Asus E200HA netbook

Today I bought one of these, ffor AU$298 (from Harvey Norman):
https://www.asus.com/Notebooks/ASUS-Vivobook-E200HA/

The main reason is that I currently do not have a UEFI-firmware computer, or rather, didn't until today. want that for testing Quirky.

My main workhorse laptop has ye olde BIOS firmware.

Also, I wanted something smaller for traveling.

As it only has 32GB solid-state storage, I wanted a USB3 socket, to be able to plug my 2TB USB3 hard drive. I looked at the cheap baby laptops in Harvey Norman, and this was the only one in the AU$240 - AU$300 range with a USB3 socket. Well, comparing with what they had on display.

It is going to be fun finding out how well Quirky runs on this. After testing booting from USB stick, if it works well, will probably wipe Windows entirely.

I have never done that before, always left Windows there, in a reduced-size partition. I am wondering how the UEFI firmware will behave, if there is no Windows anywhere to be found.

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Comments

Quite a pleasant experience running Windows 10 on this machine.

Of course, this is a very cheap laptop and the CPU is expected to be slow, but I was quite satisfied with the responsiveness.

Windows 10 is actually, finally, getting to be usable, relative to Win 8.
Microsoft won't give up those "live tiles" completely though!

I also tested Quirky Xerus, booting from USB stick, and it works. However, keyboard, wifi and sound are broken.

For wifi, I found a driver, so will try that.

Keyboard, and sound, well, have no solution yet.

I am running the 4.4.6 kernel. I probably should compile the 4.5 kernel.

I could only find one review:
http://www.zdnet.com/product/asus-vivobook-e200ha/

...which I don't entirely agree with. I think that the video is excellent. Slow CPU? -- well, I expect that, but I find it quite usable.

Regarding speed, I have been testing web browsing only so far.

I changed the desktop icons to single-click, which is the first thing I do on a Windows machine.

Click on Firefox icon, then wonder what is happening ...wait... Firefox starts. Yeah, the startup slowness, for Firefox anyway, very slow.

Once underway, Firefox is OK, except after starting 3 - 4 tabs, I got some choppy behaviour when using the touchpad.

Regarding the touchpad, this is the first laptop touchad that I have actually liked using. Always in the past, I have hated the touchpad, always plugged in a mouse.

The touchpad has gesture support. Two-fingers to scroll, works nice. Zoom and pinch, nice. It also has palm-rejection.

My early experiments with Quirky Linux, got better speed responsiveness than Windows. So, if I can fix the bugs, I will probably run Quirky rather than Windows.

Bluetooth 4.1, now that is interesting, never had that on a laptop before. I suppose with Linux, I could use Bluetooth speakers.
This is a new area for me, Bluetooth and Linux.

I am not sure how long I have been browsing, think about an hour.

The battery icon in the tray reports 87% left, and 10 hours running time.

I have a Logitech T630 touch mouse:
http://bkhome.org/news/201505/logitech-t630-bluetooth-mouse.html

Works great. This is the first laptop I have owned with Bluetooth.

Although I like the touchpad, still prefer to use a mouse.

We are seeing the capabilities of phones migrating to laptops. After all, this laptop has an Intel z8300 SoC, as used in many tablets.

Thinking of phones, there is one disappointment, Cortana does not work. Well, I don't really care, but I am disappointed that Asus designed an inadequate microphone.
When I first chose to run Cortana, a message informed me that the microphone had insufficient volume, but I went ahead, and indeed that is the case. Cortana is unusable.
I am unimpressed, Asus.

Tags: linux