A review from a user who just recently purchased an Asus Vivobook X202E.
Initial Impressions:
1. Very responsive touchscreen, no lags, no missed touches.
2. Viewing angle is bad. You need to be looking straight on the screen.
3. Touch pad not so good. Too sensitive Asus smart gesture. I would always accidentally activate the charms bar at the right using the regular scrolling on the touch pad.
4. Start up and shutdown, a bit slow. I think an SSD drive would have been better.
5. Windows 8 is really cool. Downloaded Start8 for the start menu. What's good about this is that it has multilanguage support.
Overall, solid feel, nice brushed metal texture.
For those who wants to upgrade, the Wi-Fi card and hard drive are the only parts upgradeable.
I plan to use SSD, so to be sure I opened it up. You would need a 7mm thick SSD. My initial intention was to use an Intel SSD 330 but that's 9.5mm so I might just opt for a Samsung SSD 840 instead.
This is a great laptop, especially if you're just into web browsing and more on office works only.
Price ranges from 26,995 to 27,500 for credit card and 24,800 to 25,500 for cash purchase. That's for the Core i3 unit. You should really get one though the only thing that might hold you back is the screen. Its also similarly priced like the Lenovo S405 and Samsung Slimbook Series 5.
If you plan to do some Photoshop, the smaller screen might be an issue for prolonged use.
Cons:
1. The 2-cell battery would last only between 3 to 4 hours.
2. The fan seems to be continuously running even on idle mode.
3. The HDD seems a bit noisy - that's why I switched to SSD.
Windows Experience Index
Upgrading: Replaced the HDD with an SSD. From the Read/Write speed at 85MB/s, its now a lot faster as seen below using Speed Test Pro. Read is now 430 MB/s and Write is 135 MB/s.
Below are the actual original specifications before the upgrade to SSD:
Asus Vivobook X202E specs:
11.6 inch LED display @ 1366×768 pixels
Intel Core i3 3217U Ivy Bridge 1.8GHz
Intel HD 4000 Graphics
4GB DDR3 RAM
500GB HDD
WiFi 802.11 b/g/n
2 x USB 2.0 ports
1 x USB 3.0 ports
30.3cm x 20.0cm x 21.7mm
2.9lbs
Li-Polymer battery
Windows 8
Php26,995 (suggested retail price)
There's a lower model also avilable for this model.
Asus Vivobook X202E specs:
11.6inch LED display @ 1366×768 pixels
Intel ULV Celeron 847 1.1GHz dual-core
Intel HD Graphics
2GB DDR3 RAM
500GB HDD
WiFi 802.11 b/g/n
2 x USB 2.0 ports
1 x USB 3.0 ports
30.3cm x 20.0cm x 21.7mm
2.9lbs
Li-Polymer battery
Windows 8
Php20,995 (suggested retail price)
Tried a stress test on the GPU using AIDA64 and I just confirmed that the GPU clock indeed goes up from 350Mhz default clock speed to 1.05Ghz on full load. It just confirms that you can really perform some light gaming on lower settings for newer games and even play on max settings with some older games on the X202E.
But I do recommend using a laptop cooler if you are planning to play some games on this little monster.
Accessories:
Laptop cooler - My current temps using CMC3 cooler is now lower by around 6-8C.
I uninstalled Asus' Power4Gear Hybrid to enable Intel Speedstep for lower temps and better battery life. Even at Battery Saving mode P4G doesn't enable Speedstep and I suspect incompatibility issues of P4G with Windows 8.
Use Windows 8 Built-in recovery tool to get a backup of the recovery partition. No need for any other third party tools.
1.) prepare a external HD with at least 20gb space
2.) go to Control Panel > Recovery
3.) Select Create Recovery Drive & tick the copy the recovery partition from PC to recovery drive
4.) follow the succeeding prompts & it should do the trick
*credit of content and photos to peterjommel, ccl 2003, dm1179 of TPC
