Acer 11.6" Intel Quad-Core 2-in-1 Notebook


Acer 11.6" Intel Quad-Core 2-in-1 Notebook

It’s a…craptop.

Look, it could be worse, but it’s not going to win any awards. It has a tiny, low-res display, a spinning metal hard drive, and the bare minimum amount of RAM, paired with a low-power processor from 2016. It will browse the internet, as long as you don’t have too many tabs open. It will play videos on YouTube in 720p. It will open basic Office apps but don’t throw a large, complicated Excel sheet in there. And it will take its time opening these things, and it will complain the entire time.

Conversely, it’s still hard to find a Windows laptop this cheap that has more than a 64GB eMMC for storage. Scouring the depths of the internet or local sales is still my recommendation if you’re in the sub-$250 market for a laptop. I’d recommend something like this instead: https://www.newegg.com/dark-gray-lenovo-thinkpad-x240-mainstream/p/1TS-000E-0D9F7. It’s not a touchscreen, and it still has a crappy display, but it will run circles around the guy running circles around this guy, and only a hair over $200.

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I am still amused at the general dismissal of “spinning metal hard drives” by the digerati. True, hard drives are soon at the point where (as I say) “some tech gets really, really good just before it becomes obsolete.” As with early hard drives, SSDs are still a young technology and have quirks that need to be ironed out.

I have recorded thousands of hours of audio on “spinning metal” starting with a Maxtor 550MB (not GB) SCSI AV drive that cost $1,000. In most if not all cases any errors were my fault. Failure to defragment early drives was often the cause.

Today, I find SSDs to be OK, but “glitches” do creep in that are not found in “spinning metal.” Also, it expensive to find a 1TB SSD that can handle AV needs as well as “spinning metal.”

In a few years, these disks will be gone in homes, but I doubt if all the server farms out there will be SSD any time soon.

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I still use mechanical hard drives, but never as the boot device for an OS. There’s no reason to. The difference in cost between a 500 GB HDD and a 500 GB SSD is like what, $15-20? Even a cheap SSD will provide performance leaps and bounds above a mechanical drive. I also have 9 computers (3 personal laptops, 3 work laptops, 1 desktop, 1 HTPC, and 1 ad-hoc mini PC) in the house right now, all with SSDs, and I haven’t run into any of these “glitches” that you mention. I’ve had zero SSDs fail randomly or suddenly, but I have a stack of dead HDDs that failed with little or no warning, back before SSDs were widely available.

Please don’t assume that my dismissal of a laptop with a HDD means that I don’t think HDDs have a purpose. If you’re storing large volumes of data, it’s not cost-effective to use SSDs, and moreover if there’s not a need for high-performance storage, it’s an unnecessary expense. In laptops, if you have a secondary drive, then that’s a great use case for a mechanical drive if you plan on storing large amounts of data. But mechanical drives are more susceptible to vibration/impact (like what might happen with, y’know, a portable computer), make more noise, and draw more power on average. In general, you’re basically always better-off with a SSD in a laptop. In a server? Sure, use all the HDDs you want. You’ll probably still be better off running the OS off of a SSD, even a small one, even if you have a bunch of HDDs for storage.

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Windows 10 home on the Microsoft store is $139. For $50 more you get this “craptop” included. I like the discussion about SSD vs HDD. I am a fan of the 12-14tb WD easy store shucked and paired with a very small SSD. Thanks. End comment.

Agreed with most of what is said above. For an idea of the relative performance of the Intel Celeron N3160 cpu in this laptop, it has a PassMark score of 1263, or about the same score as many first gen Intel i3 mobile cpus, Intel is now on 10/11th gen.

The biggest bang for the buck performance improvement would likely be swapping in a cheap SSD for that hard drive.

A quick search indicates the RAM can be upgraded to 8Gb, but not sure it would be money well spent unless you already have the RAM.

I wouldn’t be all that concerned about the 1366 x 768 screen resolution since it is compressed on a compact 11.6 inch screen. 1366 x 768 on a 14 or 16 inch screen wouldn’t be fun.

But nobody is buying this refurb laptop for the specs or performance.

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Quad core processors are junk!

FYI, the glitch I experience was with a Surface 3, which I hoped would be an ideal
thing for long-form audio. Some say that MS did not put the best SSDs in those units. There is some talk about uneven wearing of SSDs and problem with hibernating a lot. But who knows?