it's about damn time i talked about this thing. the machine i've done all of motsdrama with so far, this laptop has carried me through thick and thin. it was a christmas gift in 2020, helped me through school during the covid year, stuck by my side all throughout the latter half of high school, and is my go-to machine for on the go work and games alike. due to being a gaming laptop and all, it's decently powerful and can handle some pretty chunky programs, and because of the SSD it comes prebuilt with, it was the speediest computer i had for a while. i've lived out of this laptop for four years now, and it's served me well. now, with all that sappy junk out of the way, good lord this thing pisses me off.

first issue: the shell is made of plastic. i guess the idea was to make it as lightweight as possible, because lord knows it's already heavy as is, but i think that's a very shortsighted way of thinking when it comes to making a laptop. unlike something like a desktop, you're probably gonna be lugging a laptop around with you places, and it's bound to take some battle damage over time. metal will dent, but plastic tend to shatter. you know how i know that? because it's been happening to me! the bottom case of my laptop has several cracks in it, two screw posts have straight up broken off, and one of the hinges has began to break apart. and all for what, to make this already pretty heavy laptop just a little less heavy? i also hate, HATE the textured design on the outside of the laptop, it's supposed to look all "cool" and "gamer" but it makes putting stickers on it look really unnatural, and if you've seen the stickerbomb page, you know how important of a factor that is. you know what my biggest problem with this plastic shell ordeal is, by the way? on their website, Asus says this thing is buit for "real world durability" and says it'll "outlast the competition." you know what outlasted this laptop in terms of durability? my previous laptop, an Acer Aspire ES 11, which was a hand-me-down from my sister and was a cheap piece of garbage.

this laptop was used by two different people over the course of its life, which was a whole 6 years, and ended up with not a single crack in its plastic shell. now, to be fair, the ES 11 much lighter and doesn't have as much weight to support with the top screen. but i think at that point that's a design oversight with the A15, just make the hinges bigger!! and sure, i could just buy a metal shell to replace it with, but like, no that's wicked expensive, and i'd have to figure out how to disassemble this thing to even get to that point, not to mention the other myriad issues holding it back. speaking of which...

second issue: performance! yeah, just cuz it's a gaming laptop doesn't make it instantly all that and a bag of chips. 8GB of ram is all you get, and that isn't gonna take you very far. to be fair, i don't really play a lot of triple A games, but that's not even what i'm trying to run on it. back in 2021, i got really into Inscryption, and the A15 was getting winded trying to run that, even with the charger plugged in. and man, don't ever ask it to run Quake, it just can't. textures and hud elements flicker and animations jitter constantly in the Quake 1 and 2 remasters, and Quake 3 is just...

come on, how do you mess it up THAT bad? i've also had issues when booting the laptop up where it just gets stuck in a loop of going to the auto repair screen, and the only way to fix it is by shutting it down fully by holding the power button. this issue has been plaguing me ever since i got the thing, and nothing makes it go away, not even reinstalling Windows. also, this laptop comes with McAfee PRE-INSTALLED.

third issue: user repair hostility. this became most apparent to me when i was trying to clean out the keyboard. i tried removing the keycaps, and found them insanely hard to put them back in. turns out, they aren't supposed to come off, and if you want to clean the keyboard Asus just expects you to buy a new keyboard module and replace it, which is just... SO wasteful. though now im actually considering doing that, because the keyboard has been on the fritz recently. the W and S keys will just randomly not work, and can stay that way for upwards of a minute, making me stop what i'm doing and wait for them to stop being so moody. and on occassion, i'll go to save my work on a project, and pressing Ctrl+S just doesn't do anything. alternatively, sometimes i want to turn on text wrap in VS Code (my text editor of choice for working on this site) yet pressing Alt+X (the shortcut for enabling text wrap) just doesn't work at all. in the time it's taken me to write this segment, even more keys have broken, and it's forced me to migrate my work to my desktop instead. wow, so much fun! same goes for the mouse buttons on the track pad, LMB just refuses to register inputs sometimes. and oh man, the headphone jack and USB-C ports broke a long time ago, because AGAIN, THEY'RE MADE OF PLASTIC, and they're soldered straight to the board, so replacement is going to take so much more work than it would otherwise. it just feels so user unfriendly, and it's infuriating.

in the end, the A15 is a good laptop. it's served me very well the past few years, and i do appreciate it and all it's done. but also good lord, some of the decisions made with this thing are utterly baffling, and i simply don't get it. now, it's not all doom and gloom in the end. i have ordered a new keyboard module that's due to come in in a couple of days, and i'll add an addendum to this entry if that solves all my problems. but for now, i'm still waiting on that, so it doesn't get any slack yet.