short review ASUS notebook B551LA-CN101G

Here is my short review for the ASUS notebook B551LA-CN101G, 64bit. First a brief description of the spec: monitor 15.6 inch 1920 x 1080 pixel TFT/LCD; Intel Core i5-4200U, 2-core, 1.6 to 2.6 GHz; 1 x 8GB DDR3 (SODIMM, 204 pins) 1.35V, one RAM slot empty, so, max is 16 GB RAM; 128 GB mSATA SSD; Intel HD Graphics 4400, 1x USB 2.0, 3x USB 3.0, Bluetooth 4.0, card reader, webcam.

Pro: light weight and sturdy due to carbon reinforced casing. Keyboard is fine. All in all it is of decent, business like appearance. It does what you can expect from above spec and processor. It runs very quiet and even under heavy load the fan noise is not much, also due to the fact that there is one fan inside only.

Con: not hardware-upgrade friendly. I wanted to add another 8 GB RAM and another SSD. In order to do that one has to open the back cover completely by unscrewing all the screws (of unequal length) thereby voiding the warranty. RAM needs to be 1.35V type. Standard 1.5V does not work. BIOS does not allow changing the CPU voltage (perhaps not advisable anyway). Interestingly there is space available for adding another SSD but I couldn't find an additional SATA connecting point on the motherboard to connect it to; or did I just miss to see it??? See attached image I took of my laptop with the back cover open.

Attached is an image of the motherboard. Bottom left black rectangle below the DVD drive (silver greyish looking) is the space provided that would perfectly fit an 2.5" form factor SSD.

Operating system: Not happy with ASUS supplied Windows 7 and just an upgrade to Windows 8.1 and the fact that the 'recovery portion' on the hard drive ate away storage space I installed Win 8.1 OEM (formatted the hard drive). There is an issue with the ASUS keyboard driver (ATK pack). Solution was to reinstall the OS from scratch and let Windows update install all drivers and none from the supplied CDs that came with the ASUS package. Hmm, ASUS did a bit of a sloppy job here.

BIOS: The BIOS offers security features such as TPM and there is also a finger print sensor. So, for business users this might be great but couldn't decide whether or not TPM is a pro or con, so, I let you guys decide. Nice was the fact that it is possible to lock or unlock the built-in camera, wireless LAN or USB ports already in the BIOS setup (press F2 to access it on boot). In particular the camera built into laptops these days can be annoying if one does NOT want it to be activated all the time. But that's another discussion...

 

I have b551la too. It doesn't have ssd though so my msata port is empty. Otherwise my scheme is pretty similar to yours. I just disassembled it in order to investigate how I can upgrade to ssd (keeping hdd too). As I understand there is no place to insert standard msata ssd (because of dimm slots). I also not sure how to place hdd to DVD shot since they have different interface. It's worrying a bit. But at least it's easy to add ram.