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Asus Vivobook X202E DH31T: Quick review

I mostly love my Asus Vivobook X202E DH31t.  It's almost an ultrabook, for a netbook price.  There are just a few things that bother me about it.  Perhaps I can fix some of them...
Things I really like about it:

  • People seem to like to complain about the Intel Core I3 processor, saying it is slow.  However, my view is that it's pretty fast as I was comparing it to AMD quad core and Intel dual core Atom processors.  This actually what I consider to be a "real processor".
  • Touch screen is sort of convenient, though I admittedly still don't think about using it often.
  • Aluminum case feels high quality
Things that are kind of a bummer:
  • Built-in, non-upgradeable 2 cell battery with fairly atrocious life (about 2.5 hours).
  • Touchpad, despite having upgraded the drivers to something other than stock (which did slightly improve things), is very large and overly sensitive, causing inadvertent movements and clicks while typing.
  • In Windows 8, the screen starts to flicker badly after running for about 30 min (varies).  

I'd like to take a moment to talk about the screen flicker.  Essentially the entire screen starts to jump to the left and back, rapidly.  It makes me a little sick to my stomach if I try to work around it.  Rebooting seems to resolve the screen flicker issue temporarily.  It's worth noting that this only happens when it is booted into Windows.  It doesn't happen in Linux (I am running dual boot with Ubuntu), so we can rule out any hardware issue.  I have Googled a lot for answers but haven't really found anyone else reporting this screen flicker problem.  Perhaps it is a program I have loaded since I got the machine, but as I recall it happened pretty early on.  I'll post updates if I make an progress on this. 

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