andruoid
Android Expert
I've had the Chromebook (Acer C7) for about a week now and thought I'd share info and gain info from anyone who has one as well!
I decided on the Chromebook as the OS has always had my interest and Win8 is no longer an option.
First off is the speed. Everything loads fast, its what you get from an OS that has very low resources. With the stock drive I booted in about 18 seconds. I did replace the 320GB Seagate Thin drive with a 120GB Kingston HyperX. This for 4 reasons; more battery life, less heat, no noise and even more speed. Boot time is 4 seconds and when asleep as soon as I open the lid it's on. As far as the 2GB of RAM goes I haven't seen a reason yet to upgrade. There is a free slot and a 2GB stick is $20 so it would be a inexpensive solution if needed.
There are more apps and extensions than I thought. A lot of off-line apps as well. Without a net connection? Not often and if I really need to I can always tether off my phone. I keep all my files locally and one feature that is really required is a File Manager with support to access NAS drives. Luckily my WD My Book Live has FTP support so getting files from it is not as issue. Simply type ftp://username:password@192.168.1.1 in the browser and I'm in. Uploading is a no go however.
The C7 is $249 Canadian and the 120GB above is $149. Is it a keeper? This approaches the Asus Transformer with keyboard which is $500. Somethings that are better; the Transformer has apps for connecting to NAS and battery life.
Feel free to chime in and state other findings, I'm going to decide over the weekend.
I decided on the Chromebook as the OS has always had my interest and Win8 is no longer an option.
First off is the speed. Everything loads fast, its what you get from an OS that has very low resources. With the stock drive I booted in about 18 seconds. I did replace the 320GB Seagate Thin drive with a 120GB Kingston HyperX. This for 4 reasons; more battery life, less heat, no noise and even more speed. Boot time is 4 seconds and when asleep as soon as I open the lid it's on. As far as the 2GB of RAM goes I haven't seen a reason yet to upgrade. There is a free slot and a 2GB stick is $20 so it would be a inexpensive solution if needed.
There are more apps and extensions than I thought. A lot of off-line apps as well. Without a net connection? Not often and if I really need to I can always tether off my phone. I keep all my files locally and one feature that is really required is a File Manager with support to access NAS drives. Luckily my WD My Book Live has FTP support so getting files from it is not as issue. Simply type ftp://username:password@192.168.1.1 in the browser and I'm in. Uploading is a no go however.
The C7 is $249 Canadian and the 120GB above is $149. Is it a keeper? This approaches the Asus Transformer with keyboard which is $500. Somethings that are better; the Transformer has apps for connecting to NAS and battery life.
Feel free to chime in and state other findings, I'm going to decide over the weekend.
