Asus VivoBook X202 – Decent Price for a Portable Windows 8 Laptop

Asus VivoBook X202 – Decent Price for a Portable Windows 8 Laptop

The Asus VivoBook X202 is a value for money portable laptop that comes with an 11.6-inch multi-gesture touchscreen, so you can tap, swipe, and pinch your way through your favorite apps—no mouse required. It’s a value for money budget laptop at S$799 or US$509 from Amazon.

It is an entry level Windows 8 laptop, that has the exterior of an ultrabook and looks more expensive than it actually is. Besides its aluminium chassis and solid build, this 11.6-inch notebook comes with a touchscreen to make it much easier to operate Windows 8 with. It only weighs in at slightly under 1.40 kg which is a comfortable weight for a laptop. In comparison, it is about 300g heavier than the Macbook Air. The aluminium finish is very well done and not something expected for this price range. Similar competitors are decked out in full plastic shells. Inspired by the Asus Zenbook, most of the Asus Vivobook X202e’s body is made of aluminum alloy with brushed metal finish. On the outside the lid has a dark purplish gray color with tapered edges while the inside is of silver gray. Check out the pictures below.

vivobook aluminium finish

For system specifications, it is considered entry level, with an 1.86 Ghz i3-3217U processor, 4gb of ram, integrated graphics chipset, standard 5400 RPM 500gb hdd, and an average battery life of about 4 hours. As long as you don’t have the misconceptions of gaming on this portable laptop, this laptop will serve your needs just fine. Even the integrated HD4000 graphics chipset has no problems handling 1080p output and allow you to maximise the HDMI output provided. The 4gb ram is also sufficient. If you are looking for more speed, a good upgrade would be to swap out the 5400 rpm harddisk for a solid state disk for quicker boot time and data access.

vivobook x202e hdd replacement

A decent solid disk with about 120gb of storage can be purchased for about US$100. A good one is the SanDisk Extreme SSD 120 GB which you can offer find it on a discount from Amazon. It rates highly among its SSD peers and you would see much faster access speeds and boot up / program load times with the SSD in place of the default hard disk. It’s one of the best upgrades for this laptop, improving the overall experience with less lag time with applications, as well as quiet, cool operation overall.

I can definitely say that the Asus Vivobook X202e is a perfect work companion. It’s an entry-level notebook but packs more power than most netbooks. At 2.9 lbs it isn’t exactly feather weight but it isn’t tiring to carry around. Plus, it is only 0.85-inch (21.7mm) thin so it won’t take much space in your bag. Connectivity wise is also good with the suite of USB/Ethernet and HDMI. Not to mention the Zen look that makes the X202e aesthetically pleasing. If the screen could be made detachable to convert it to a tablet, this would be the perfect laptop but we would have to wait till future iterations for that.