Comment by soylentcola | Hacker News Reader

Comment by soylentcola | Hacker News Reader

Didn't see mine on there (Asus N56JR). I do something similar on Newegg and Microcenter's site when I shop for a laptop for myself or someone else--narrow down based on specific specs I want and then compare the results based on reviews and other details.

I wanted something I could use for mobile DJing/VJing and some 2d/3d content creation capability. I was looking for 15" or larger, i7, decent nVidia GPU, 16GB RAM, 1920x1080 or better, and at least 500GB storage.

The Asus uses a 1TB HDD and not a SSD and the display is OK but not amazing. Still, it was tough to find something similar for anywhere near the $900 it cost and the relatively good build quality. It's obviously aping the look of a Macbook but since I have stock in neither company that's not really important to me. Couldn't find much else with those specs without spending several hundred dollars more.

I got the N56VZ a while back and I found it using the same method. If you don't use the blu-ray drive (and who does, really?) it's pretty trivial to swap it out with a new drive caddy. I put the HDD in there because I heard people had trouble booting from the caddy and put in a SSD where the HDD was. This [1] is the caddy I used, and swapping out the face plate with the original is pretty easy. Considering the price of the machine in the first place, why not throw a second drive in there.

[1] http://www.ebay.com/itm/Second-Hard-Drive-2nd-HDD-SSD-Caddy-...

Not sure if mine has Blu-ray. Think it's only DVD but I don't own any Blu-ray discs anyway. Figured if I ever really need it or want a simple-ish upgrade I'll just swap the HDD out for a SSD at some point.

Either way it works for what I use it for. It's not my main workhorse so it doesn't need to be as fast as humanly possible. Just need to be able to handle fairly processor or graphically intensive tasks outside of the house. For the sub-$1k price it was a good deal. Macbook had a few more bells and whistles that I didn't need but cost a good deal more.

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