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Will HP's $200 Stream 11 Make People Forget About Chromebooks?
theodp writes With an 11.6" screen, Windows 8.1, and free Office 365 for a year, the $199.99 solid-state HP Stream 11 laptop is positioned to make people think twice about Chromebooks (add $30 for the HP Stream 13). But will it? "The HP Stream 11 is clearly both inexpensive and a great value," writes Paul Thurrott. "At just $200, it's cheap, of course. But it also features a solid-feeling construction, a bright and fun form factor, a surprisingly high-quality typing experience and a wonderful screen. This isn't a bargain bin throwaway. The Stream 11 is something special." The HP Stream Family also includes the HP Stream 7, a $99.99 Windows 8.1 Tablet that includes the Office 365 deal. By the way, at the other end of the price spectrum, HP has introduced the Sprout, which Fast Company calls a bold and weird PC that's bursting at the seams with new ideas, from 3-D scanning to augmented reality. (We mentioned the Sprout a few days ago, too; HP seems to be making some interesting moves lately, looks like they're getting on the smartwatch bandwagon, too.) If you're looking at the Stream as a cheap platform for OSes other than Windows, be cautious: one of the reviews at the Amazon page linked describes trouble getting recent Linux distributions to install.
It's a Celeron CPU. Office 365 is a rental. It's 2GB of memory. It's Windows. vs. http://www.google.com/intl/en/... and the OS is ChromeOS which is automatically updated. And it's not a rental. And you can install Ubuntu/Debian if you want in a chroot using crouton if you want a fully functional OS for programming.
Even Paul says its not too good (without saying "its too underpowered"):
Whether the Stream's Celeron process, 2 GB of RAM and 32 GB of eMMC storage will stand the test of time will of course require some, well, time. But I can offer a few quick observations.
First, this configure seems perfectly capable of running Windows 8.1 (and thus Windows 10 as well) and doing well for the types of casual computing tasks one should expect of such a machine. You can run Word and Office 2013. IE. Facebook. That kind of thing. My bloated Chrome configuration, with multiple add-ons, quickly overwhelmed available memory, and while it does run fine, you won't want to run Chrome alongside any other heavy hitters.
so its not really enough to browse the web with the addons one expects nowadays (and I assume heavy javascript web pages) and do anything else, and he goes one to say you have 10gb storage free. You'll have to carefully manage that once you store a load of music or movies on it.
Chromebooks are not just cheap, they are very low maintenance and easy to use. If you buy your mum a Windows laptop she will need technical support. If you buy her a Chromebook after the initial set-up you can forget about it.
This is precisely the reason I recommended my mother buy an Acer Chromebook because after years of supporting her Microsoft Windows-running computer it was definitely a blessing to have a computer which I could set-up for her the features (email, web browsing) she cared about and be done with support. The only support request I get these days, which admittedly is as rare as hen's teeth, occurs when the track-pad mouse freezes - attributable to the suspend mode I dare say. For 99% of the things I use a computer for these days a Google Chromebook would suffice since any software development work can be done on a virtual machine or physical server accessible via SSH from the Google Chromebook.
Chrome Remote Desktop. Full password protected access from anywhere in the world, even if she's NAT'd behind her router. Chrome Web Store
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