Grant Watt
2
- Pros
- Build, looks, touch screen responsiveness, keyboard, Fast with SSD I installed
- Cons
- HDD is slow, touchpad is typical laptop although better than most
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I saw this Asus F202E at Harvey Norman. I decided a 1.1GHz Dual Core Celeron with 2G RAM was probably just enough to do what I wanted it to do as a basic Word/Outlook and show customers Windows 8 as well as downloading drivers and testing internet connections.
First of all this is an impressively good quality unit to look at and picking it up and having a play with the keyboard confirms this.
I replaced the drive in the machine with a $98 Samsung Series 840 120GB drive and it transformed this machine. With the standard HDD, if you did much at all the drive would go up to 100% on task manager and stay there so some windows could easily take 15 seconds to load when busy. This behaviour is no doubt memory related too as it probably disk swaps a bit with 2G. Overall though the build quality is great, the touch screen if you want to use touch, is beyond reproach for responsiveness.
It also has great sound and an excellent keyboard, both much better than I thought for a touch screen laptop at this price. I have Office 365 on it and was using it to do my newsletter and saving it to SkyDrive for editing on my desktop. Excellent. It has enough power to make standard word, outlook and web surfing quick and painless.
Overall for general purpose use. I really can’t fault this unit, at pretty well any price with the SSD installed. It is also a perfect size for mobility and small enough that sitting it on your chest while using it as a tablet using touch is an option.
The other negative is just the screen in bright light, again if you compare it to a MacBook or no doubt any Windows machine with an expensive IPS screen then sure it will come up lacking. It is however the same sort of quality as any reasonable laptop in the price range up to $1000.
Battery life is pretty average and somewhat less than I thought but still very useful. If you are doing average stuff while connected wirelessly like web surfing email etc., three hours is a safe bet for battery life.
It works fine on outputting to a 22 inch desktop 1920 x 1080 via VGA cable. It did use a bit of extra memory but basically worked just fine.
Overall, I think that this is a great machine for the price, almost a steal in fact. And touch does work very well if you care to use it on this machine. The touch use suffers no delays that you can sometimes get using the touchpad either since touchpad gestures are executed using Asus Smart Gesture which is loaded as a background process
SUGARZP
1
THIN, STYLISH, CHEAP