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Steel Rat
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I was looking for a small, cheap laptop to carry all my school textbooks as ebooks, so I bought the Acer C720 Chromebook for $180 about a month ago. I don't mean to gush or anything, but I'm incredibly surprised. I was expecting - intending, even - to have an extremely cheap, extremely portable system that's just powerful enough to do the basics. What I got was as seamless and powerful as something for around $300.

 

Specs:

Screen - 11.6 inch, 1366x768 LCD

Battery Life - 6 hours, on average

Weight - under 3 pounds

Ports - HDMI, 1 USB 3.0, 1 USB 2.0, SD slot

OS - Linux Chrome OS

 

Processor - Intel Celeron GHz 1.4

RAM - 2GB DDR3

Storage - 16 GB SSD

 

What really shines is the use of a Solid State Drive in an ultra-cheap, ultra-portable laptop. You can't find any Windows laptop that comes with an SSD for less than $300. It's so damn fast, you boot up in seven seconds. It's perfect for this form factor, it makes the system weigh a lot less, and gives a huge increase to battery life, on top of being a breeze of speed. In most computers, a hard drive can be a bottleneck to an otherwise great PC, but a SSD will sure up that issue. The 16 GB of storage can be a concern, but I found a 128 GB replacement for $70. I'll get around to it, but I really haven't needed more space. The purchase of a Chromebook also gets you 100 GB of online storage on Google Drive free for 2 years - which is about half, at most, of a laptop's expected lifetime. That's on top of the 15 GB they give to everyone free for life.

 

The processor is also surprisingly powerful. A dual-core with 1.4 GHz, it's just a bit less powerful than the i3. I can run Minecraft on it better than my girlfriend's $500 3-year old windows laptop. It really needs to be said - processors today are extremely powerful - way more powerful than computers most people have can make good use of. If you have a computer you're not expecting to game on, you really don't need much processor. What slows the computer down the most is the hard drive. Cheap computers can't adopt the SSD fast enough.

 

The Chrome OS might not be for people who don't want to learn a new operating system, and does not natively support Windows programs, but I've found it to be a godsend of elegance compared to Windows 7; no dozens of mysterious processes eating resources in the background, no waiting through arduous updates every week, the UI is a pretty beautiful thing. You file manager application has a folder which automatically syncs to Google Drive, so you can backup everything to online storage without giving it a second thought. When the OS releases an update, an update icon appears in your tray, and all you do is restart your computer, which just takes 7 seconds, and you're ready to go. And if it doesn't do everything you need, you can use "crouton" to install any Linux OS to run side-by-side. At any moment, you can switch from Chrome to Ubuntu. Through Ubuntu, you can run "Wine" and do any Windows task. It's also good if you need to do something that can't be done offline on Chrome's OS.

 

To note some drawbacks, you might be put off by the trackpad's missing right-click button. Chrome OS does not utilize a right click, it's basically replaced by two-touch clicks or alt-clicking. Another pain of the trackpad is click-dragging, which takes some significant effort to get used to. The trackpad is all a single button, there's no separate physical right-left clickers as on Windows laptops. The best way to get over this is simply to pretend they're there. If you click the trackpad all the way down and hold it, you can drag with another finger in exactly the same way as if you had a separate button.

 

The next drawback I can say simply - the third-party apps suck. ALL OF THEM REALLY SUCK. You recover a lot of functionality by using an alternative Linux environment through Crouton, though.

 

The final drawback is that many of the third-party apps - of which all of them suck - usually don't work offline. Most of the "apps" are really just internet shortcuts which, obviously, won't work without an internet connection. I believe all of the Google Drive applications (Docs, Drawings, etc) still work offline, which is great. The Google Drive applications are really rock-solid, and so much more of a joy to work with than Microsoft Office.

 

That's about all I have to say. Now I'd like to conclude with this hilariously sad youtube video by Microsoft, employing the Pawn Star guys to say a bunch of crap about how Chromebooks aren't real laptops.

 

 

Scroogled! :laughing guy:

 

Man. That is terrible acting. And all of the information is either patently false, or at best extremely hypocritical.

 

Anyone else got a Chromebook? Anyone interested in one?

Edited by Steel Rat
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I'm moreso interested about dual partitioning my HDD to let me boot into Linux if I need to do some Unix suited tasks (like MPD) than specifically Chromebooks, but Chromebooks are pretty damn cool!

 

I built my desktop this summer and I've been a staunch Windows user my entire life, but when I have the time I'm gonna add some Linux to my hard drive.

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Microsoft just came out with a rip-off of the Chromebook, called the "Stream," which is being manufactured by HP.

 

The series is a set of 11" or 14" laptops with 32GB SSD's, including a free Terabyte of online storage for one year for around $200. Just like the chromebook, they have 2GB of non-expandable ram, but boast a more powerful quad-core processor.

 

Check it out. If you wanted awesome, inexpensive, basic online performance but were afraid of abandoning Windows, this might be a good compromise.

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