Loose:
I too just picked up an Asus ultrabook. But I went low end, $400 for a 11 inch traveling machine. Seems well put together. No prob with the HDMI output for vids.
Moving to 8.1 took all of 6 hours. Can't see much diff, but I finally have the machine looking like the old Win 7, loading to the desktop, etc. Office 2003 loaded up fine. AVG,CCleaner,PDF writer - and I'm good.
Will it last? Who knows.