I unboxed and deployed about 500 of these a few months ago. They are pretty unremarkable laptops but decent for the price. Durable and reasonably easy to work on. The RAM is not soldered down and you could easily upgrade to SSD later on. The touchpad and screen are both enjoyable. I didn't like the keyboard though, it felt like the key travel was very short and mushy. I am not a keyboard snob at all (no mechanical keyboards in my house) and I still found it hard to type on. We did have maybe 10/500 that came from the factory with sticky keys (that stick down or are very slow to come back up) so this seems to be something they are prone to. Another issue is the cable that connects the touchscreen to the motherboard seems to break under normal use. If you are not buying a touchscreen model though this probably won't matter to you, and in any case they might have come up with a better cable by now since I believe they are aware of this problem. It only affects the touchscreen input, not the display itself. I have played AOE and AOEII on mine and it ran well. Normally i5 indicates four cores, but the i5 in this laptop is really more of an i3. It is a dual core with hyperthreading. You can now buy laptops with the next-gen i3-5020u which is the same configuration (dual core with hyperthreading) and much cheaper. Then you could spend the difference on an SSD. For instance, you could buy something like this and something like this . This would be a better setup IMO. More on reddit.com

What are the specs? More on reddit.com