Love mine from last yr’s Black Friday sale @ Staples [$99]. Lifting the lid feels torque-y, but nothing has come loose. Participated in Win 10 Insiders and had some challenges with 2 of the builds killing WiFi. Regular Win 10 is probably roach-free. I immediately augmented the soldered 32GB eMMC with a fast 64GB microSD. It runs Chrome great. Native Win Defender does all the AV I need. Files transfer across buses limited only by the external drive. No USB 3.0. Great battery life and screen rez. Entire device is a fingerprint magnet. Be gentle with the power adapter plug: it’s proprietary.
That’s possibly the worst argument ever against getting an affordable low-end laptop. There’s a really, really easy solution to this: don’t download random shit off the Internet. When you do download stuff off the web, read every page of the installer (meaning don’t just keep clicking next on every step of the installer - opt-out of extra crap that gets installed from sites like downloadAtoZ, CNet, and driver websites, which you shouldn’t be using anyhow). Install AdBlock Plus (works in Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer), and you’ll avoid 99% of the crapware on the Internet.
I can barely even use ChromeOS for checking my email, thanks to its complete and utter lack of support for anything that isn’t entrenched in the Googleverse.
It’ll be fine for Minecraft. You’ll probably have to turn some of the effects down, like view distance (that’s a big one), but it’ll otherwise be fine for a kid.
Just got mine churning… dumped the bloatware and downloading Win10 now. However… I was a bit concerned because the “32GB” drive only has 18.8GB total size with about 7GB used by OS & other stuff. Come to find out, they partition a whopping 10GB for the backup partition, and hide it extremely well.
I wish I knew how to recover that space. It sure would come in handy.