I started hunting for a new laptop for almost a year with many trips to Best Buy, WalMart, Office Depot, OfficeMax, and Frys. When this new model came to BestBuy, I mmediately felt that "this is it." It has two 2.4 GHz physical CPUs, 500 GB 7200 RPM fast disk, and a large memory of 6 GB which is rare among laptops, all for such a great price of $530. It exceeded my expectation performance-price-ratio wise. Keep in mind that computer performance is not all about CPUs. It's equally important to have a large amount of memory and faster disk . Now a few things to share: I spent some time figuring out what bundle-ware to remove immediately out-of-the-box. Eventually I removed only 3 pieces: best buy PC app, bundled anti-virus program (Trend), and Office 2010 Trial. All other pieces seem to be thrustworthy and needed. A greta thing I learnt from a Windows 7 book is that there is no need to buy any anti-virus software - just download and install Microsoft Security Essentials. I tried it and I am confident that it will protect my PCs equally well without having to pay a single penny. For Office 2010, I purchased a copy for $9.99 through Microsoft's Home Use Program. All in all, unless you are looking for a laptop for playing games most of the time, this laptop would statisfy most of your needs. Some more experiences to share. My first laptop was a toshiba purchased about 8 years ago. One day about 4 years ago, it crashed by itself and could not be recovered no matter how hard I tried. So I bought a Compaq Presario V6000 laptop with Amd Turion 64 X2 TL-50 dual-core @1.61 GHz, 960 MB RAM, and 80 GB hard disk for about the same price from CircuitCity. My compaq experience has been much much better than my toshiba experience. It still runs great, but I am afraid that one day it may crash as well and I would lose all my data. I wanted to buy another latest compaq but could not find one I like so I ended up with this ASUS. A friendly reminder: do not remove any bundled software unless you are sure. Or if you don't want to spend your time doing your own research, you can pay about $20 - $30, and the retailer store can do that for you (what a shame that we have to pay for things that we don't want. I hope one day a law would be in place to prohibit any pre-bundled software or the bundled software vendor will have to pay for removing it).