ATIV Book 9 NP900X3E-K01US 13.3-Inch Deal

Kenneth R. Koscicki - : My biggest concern for not jumping on to this deal right away was due to the 4GB RAM restriction. I still feel a little upset that Samsung didn't put a 8GB RAM on this machine, but surprisingly it's adequate enough for me. I use Photoshop heavily for all my freelance work. I have CS6 and Photoshop runs perfectly fine for web work. However, the 4GB restriction starts to kick in when you're working with HUGE documents (300ppi) magazines, because the scrub zoom feature becomes disabled. Fortunately, I only do webdesign and do not need to work on huge pictures and publications. However, if you are in the business of such, I would look for another machine.

Nik : Overall, I love this machine. It has allowed me to program/design on the fly due to its lightness and great battery life. The machine does its job and the 1080p MATTE screen is gorgeous. Photoshop editing is a joy due to the vibrant colors and programming is so much easier as you can have two windows side by side and not suffer from lack of screen real estate. For those holding off due to the 4GB RAM, I completely understand the concern, but it has not been an issue for me yet.

Fiji Sunrise: This computer is awesome. i have always used 15" screen laptops in the past, then I decided I wanted to check out a MacBook. I loved the size at 13" and screen was perfectly clear, but I ahve learned that I have no patience for thnigs that just don't work when I need them to, for example I couldn't wirelessly print to any of the printers I owed. So along comes this jem. The same screen size, perfectly clear, the lightest laptop I have ever used and a Solid State HDD to boot. I have never used a machine that was so fast. It boots in about 3 seconds, it comes out of hiberantion in about 2 seconds. I am not a fan of Windows 8 by any strech, but I can tolerate it on this. The lighted keyboard is great, the keys are very responsive, movies look good on this and I use it for almost everything.

Series 3 NP355V5C-A04US 15.6-Inch Deal

Little Italy (USA): This AMD Model is the way to go. From everything i know, the graphics will out perform the stock Intel graphics that are in the more expensive laptops. The quad core AMD is very powerful cpu. The i3 line are just dual core's that are slightly faster, but have way less graphic power! Not to mention that Intel charges more. So you get a great price/performance when you stick to AMD!

Jefferey Bowman "TransFan Since 1984!" (PA, USA): I am a computer person. I do my research before I purchase anything and usually know exactly what I am getting for my money. I found this beautiful little machine and grabbed one for $399 while they were at Best Buy. I was completely surprised by the performance of this little beast. First of all, the laptop is beautiful, light, feels well built, and has a battery that lasts 4-5 hours even while streaming video over wifi. What really blew me away however was how strong the AMD processor and graphics capabilities are for a notebook at this price point. Since the video card shares system memory I bought another 4GB stick of DDR3 Ram for about $30 and installed it in the second slot (A nice feature) that starts empty on this laptop.

Byron: I can run World of Warcraft on high with consistent 60fps everywhere, or even on ultra with up to 60fps in dungeons and 20-30fps everywhere else. I was also able to run The Old Republic for several hours at a time on medium settings with 30fps. This is a fantastic laptop for the price point, and for the mobile gamer or MMO person it gets the job done. The screen is very clear and resolution looks great, plus the HDMI port is a nice plus. Bluetooth built in is a feature usually found on more expensive laptops and makes uploading photos from your smartphone an absolute breeze.

ATIV Book 9 Lite NP915S3G-K02US 13.3-Inch Deal

Marin: Samsung is one of the rising companies in this down economy. With the success of their cell phones and television, they have broadened their horizons to ultrabooks and notebooks. This review of the Ativ Book 9 Lite is more like a first impression as I have only played around with it for two days. On the software side of things, it is a Windows 8 computer, which speaks for itself. I am reviewing the unit itself, not the operating system, which is albeit a pretty decent one.
I switched to this from a Macbook Air. The drop off in build quality is quite spectacular. While the Air feels sturdy and very nicely crafted, the same cannot be said for the Ativ 9 Lite. It is all made of plastic and pressing on the wrist portion where the keyboard is you can tell its a pretty big downgrade. The plastic has this sort of give to it, pressing down on it will cause it to flex. It has cheap written all over it. It does have a nice look to it but the same cannot be said for the feel.

Jan Holland : Overall the Ativ 9 Lite is a budget computer and it should be reviewed as such, keeping in mind that the Plus version of it will run you over $600 more. I am a student and was getting sick of running dmg images of programs I needed on Apples platform. I am more comfortable with Windows and prefer it more overall which is the reason I made the switch to this ultrabook. The Ativ 9 Lite is a solid performer with very good looks. It performs day to day tasks with ease, and it is an okay purchase based on what I require from it. I purchased in white and I am happy with the color, as I am sure black will be an absolute fingerprint magnet. I can easily recommend this laptop for a person looking to use Windows 8 that can put aside some of the bells and whistles (does not have backlit keyboard) for an average price of $749, I would tell them to consider this as the go-to budget ultrabook.

Joon-Sub: On the performance spectrum, the quad core 1.0ghz processor powers the laptop pretty well with 1.4ghz available to you (AMDs equivalent to turbo boost.) It breezes through most tasks although it did take me about 20 minutes to uninstall adobe photoshop software that came with it (not the full version obviously.) While it does perform pretty well, I'm not sure its quite something to admire as even the cheapest Windows 8 computers perform pretty well on the solid windows 8 platform. The Ativ 9 Lite also comes with a lot of bloatware. It's equipped with a 128gb solid state drive that ships out to you with about 60gb available. Norton, adobe, samsung; its chaulk full of this unnecessary "crapware" which was the first thing to go during my use of it and left me with about 75gb of free space to use.

ATIV Book 2 NP270E5E-K04US 15.6-Inch Deal

Barbara A. Ray: Samsung has long been a favorite of mine, along with Dell, but the ATIV Book 2 has put Samsung in the lead for good. It boots up in seconds and is ready to do a good days work or play. I did install word (work and my writing require it), but other than that I was working on it within 8 minutes. (I'm slow, LOL)
The screen is amazing and the picture quality is as well. This is one of the best laptops I have ever used and will buy another one when this one gets to old. This is ideal for the anyone who wants a light weight laptop to carry with them!!

Eugene F. McCarthy Jr (Gonic, NH USA): I love this unit! I changed from a Dell which I am sick of! This is so much easier to use and Samsung has some of their own features that make it worth every penny. On the down side, it has a feature on the touch pad that you can change screens by sliding your finger from the outside edge. I find this to be a pain as another screen will pop up if I go to far over from the center of the touch pad. the only other thing I would have REALLY liked is a back lit keyboard! I can deal with the touch pad issue but the Non-Backlit keyboard is the only thing that kept me from giving this a 5 star rating.

Mis T.: Great graphics but overall the construction is on the chintzy side. I could live with that but not the OS. Windows 8 is something Microsoft should be ashamed of. It seems to assume you are 15 years old and a complete idiot. Tries to do everything for you the way it thinks it should be done. Terrible OS.My 12-year old daughter needed a laptop for school. So far -- so good! We went back and forth between getting the Samsung Chromebook, or getting a laptop. In the end, I'm happy with my choice.

NP355E5C-A01US Deal

Cas Walker (Abq): My first day working on the NP355E5C and it's not as slow as I feared it would be. It has a low end AMD processor so I was worried it would be annoyingly slow to use. So far I've installed Windows updates and ClassicShell to make Windows 8 usable and performance has been ok.
The 5400rpm 500GB Hitachi hard drive with 8MB cache is a pretty standard part for inexpensive laptops and it's kinda slow. If this was my daily use computer I'd be tempted to upgrade it to an SSD drive.

Devrie K. Paradowski : I'd hoped I could find a way to add Windows7 but this laptop uses "Secure Boot" making it difficult and expensive to get Windows 7 installed. It looks like I would have to turn off Secure Boot then reformat the hard drive and reinstall Windows7 from scratch with a retail Win 7 disk. It appears I would then loose the ability to use the provided Windows8 installation. Think I'm stuck with Win8. I'm using Classic Shell to help make Win8 more usable. That makes it pretty much like Win7 but still a little weird. On the upside, every program and tweak I use in Win7 is working in Win8 so that's cool.
I'm still having the problem where the trackpad stops responding until I lift my finger. I'm getting used to doing that but I hope someday a driver update will help with that issue.

Melody Collins: Downgraded from 4 stars to 1 star. I've given up on this thing. The trackpad has never tracked right. I tried driver updates & setting changes but cannot get it to work smoothly. I have to use a mouse. Then one day the screen went solid white then solid black. I could only see the desktop when I plugged in an external monitor. I called Samsung and set up a warranty service return to get the screen fixed but after a few days and many reboots the screen started working again so I had to cancel the return. The screen has worked perfectly ever since but I no longer trust this laptop to be reliable for travel. This past week I noticed the CPU is always working at half speed, .8GHz instead of 1.7GHz. Turns out the power plan keeps reverting to the Power Saver plan after I set it to the Performance plan. I can't find a way to get the Performance power plan setting to stick.

Series 5 NP550P7C-T01US 17.3-Inch Deal

R. Esperanzate (Jersey City, NJ): I decided to reload my MBP from scratch rather than cloning. I had about 350GB of data on my old drive, so cloning wasn't really an option. I went with a smaller SSD to save a few dollars. I started by making a backup of my original drive onto an external 500GB FW800 drive. Once the backup was complete I installed the Samsung 840 Pro to the internal HDD location.

Mike B "mbicknc": I made a USB drive with the Mountain Lion install software on it. I booted to the USB install drive and used disk utility to format the Samsung 840 Pro. No issues at all with the system recognizing the drive. After formatting the drive I loaded a fresh copy of Mountain Lion. I spent several hours reloading my apps to the Samsung 840 Pro. I also copied my documents back onto the Samsung 840 Pro. I will copy some of the larger files from the original drive onto the 2nd HDD once the data doubler arrives. I'll use the cloned copy to copy those files after I reformat the old internal HDD. I still have about 100GB remaining after a fresh reload and putting some of my documents onto the SSD.

Michael B. : The drive has only been in for a few hours, so it is still early. The good news is there were no technical hiccups at all. The swap went as smoothly as replacing with a regular HDD. I've seen some issues reported with trying to install a SSD into the data doubler depending on the SATA controller on your MBP. Mine shows 6GB for both, so I may have been fine either way, but decided to go with the method that seems to have the most success. Stay tuned.... I'll update as I get some time in with the drive.

ATIV Book 2 NP270E5E-K03US 15.6-Inch Deal

Daniel Simon: Lightweight, nice keyboard and display is bright and readable. Samsung electronics seem to have good attention to detail and pretty much trouble free.Great price and great computer. Fast, neat. Very nice configuration. Nice RAM memory. Makes thing easier to do. Price was ok too.Samsung has long been a favorite of mine, along with Dell, but the ATIV Book 2 has put Samsung in the lead for good. It boots up in seconds and is ready to do a good days work or play. I did install word (work and my writing require it), but other than that I was working on it within 8 minutes. (I'm slow, LOL).

Eugene F. McCarthy Jr (Gonic, NH USA): I love this unit! I changed from a Dell which I am sick of! This is so much easier to use and Samsung has some of their own features that make it worth every penny. On the down side, it has a feature on the touch pad that you can change screens by sliding your finger from the outside edge. I find this to be a pain as another screen will pop up if I go to far over from the center of the touch pad. the only other thing I would have REALLY liked is a back lit keyboard! I can deal with the touch pad issue but the Non-Backlit keyboard is the only thing that kept me from giving this a 5 star rating.

Joon-Sub: My biggest concern for not jumping on to this deal right away was due to the 4GB RAM restriction. I still feel a little upset that Samsung didn't put a 8GB RAM on this machine, but surprisingly it's adequate enough for me. I use Photoshop heavily for all my freelance work. I have CS6 and Photoshop runs perfectly fine for web work. However, the 4GB restriction starts to kick in when you're working with HUGE documents (300ppi) magazines, because the scrub zoom feature becomes disabled. Fortunately, I only do webdesign and do not need to work on huge pictures and publications. However, if you are in the business of such, I would look for another machine.

ATIV Book 2 NP270E5E-K01US 15.6-Inch Deal

Barbara A. Ray: Of course, this laptop is so cheap. Someone want both cheap and strongest laptop. That is impossible. This is a cheap laptop, and you can use it for office works. You can also use it for some basic tasks, play some basic games, surf internet.. If you are Designer, Gamer, Engineer or Architect, you should not choose this laptop.

Hunter (22 Knightbridge Road): Great graphics but overall the construction is on the chintzy side. I could live with that but not the OS. Windows 8 is something Microsoft should be ashamed of. It seems to assume you are 15 years old and a complete idiot. Tries to do everything for you the way it thinks it should be done. Terrible OS.

Shari Harris-dunning: My 12-year old daughter needed a laptop for school. So far -- so good! We went back and forth between getting the Samsung Chromebook, or getting a laptop. In the end, I'm happy with my choice.Very good laptop! It does a great job at surfing the the web!! Keyboard is nice!! Touch pad is a little sensitive! Was able to install all my favorite programs! Does a good for a 4GB laptop! Overall I am quite happy with it!

Series 3 NP350E7C-A01US Deal

Millitia (south, usa): Sound. This is a big one for me. Your speakers are slightly above worthless on this. They are tiny. tiny tiny. maybe 1inX0.5in on each side. that is it. its like having tweeters for your main sound. The speakers were the reason i removed a star. Do not expect any rich high-def sound with this laptop and there is plenty of wasted space they could have put bigger or more speakers. Headphones are better for sound quality but its not super rich sound due to sub-par sound card but with headphones the sound is much better, good enough for gaming

Johnhe: Bought this laptop to help me edit photos I take as I am learning photography. I needed a laptop that could handle a photo editing program, such as PhotoShop, and lots of storage for saved photos. So far, it's working great for this purpose, with one exception: Windows 8 does not recognize .dat files of online photo editors such as Pixlr or Picmonkey, so that's a negative. Since I am use to Windows Vista, I was a little worried about getting a laptop with the new Windows 8 system, but once you get used to the vastly different arrangement of everything, it's pretty cool and easy to use. Overall, I am very satisfied.

Fred Roberts (Hamburg , Germany):  Then there's Windows 8: at first I hated it, but after delving deeper into it, the new possibilities are definitely intriguing. There are two "realms" in the new windows, the desktop which is the old interface and the app world, which is the new interface. Switching back and forth is cumbersome at first, and the default configuration has you falling out of desktop and into the metro interface quite often. But you can work pretty much the way you used to in Windows 7 by 1) learning the shortcuts, e.g.windows key+d returns you to desktop mode. 2) select desktop applications as default programs for common filetypes (pdf, jpg, mp3, avi, etc) - if a metro app is the default you leave desktop mode when opening the object and don't return to desktop when closing. 3) I haven't done this yet, but you can also install one of a number of programs that reinstates the start menu and disables the charms menu.

Chromebook Deal

Ryan (North Carolina): I've had the computer for a few days now and I love it. It's not super fast by any means; however, it gets the job done in regards to web browsing, finding papers for literature reviews and listening to rdio or Pandora. That's what I need this for. And most likely the average consumer. Face it, most college students buy $1000 Macbooks to look cool. For what? To facebook, stream music, and browse the web. Most people who do photo editing buy the 15" models with maxed out specs (like me). I don't want to bring that to campus. That's too much money to be slinging in my bag to just browse the web.

Lance Haun (Seattle, WA): My background: I'm a gadget geek but I'm not super devoted to any platform. I do love Google's web products but never used their hardware. My laptop is a 13" MacBook Pro and my desktop is a Mac Mini that runs both OS X and Windows 7 (I spend more time on Win 7 these days). I have an iPad (3rd gen) and Motorola Droid Razr Maxx along with a docking station. My wife has a Win 7 ultrabook, Kindle Fire HD and Razr Maxx, all of which I purchased for her.

Captain Awesome (England): You cannot install Windows applications (or other native software) on Chrome OS. This means that the computer can operate more securely than a Windows machine simply because the computer knows what should be installed. If something is there that shouldn't be there, the computer will erase all local data and install a version of the software that's stored in a secure area. Once you're connected to the internet, you'll be updated to the most recent version of the operating system. As your settings, bookmarks and Chrome applications are stored by Google, they are also restored after the machine is reset and you log in. Typically the operating system is updated every 6 weeks, meaning bugs get fixed pretty quickly (important bug fixes will arrive more quickly) and new features are released quickly, too.