ASUS Laptop VivoBook 15 X515EA 15.6″ Full HD Laptop (Intel i3-1115G4, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, Windows 11), Silver

4.0 out of 5 stars Good for my needs
i had to make a quick decision to buy this Laptop as my previous one had broken. it is missing a couple of features that are used, such as an SD slot. Overall not to bad.

3.0 out of 5 stars I’m convinced laptops are getting worse
this will be replacing a fujitsu lifebook a530, which honestly has been a workhorse and the fan noise is all that’s holding it back along with it being 10 years old

I basically bought this because of the colour. I didn’t want silver and I didn’t want black. this had the basic specs (I wanted 3 full sized usb ports and lenovo were not clear about their usb ports). despite running windows 11, it hasnt crashed yet. I’ll be installing windows 7 at my earliest convenience because frankly windows 11 is nasty. I also wanted as near as possible to a number pad. the asus has a halfway house

laptops have always let down for me because of the keyboard and recently the trackpad. this continues to fail. for some reason, asus have said “lets put the keys in different positions”. not sure why. “lets take a standard keyboard, and move the keys around”. so the enter isn’t double height, the hash key isnt where it should be, something strange has happened with the left shift and for some reason the number pad has had a column removed. this means the enter and delete key are permanently not where they should be and the +-*/ keys are literally stuffed wherever asus could put them

powertoys is able to remap. the trouble with that is that if you plug in a keyboard, right-position keys are now remapped.

looking at the layout, it seems obvious that there is enough room for a full sized keypad, so why asus chose to “remove keys” is anyones guess. asus, you’ve messed this up

oh and asus have decided not to include a wifi off button – so when windows 11 setup decides you must connect to continue, you are going online whether you want to or not. and if you discover you are on public wifi and a nasty has got in and you need to disable online quickly. tuff

there is no num lock indicator. the num lock key is in a different place than it should be. lack of backlit keyboard is a pity. asus really have mullered this keypad

as is with the industry today, in an obsession with removing lines from the plastic, there are no trackpad button places. just a flat surface. to compensate for making the trackpad less useable, asus have decided to put a stupid, what I presume is a fingerprint recognition moulding that I’ll never use, on the trackpad. so, we remove the trackpad buttons to make it less useable, and put in an unneeded chunk of molded plastic for a fingerprint detector some people will never use

another day in the life of asus product development

you don’t get an optical drive, more’s the pity. not that I use one much (you only need to use it once for it to be useful) but it means you cannot install secondary storage in this laptop. edit – you can install secondary storage. it is not as easy to fit as a cd caddy drive adapter, you need to plug ribbon cables in and probably invalidate your warranty

the laptop industry seems obsessed with making laptops thin, which then reduces functionality. no really, I dont mind the thing being 5mm thicker. maybe the PC laptop industry has mac airbook-itis (apple did it, must…copy…apple)

the audio jack is very close to the usb port. as someone has mentioned, a lot of the external ports are physically close to each other on the side of the case, so you might have problems using connector adapters – eg plugging a usb stick into a usb-c port. or if you want to plug an sd card adapter into a usb port – which you’ll need to do because this doesnt have any sd card type slots

a bluetooth speaker may mean the audio jack isn’t as needed as it used to be. but it only needs to be inconvenient once

the fan is quiet – honestly this almost justifies the purchase for me given that my fujitsu now sounds like a plane taking off and was the main reason for a new laptop. easily pleased etc

they described windows 11 as snappier. “do not know snappier” says robbie the robot from forbidden planet. I do. it means menus move in and out of view annoyingly

the difference between an asus vivobook and expertbook – a subscription to norton antivirus. in my experience norton will scream at you to tell you you have disabled the notification to tell norton not to scream at you. norton caters for the “I want a phone” number” crowd – I suspect that a company then charges more for a phone number, and in the process of charging more they feel their software needs to make more noise to justify the price increase. so it’s a sort of “we can charge more but then need to look like we’re charging more”. and more (noise) becomes less (useable)

whether or not there is lore about norton deliberately creating nasties in order to provide a solution, I leave to your imagination

am I going off asus just as I begun? I may be giving lenovo a chance. lets go over the other points

build quality – you dont get marks for it not falling apart – you certainly get them deducted if it does

keyboard and trackpad – already covered. apart from the colour, what swung this for me was that left and right arrows are not double height, my right hand likes the small amount of dead space on the keyboard above left/right arrows as a reference point – lenovo – had you had this I may have bought lenovo because lenovo has a proper keypad

screen – its got one of those, yes. I taped over the camera so when I next receive an email saying “we have footage of you surfing dodgy BBC websites”, I know they havent. when I an watching films I plug a monitor into the hdmi, so laptop screen quality isn’t my end-all

battery – case needs to be removed to access it. with intelligent battery charging utilities it might mean batteries dont have to be replaced as often

I’m not going to comment on the graphics speed, I really don’t use much in the way of 3D gfx – google earth is about the closest I get to 3d graphics. obviously this has no issue with hi def video

at £480 this laptop does seem quite expensive compared to similar specced lenovo i5 items at £350 – maybe because of a windows 11 pro license? you get what you pay for. lenovo again didn’t make it clear if you could install secondary storage. I’ve re checked and this is now at £435 – ah well, thats what you get for buying at christmas

just to summarise, lenovo the following did you out of a sale
3 usb
secondary storage
half height arrow keys

no I don’t regret wasting money on a windows 11 license – being remotely associated with the computer industry means trying it is a useful experience

4.0 out of 5 stars A good general purpose laptop
This was bought for Web browsing, email and general MS Office use and it is just fine for that. The screen is good and performance has been good. It boots quickly and runs well. It was easy to set up and and get running with Windows 11. It replaced a Dell Vostro laptop which has a more robust feel especially the keyboard. The Asus keyboard isn’t as good as the Dell but is fine. For the price I think it was a good purchase and I am happy with it.

5.0 out of 5 stars It can run Sims 4! Daughter loves it!
I wasn’t sure the graphics card on a laptop this cheap could run a decent spec game that has some 3D graphics (ok, not advanced ray tracing or anything a £1000 graphics card could do). I can see in the game the Sims can walk around rooms and things, there’s no dropped frame or lag visible – so perfect!
So this ticks both boxes of allowing daughter to do work and play, and so for the price is brilliant. Highly recommended!

4.0 out of 5 stars Good solid laptop
I bought this laptop as the specs looked good for the price.

I wasn’t disappointed in that it does the job that I wanted, basic browsing, word processing etc, with bits of music, video and editing thrown in (not overly power intensive albeit)

It does what I need it to and without struggling.

The screen quality is decent, nothing spectacular as is the audio.

The general feel of the laptop is not premium but nor is the price. It feels quite cheap but not to the extent that it will easily break, it is sturdy.

The specs as previously mentioned are good and will cater to the needs of probably 90% of people who won’t be doing video editing or music editing etc.

If you, like I do want to listen to music, watch videos, browse the internet and create word documents then this is more than capable of allowing for that and will do it with ease.

Overall very pleased. 4 stars as in the grand scheme of things, 5 star laptops will have better specs and feel more premium but otherwise a great laptop.