This laptop is the worst laptop I have ever encountered. I tested (or tried to) this brand new and right out of the box laptop with Trisquel 5.5 live-CD and pendrive. It simlpy refused to boot.

My first problem with this laptop was getting into the BIOS. I could not get in no matter what key I tried. I then browsed the internet for a few minutes and found a solution; boot to the installed OS on the HDD (windows 8 in this case) and make the OS to re-start. Then I could access the BIOS with delete key.

My problems did not end there. The BIOS did not recognize my CD as a boot option and wouldn't boot my USB pendrive even when UEFI was disabled. I am sure my CD is ok. I tested it right away with another laptop and it worked fine. I happened to have a non-free GNU/Linux CD with me and I tried it as well with the same result. The only thing it did recognize and successfully booted was a windows 7 DVD.

I don't know if this laptop is working properly or not since it refused to boot even the testing CD which my employer uses to test the hardware to see if it is working properly or not. It is brand new and it has a fresh OS installed which seems to work fine. I suspect that the BIOS has some freedom unfriendly features. Please verify if you have similar experiences with this model.

Specifications from the laptop's packaging:

Vendor        Asus
Series        A55V
Full name     A55VJ-SXD85H
CPU           Intel Core i5-3210M, 2.5Ghz
RAM           DDR3 4GB
Mother board  K55VJ
GPU           nVidia GeForce GT 635M 2GB
Architecture  64-bit (maybe x86-64)