The New and Old!
As you know my Acer Aspire with Windows 7 was falling apart and I had to figure out a way to keep blogging without breaking the bank. I happen to fin this nice little system for under 250$ and with the amount of positive reports from people around the globe about this laptop. I figured I have to try it out myself. As you know I simply love to buy products from Acer because I believe in them so much. Every time I buy something from them, they just seem to last and thus I couldn’t resist trying this little Chromebook out. I also thought this might be something that could be given as a gift to other people since Christmas time is almost upon us. I just didn’t realize what I was getting myself into with this laptop.
Specifications
Let’s start off by detailing to you what the specifications are for this Chromebook:
Chromebook With Chome OS:
- Screen Size: 11.6”
- Screen Resolution: 1366 x 768
- Processor Type: Intel
- Processor Model: Celeron 847
- Processor Speed: 1.1GHz (Dual core)
Display:
- Screen Size 11.6’
- Screen Mode HD
- Screen Resolution 1366 x 768
Network:
- IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n (With Fast Ethernet Technology)
USB:
- 3 USB 2.0
Comes with no optical drives, so no DVD’s or CD can be played with this device. I am sure someone was going to ask this so I figured it was time to point that out! Now I can tell you every detail about the specifications but it really doesn’t need to be discussed.
Pros and Con’s
I am sure some of you are think there isn’t really anything positive that I could say about this laptop but you’d be wrong. I started using this laptop last month for 3 weeks now and thought it was high time we at least do a review of this and try to talk about my experience.
Now let’s get to the juicy parts of this article. Would I recommend this to everyone, I would say NO. If your doing photo editing or something that requires high processing editing then you might as well go look somewhere else. The good part of this Acer Laptop is quite obvious but can be oblivious to others. You can Stream movies and Shows and watch them on the laptop. Google did a good job of this. Just like Chromecast, you can stream them from your laptop to the big screen if you want.
Processing Speed
The speed of the laptop when used with the Chrome OS is very different compared to my old laptop but then again, I am sure it was getting sluggish and probably needed a good clean refresh of the system. I wasn’t how well I would like this system but I am not disappointed at all with what I expected to be doing with it. I wasn’t going to be doing much other than blogging, surfing the net, and streaming movies and shows using HULU, CBS, and Netflix. Let’s not forget about Pandora, which also worked perfectly for my needs. It works perfectly on this Acer Chromebook. I had no problems watching shows and movies from all those providers and many more.
Hard Drive
If your planning on putting a lot of music files and documents on this laptop, think again. You can however use USB drives to increase it to what ever size you may need but that will impact your time of the laptop if you don’t have it plugged in then you are are going to be using batter power to power the USB HDD. It comes with a 16 gb Solid State Drive and it is really quite. You can increase the space to 48 Gb’s by adding a 32 Gb SD card which is helpful for some.
Screen
Most videos I streamed worked flawlessly and were quite nice to watch on the 11.6’ display. They say it is High Definition and I believe it is. I have had no problem surfing the web and checking out other web sites to see if there would be any problem with viewing them on a smaller screen and it was nice and no problems.
Battery
The battery power in this was quite amazing. It at times has lasted me more than 5 hours on one charge an that has been a record for me. The size and power alone is something that is definitely big plus to me because I don’t always need to keep it plugged in. Very portable and can be taken to McDonald’s or any Wifi Hotspot. I will be discussing this in detail later, and how to setup a VPN on a Chromebook! 🙂 So stay tuned!
Keyboard and Touchpad
Now to tell you I had a learning curve for the touch pad would be understand statement. You have to understand that it has different gestures for double clicking and right and left clicking. So when you first start using this laptop you will need to be prepared to go to the Chrome Book Help section to help you out and figure out all those new gestures. The keyboard is like most other laptops and does a superb job at letting me type. It all worked out in the end with me because it worked just well for all my needs.
If I haven’t changed your mind and you would like to try this laptop out for yourself you have a few options available to you and here they are:
- Acer 11.6” Laptop 2GB 16GB | C710-2856
Price : 199$
- Google Play Store Price : 199$
- Walmart 199$
- Newegg
- And many other places
Most of the time almost everyone has this version of Chromebook because it is the cheapest there is. It is quite responsive and I have no qualms with this laptop. I even like the size more easier to carry around and not be so bulky.
