Pros: Price: This laptop is sold at an extremely competitive price (but you get what you pay for).

Ports: Includes all the ports you'd expect, including USB 3.0, HDMI, multi-reader (SD/MMC) and headphone ports.

Capacity: 1TB hard drive and DVD-RW included.

Weight: While not a featherweight, it's a reasonable weight for the size and specs. After carrying around in a backpack all day, you won't be tired.

Cons: I have been using this laptop for about 6 months and have grown to hate it. It honestly drives me nuts. There is no one thing, but a combination of little things that will make you loathe pulling this laptop out of your bag and wish you had anything else:

- Security: This laptop shipped with a severe security problem in the BIOS. There is a BIOS flash available from the manufacturer, and it's one of the first things you should apply if you buy this laptop.

- Windows 8: Every other operating system release from Microsoft is worth a pass. Upgrade to Windows 10. It's free.

- I swear the touchpad is drunk. Everything will be going just fine and then suddenly it'll wander off into its own little world and put the cursor only into the general direction where you're pointing it. It's not only an uncomfortable touchpad to use, it's not particularly accurate. I bought a wireless mouse and try to use that wherever possible, because the touchpad is almost impossible to manage.

- Performance: For a machine with 10 CPU cores and 8GB of RAM, it's astonishingly sluggish. This may be a problem limited to the AMD-powered model, but a lot of it seems to be limited to the very slow disk drive included with the machine.

- Layout: There is a sharp ridge around the edge of the laptop perfectly positioned to painfully catch your wrists. Maybe it's intended to force you to maintain a healthy typing position, but it serves no purpose but to annoy me.

- Keyboard: The chiclet style keyboard is hard to avoid on laptops these days, but I type hard and fast (I'm a systems architect) and the keyboard stutters--it sometimes puts the character I type down twice unless I type very softly. Also, the keyboard isn't backlit, and this makes it annoying to use in the dark.

- Heat: This laptop gets very hot sitting on your lap. Could be limited to the AMD-powered version, but it's very annoying.

- Battery life: Astonishingly poor. You only get about an hour out of it when watching YouTube videos.

- WiFi: Outdated 2.4GHz only chipset.

Overall Review: I haven't been either more excited about a technology purchase this year, or more let down after the fact. Give this laptop a pass. You'll be glad you did.