ASUS X205TA 11.6 inch Laptop Notebook (Intel Atom Z3735F 1.33 GHz, 2 GB RAM, Integrated Graphics, Windows 8.1 with Free Windows 10 Upgrade) – Blue

I bought this primarily for the “up to 12 hours” battery life.

So long as you know what you’re buying, the Asus X205TA is a great budget laptop. It has the specifications of a tablet that you might buy for as little as £50 (which is what I bought my Linx 7 tablet for – after cashback – last year, and it shares similar specifications). If you’re looking for a powerful machine, or a quick machine, look elsewhere.

I upgraded to Windows 10 as soon as I received the laptop. The upgrade requires more disk space than what it available, but it’s enough to plug in a decent size USB stick.

Whether it’s due to the speed of the machine, or that the upgrade is throttled due to having to use a USB stick through a USB2.0 port, the upgrade takes some considerable time. I think that including all the Windows 8 updates and then the Windows 10 upgrade, the whole process took something like 24 hours. I just left it to it, just checking on it from time to time in case it needed my input. On some occasions, it looks like the upgrade has “frozen”, but it hasn’t. It’s just slow. I went through this experience with my tablet, and a much more powerful laptop, and you just have to be patient.

I’ve now supplemented the 32GB internal drive with a 64GB microSD for under £15 from an Amazon Lightning Deal.

I’ve not done a battery run-down test, but does look like it lasts a long time. The laptop ships with McAfee anti-virus, and as soon as that wants to do a full-scan the CPU shoots up and the “remaining battery life” plummets. So I should imagine that you won’t get half the claimed 12 hours if you’re using the laptop in earnest. For light use (internet, email, Word, etc) I think it’ll last for quite some time.

This would have been a 5/5 laptop except for a couple of annoyances –

I don’t like the two little “prongs” at the bottom of the screen. It’s nice that they raise up the keyboard a little, but they feel like an afterthought. If you forget they’re there when opening, you could scratch your table top.

Only having USB2.0 ports and no USB3 is an annoyance. I don’t understand the thinking on that one.

The proprietary charging port is also a strange choice – one of the great things about most tablets is that they can be charged with any micro-USB cable/charger. The X205TA can’t. Given that it only has tablet specs, they should have allowed charging via micro-USB.

As a light-use, lightweight, long battery-life laptop for around £150, it’s a great machine. Just don’t ask it to do anything you wouldn’t ask a similarly-priced tablet to do, though, without expecting it to creak a little.