Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsSolid performance, beautiful design, and incredible energy efficiency make this a great deal
Reviewed in the United States on September 8, 2017
The ZenBook is very light, and feels solidly built with clean lines and precise fit. It's very quiet, except when the CPU is under heavy load and even then the cooling fan is remarkably quiet. The LCD display uses the same IPS technology that Apple laptops, tablets, and smartphones use, so you have good color and contrast at a wide viewing angle. The back light on the LCD isn't as bright as I would like, even at full brightness, but I did notice that when you're in a well lit room it adjusts its brightness quite a bit to remain viewable, so this isn't a showstopper by any means.
The keyboard is comfortable, and while some laptops have separate numeric keypads, I've found that I don't miss it one bit here. I love the lighted keys, especially with the bright white LEDs that they use for illumination.
The power supply is very small and lightweight. The power connector has an elbow so that the cord projects toward the back of the laptop while plugged in. Frankly, the connector and the jack seem cheap and flimsy compared to other laptops, but this computer is such a power miser that it really doesn't need anything heavy-duty to transfer power. You can charge up the battery in the span of a couple hours, and unless you're, say, rendering a large MPEG-4 movie file or MPEG-3 audio recording--anything computationally intensive--you will get hours and hours of use out of a single charge. The manufacturer claims 12 hours of use, but my experience has been closer to 9-10 hours, which is darn impressive.
The Windows 10 installation isn't saddled with bloatware and runs very well and is super responsive. Asus chose good default settings to ensure your security within Windows, and it relies on Windows Defender for antivirus and malware protection. If you're the type of person who tends to visit the same websites each day this is almost a non-issue. I download software on occasion and Defender has alerted me to malware the few times I've downloaded something that was infected. Boot time is crazy fast, on the order of 4-5 seconds, as is becoming the norm now with SSDs.
After toting around a 15" gaming laptop for a couple weeks, I barely notice the weight of this ultrabook in my backpack. It's amazingly light and compact, and as I said earlier, even the power supply is noticeably lighter than most laptop power supplies.
I'm very pleased with this ultrabook and think it will meet most people's needs for general computing, and even some more compute-intensive tasks, including audio compression and transcoding, and some light video editing and rendering.
UPDATE 10/4/2017 - The issue I had with the display brightness is due to the ambient light sensor. To my surprise, there is a key sequence that will display the ambient light sensor and, boy, can this screen get bright! It was right there in front of me the whole time, an icon on top of the A key--pressing FN+A toggles the ambient light sensor on/off, and I'm pleased to say that, if you want this display to be bright you certainly can do so.
