Asus X205TA Review
Asus X205TA is lightweight
I bought this laptop some time in 2015. It was my first laptop with an SSD-like type of storage. I picked it because I prefer laptops that are light and portable. In 2020 it's obsolete, nevertheless here is my belated review:
The first thing you notice about Asus X205TA is that it is very lightweight, about 2.2 pounds. It is thin and has a compact form factor, which makes it very portable. The tradeoff is that it only has a 11.6" screen, and the keyboard is slightly smaller.
After setting it up, I immediately noticed that surfing the web was much faster than my previous laptops which had HDD hard drives. It also woke up very quickly from sleep, thanks to the SSD. The touchpad was large, smooth and responsive as well, better than many other laptops I have used at that point.
This laptop came with 2GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, with an Intel Atom CPU. All these specs are somewhat limited, and this is where its weakness is. After accounting for the space taken up by Windows, there was less than 10GB left for installing applications and storing personal data. You most likely need an external USB drive to store personal data instead. When browsing, if more than 6 or 7 tabs are open with busy websites, the load speed starts to degrade, and the touchpad can be jittery.
Just to note, the touchpad can freeze momentarily when the laptop cannot handle the load. This is probably the most annoying part of the laptop because it can cause unintentional drag-and-drop or doubleclick.
In terms of cooling, it is a fanless laptop and therefore dead quiet, a feature I highly appreciated. Even without a fan, the laptop stayed very cool.
The Intel Atom CPU is very power efficient, and the battery typically lasted me 8-9 hours with full charge. My typical usage was surfing the web and using remote desktop into other computers. The laptop can handle word processing and some older games fine, but would struggle with modern games or graphics intensive applications.
Here are my summary of pros and cons:
- lightweight, compact and very portable
- 9 hour battery life
- quiet and runs cool
- fast surfing experience when not many tabs are open
- smooth touchpad operation
- limited hardware specs limiting it to light duty usage
- very limited storage space
- only 11.6" screen
- somewhat reflective screen, not suitable for using outdoors
Final Thoughts
I really liked this laptop when I bought it. I was willing to compromise on some performance and smaller screen size, but I got portability, great battery life, quiet operation, and overall good usage experience out of it. The biggest issues were the low RAM and storage capacity, which rendered it less than ideal. It is obviously very inadequate today in 2020. Luckily there are quite a few highly portable laptop options to take its place.
Where to Buy
Surprisingly this laptop is still available for purchase. I wouldn't recommend buying it in 2020, but here is the link to it: