Basic laptop

Today I purchased an Acer Cloudbook 14 for $30 ...

No AC, battery dead, physically in good condition. I ordered an adapter for $6.95 on eBay.
The notebook has a 32GB eMMC solid state hard drive and a SD card slot. Intel Celeron N3050 dual core 1.6GHz w/burst to 2.2GHz CPU with 2GB DDR3 RAM. 14" TFT display, webcam, stereo microphones, 802.11 ac WiFi and Bluetooth enabled on Windows 10 Home OS and Cortana voice response. The absolute minimum basics for a laptop running Windows 10 Home.

 

Today (June 17) I received the AC adapter. It works!

This how fast Windows 10 booted...

After installing Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS

Same boot time: about 40 seconds. 

Streaming CBS News: w/Ubuntu

After day one Windows 10 started updating and left the hard drive with less than 5GB of space. I loaded Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS "minimal installation" and managed to boot up the OS with 21GB of hard drive available. I then loaded the smallest programs I could find to manage streaming audio, VLC media player, webcam and tweaks to fine tune the touchpad. I still have 20GB of space.

As a streaming media player it works just fine. My home desktops do all the work and the laptop is just a portable TV. With a Roku account I can see many programs and movies, local news streams live broadcasts and the internet archive has thousands of old movies free.

The easiest upgrade I've ever done. Insert one 512GB miscoSD card. I have an embedded PC with eMMC 32GB hard drive and 512GB of storage on a removable drive. Literally no moving parts except opening the display. Battery provides an average 10 hours operation.

We also purchased an HP Beats 15 Special Edition Notebook PC.

AMD Quad Core CPU, 1T hard drive, 8GB RAM, 15.6" display

Cnet Specifications

HP Beats 15 Notebook PC review July 2015: