At 8.5lbs it's not much different than the average 17" weight. And it's not much smaller either... might as well have the 17".

Hi Henry,

Other than the weight, that seems like a pretty nicely spec'd laptop. I can't speak to the Asus in particular.

I would most definitely bump the SSD up to 240GB. If that puts you over budget, scale back to 16GB (1600Mhz 2 x 8GB) of RAM. I'm guessing that you don't need anything close to 32GB, and you can always add more later if it's really needed.

Personally, I find W8 a major pita, so we're still getting W7 on all of our computers... but that's obviously a personal preference.

The only other major item to be aware of is that Intel will announce their new CPU line (Haswell) in a couple weeks, so if you don't need a new laptop immediately, you might want to wait a month or so to see what comes down the pipeline. Aside from a small bump in speed, it will offer better battery life.

Best of luck!

Thanks iru69! That's very helpful. I was wondering about Windows 8 vs 7.

I highly prefer 8 over 7 from a computer admin point of view. It seems to perform better as well. I wouldn't upgrade if I already had 7, but I wouldn't put 7 on a new computer.