD: 1TB Seagate (I Googled the model number and it seems prone to failure, so I would replace it ASAP) The HDD is split into 2 partitions for some reason, but I merged them using MiniTool Partition Wizard.

Software

The machine comes with Windows 10 Home and lots of bloatware, including McAfee and various other useless programs. I just removed them all using IObit Uninstaller as I didn’t have time to do a complete re-install of Windows.

Conclusion

For the price of £499.99, the laptop is really great and I would thoroughly recommend it if you need a new one. To buy one from Amazon, click here, or to get it from somewhere where is doesn’t cost over a grand, just Google the full model number: X556UB-XX039T.

Stay tuned for a follow-up a few months of usage. Follow me or this blog to stay updated!

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