I purchased my laptop in August 2016. I bought it based on the specs even though the hard drive is only a sluggish 5400rpm. It's been a love / hate relationship until a week ago when I installed a Crucial M.2 SSD drive and replaced the horrible hard drive with a Samsung SSD drive. Now I absolutely LOVE my Asus. Why in the heck the manufacturer would stick the worst possible hard drive in an otherwise flawless machine is beyond me. Before SSD, I would wait for two minutes while the disk use was at 100% as the system would boot up, run everything in task scheduler, run the boot sector virus scan and load drivers. Once this was complete, I could start using the laptop. It was frustrating enough that I regretted ever buying the laptop. After enough agony, I finally decided to do what I should have done from the very beginning. After doing some research, I settled on the M.2 SSD drive from Crucial and the Samsung SSD for the main replacement. Using a T4 bit, I removed the screws from the bottom cover and gained access to the internals. I installed the M.2 SSD and went through the steps to format the drive and clone my windows installation to the new drive. Once that was complete, I removed the abominable mechanical hard drive and installed the main SSD drive. Now I get pure joy when I press the power button to boot up. The login screen appears in 6 seconds. The OS is completely loaded and system resource monitor shows the hard drive at 13% in another 9 seconds after I enter my password. Now I absolutely love my Asus. The moral of this story is that unless you’re prepared to replace the poor excuse of a hard drive with an SSD of any size, you are going to be disappointed with this machine. I certainly was. But having been in IT for nearly 30 years, I had the knowledge and experience to perform the upgrade. Bottom line: The machine is absolutely beautiful and stunning in appearance and performance, once you get rid of the anchor and chain slowing it down.