I bought an ASUS ROG Strix GL553VE in June 2017 for Can$1650.00.After almost 6 months of use, I can say with confidence that I totally regret this purchase. Here is why :1. The keyboard layout is non-sensical. There is no Num Lock key indicator that informs the user of the state of the number pads (number input or cursor navigation). So, one never knows if for example a 9 is going to be typed or the cursor is going to move on Page Up. If you type a lot, you likely won’t be able to use this laptop keyboard. I tried for a long while but I had to give up and finally had to buy an external keyboard, which of course totally defeats the purpose of having a portable computer.2. The ROG family of laptop from ASUS is supposed to be designed for gamers. So I thought this pricey machine, which has an Intel Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7100 @ 1.80GHz and a EVGA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Gaming graphics card would easily be able to drive my SAMSUNG SyncMaster 245T at its native resolution (1920x1200) as a secondary monitor. Well, it can’t. Not only the image quality is very bad (color shift, color rings), but the text is smeared out and worst of all, the windows is bigger than the actual monitor screen, so that both the menu (top) and task bars (bottom) are not visible. This is not adjustable from the monitor in HDMI (the only mode available from the ASUS laptop).3. ASUS technical assistance for the above problems has been abyssal. All they could come up with was the traditional “Reboot”, “Reload Windows" and ultimately “Send the machine back"!4. Intel technical assistance for the graphic controller was even worst : Not very keen about sending the machine back to ASUS who would have probably send it back to me saying that nothing was wrong with it, I sent all the details to Intel technical assistance hoping they could fix the controller settings/driver. They pretended to study the problem for several weeks, but it finally transpired that they were not doing anything at all, despite the technician talking about a lab studying my screen shots and so on. All they did was telling me to install an updated generic driver whenever one was becoming available (happened twice). They never look specifically at the problem at hand despite pretending to do so, since they finally directed me to their Community asking me the very same info I provided to them when I first contacted them. In other word, they were just buying time, probably hoping for me to forget about the whole issue. When I pressed them, Intel finally acknowledged that their graphic controller was simply unable to drive the secondary monitor at 1920x1200 (while my 10 yo Vista computer was!). After wasting my time for 6 weeks, they found it appropriate, as a final touch, to ask me to fill up their online customer satisfaction survey. 5. Finally, not so critical but a very noisy cooling fan starts whenever this laptop performs anything more that listing a directory content. If you are in a quiet setting, like a library, an airplane, etc. you will sure attract attention. Reminiscent of a vacuum cleaner noise.Otherwise, the laptop performs “OK”… You mileage may vary, but honestly, you will probably find the ASUS-Intel combo video set up is just a cruel joke. Buy a simpler rig or a much more powerful machine (i.e. desktop). This is in between, and was a waste of money for me.
