Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsWonderful computer for the price, great for many purposes.
Reviewed in the United States on October 19, 2015
So far I'm really happy with this laptop. It's kinda slow sometimes, and only has 2GB of memory, and the storage is only 32GB (and Windows 10 takes over 14GB iteslf!) and the screen is fine but it has a lot of light bleed at full brightness. There were no bad pixels in the display.
But it seems very sturdy, the processor only consumes 6 watts at full tilt and even then there's only one warm to very warm (definitely not hot) spot on the bottom of the cast towards the right side. This is a bit plus along with the fanless design which means there are no vents to block or admit dist and pet hair etc. It also means you can use it directly on your lap or a blanket etc. without overheating resulting from blocked vent access.
So far battery life is better than just about anything else around here. It shows ~9h predicted life running at full tilt with a full charge. One thing I haven't found yet is a way to prevent the battery always charging to 100%, since that's not good for Li-Ion batteries and I'll probably use it mostly while plugged in. The battery is not externally removable.
You cannot upgrade the internal memory or storage, but you can add a micro SD card to get substantially more storage. The system should work with any micro-SD card up to a 2TB SDXC card (if there were such a thing). I'm using the latest SanDisk 128GB SDXC CLass 10 and it's working fine so far. The card fits mostly flush with the surface, though it sticks out maybe 1/16" which is enough to press it in to release the latch mechanism, so you will want to keep an eye on it and avoid bumping that part of the case so you don't accidentally eject it.
It's super light compared to a full-sized laptop, and I got it primarily so that I don't have to keep dragging my 15" laptop around and can bring this one for light tasks wherever I am, and with much less worry about damaging it or theft.
The system was not too loaded with crapware, and I was able to uninstall everything I didn't want, and set the numerous Win 10 privacy settings to turn off at least some of its desire to constantly phone home about everything. The Celeron processor supports the full up-to-date 64-bit instruction set, and even VT-x virtualization extension (which have to be turned on in the BIOS). Also in the BIOS you can change whether the Fn key need to be pressed to get F1-F12 (default) or the special functions like volume, screen brightness etc.
The keyboard feels good. There's an actual light in the Mute/F6 key that illuminates whenever the system volume is at zero.
I've actually been playing with Blender, the free 3D app, and performance so far has been excellent. I can model and render with Cycles (though just using the CPU as no GPU compute hardware is available) and the performance is sufficient for learning and other light work. The limited memory would likely become an issue very quickly if you tried to do anything terribly complex though.
I haven't tried any modern games yet, and don't have high expectations here, but I expect most older games, games on their lowest settings, and pretty much any casual game would likely run fine. Again, disk storage, memory, and CPU performance will all be significant limits when trying to run modern games (many of which require more disk space than the entire machine has available!) but the 3D performance doesn't seem to be terrible.
I love it!
G.
