Acer's Chromebook 15 Is Larger And More Affordable Than Ever

[IInuyasha74]

Acer announced a new member of the Chromebook 15 product line, which the company designed to be an affordable notebook for web browsing and media streaming.

Acer's Chromebook 15 Is Larger And More Affordable Than Ever : Read more

 

[Steve Simons]

Sorry. 2 GB of RAM is a deal-breaker. In the school where I manage a very large Chromebook fleet, 4 GB is necessary. The machines have a very long lifespan, and an extra $30 for 4 GB of RAM is well worth it.

All that keyboard space and no ten key?

Speakers are pretty pointless. You don't store music on these. You may stream netflix or Amazon Prime, but, just plug in headphones for a much better experience. That space should have been used for a larger keyboard that included a 10-key for working out of Google sheets.

 

[negusp]

Sorry. 2 GB of RAM is a deal-breaker. In the school where I manage a very large Chromebook fleet, 4 GB is necessary. The machines have a very long lifespan, and an extra $30 for 4 GB of RAM is well worth it.

Chromebooks don't need more than 2 GB. Students, especially, shouldn't be doing things on a Chromebook that require more. Regardless, you wouldn't want to be giving 15 inch Chromebooks to school students.

 

[IInuyasha74]

Sorry. 2 GB of RAM is a deal-breaker. In the school where I manage a very large Chromebook fleet, 4 GB is necessary. The machines have a very long lifespan, and an extra $30 for 4 GB of RAM is well worth it.

Chromebooks don't need more than 2 GB. Students, especially, shouldn't be doing things on a Chromebook that require more. Regardless, you wouldn't want to be giving 15 inch Chromebooks to school students.

Well, there are strong arguments to support and refute the need of 4GB of RAM in a Chromebook. Honestly, most should be able to get by with 2GB in a Chromebook, but 4GB would be helpful in some scenarios.

As for giving 15.6-inch Chromebooks to students, why wouldn't you want to do that? They are cost effect, and useful for just about any subject of study.

 

[negusp]

Sorry. 2 GB of RAM is a deal-breaker. In the school where I manage a very large Chromebook fleet, 4 GB is necessary. The machines have a very long lifespan, and an extra $30 for 4 GB of RAM is well worth it.

Chromebooks don't need more than 2 GB. Students, especially, shouldn't be doing things on a Chromebook that require more. Regardless, you wouldn't want to be giving 15 inch Chromebooks to school students.

Well, there are strong arguments to support and refute the need of 4GB of RAM in a Chromebook. Honestly, most should be able to get by with 2GB in a Chromebook, but 4GB would be helpful in some scenarios.

As for giving 15.6-inch Chromebooks to students, why wouldn't you want to do that? They are cost effect, and useful for just about any subject of study.

Haha, 15.6 inch laptops can barely fit on desks and are easier to break due to their clumsiness/unwieldiness.

Imagine giving 2000 school kids 15.6 inch laptops to roam the halls and use in class. Droppage rates would skyrocket.

 

[IInuyasha74]

Well, to that I'd argue that children are likely to break a large number of notebooks regardless of what size they are. I remember several years ago when I was in my last year of high school, the school decided to buy a few hundred 7-inch netbooks. This was for a relatively small school of about 500 students, and the computers were used exclusively in some class rooms. The end result was that roughly 1/3rd of the notebooks suffered fatal break downs by the end of the year (mostly cracked screens). I was in a tech class at the time, and we were in charge of maintaining them, and we h ad a whole pile of ones that were basically dead from being dropped, tossed or handled too roughly.

I suppose that this could increase with larger systems, but I'd expect the number of failures to be fairly high regardless of the overall system size.

 

[gggplaya]

Hey guys, i'm actually interested in buying one of these for my mom. She tends to google things, and can't understand that some links are full of popups and malware. Even with norton installed, i have to go over and spend 2-3 hours getting rid of some of these, and now just make disk images and wipe her computer back to the image.

Is the chome experience snappy?? Or will this celeron processor seem sluggish?

 

[turkey3_scratch]

In high school we had Chromebooks our last year, Acer ones. Surprisingly they were very reliable for the vast majority of students and could take a beating. We also had cases we were required to put them in which helped protect them but most people didn't use the cases anyway. They were also the perfect cheap laptops for what they were used for.

 

[Steve Simons]

Sorry. 2 GB of RAM is a deal-breaker. In the school where I manage a very large Chromebook fleet, 4 GB is necessary. The machines have a very long lifespan, and an extra $30 for 4 GB of RAM is well worth it.

Chromebooks don't need more than 2 GB. Students, especially, shouldn't be doing things on a Chromebook that require more. Regardless, you wouldn't want to be giving 15 inch Chromebooks to school students.

Well, there are strong arguments to support and refute the need of 4GB of RAM in a Chromebook. Honestly, most should be able to get by with 2GB in a Chromebook, but 4GB would be helpful in some scenarios.

As for giving 15.6-inch Chromebooks to students, why wouldn't you want to do that? They are cost effect, and useful for just about any subject of study.

Haha, 15.6 inch laptops can barely fit on desks and are easier to break due to their clumsiness/unwieldiness.

Imagine giving 2000 school kids 15.6 inch laptops to roam the halls and use in class. Droppage rates would skyrocket.

We have over a 1000 15" chromebooks in our school. We get less than 5 broken ones every year. And these are clumsy middle schoolers. 4 GB of RAM is necessary because of standardized testing. 2 GB is minimum spec. Sure, it'll run, but we all know what minimum spec means (or should).

 

[Steve Simons]

Sorry. 2 GB of RAM is a deal-breaker. In the school where I manage a very large Chromebook fleet, 4 GB is necessary. The machines have a very long lifespan, and an extra $30 for 4 GB of RAM is well worth it.

Chromebooks don't need more than 2 GB. Students, especially, shouldn't be doing things on a Chromebook that require more. Regardless, you wouldn't want to be giving 15 inch Chromebooks to school students.

Thanks for being an educational expert and know exactly what our students should or shouldn't be doing on a Chromebook! What exactly is your expertise?

 

[Steve Simons]

Hey guys, i'm actually interested in buying one of these for my mom. She tends to google things, and can't understand that some links are full of popups and malware. Even with norton installed, i have to go over and spend 2-3 hours getting rid of some of these, and now just make disk images and wipe her computer back to the image.

Is the chome experience snappy?? Or will this celeron processor seem sluggish?

In our fleet we have some with Intel and some with NVIDIA processors. They are both quite snappy. I almost had my mom sold on one but she went with Windows because she's still very married to Excel (retired accountant/buyer). I sense more malware cleaning in my future as well...

The beauty of a Chromebook is the ease at which you can just reset the whole dang thing. A few keystrokes and bam, back to factory settings.

The biggest drawbacks tend to be their screen. It just isn't particularly sharp.

The best solution I have is HP's Chromebox. That thing is smoking fast for what it does and attaches to a monitor, so you get a nice screen resolution as well. It's more of a desktop deal though and not a mobile solution.

 

[gggplaya]

Hey guys, i'm actually interested in buying one of these for my mom. She tends to google things, and can't understand that some links are full of popups and malware. Even with norton installed, i have to go over and spend 2-3 hours getting rid of some of these, and now just make disk images and wipe her computer back to the image.

Is the chome experience snappy?? Or will this celeron processor seem sluggish?

In our fleet we have some with Intel and some with NVIDIA processors. They are both quite snappy. I almost had my mom sold on one but she went with Windows because she's still very married to Excel (retired accountant/buyer). I sense more malware cleaning in my future as well...

The beauty of a Chromebook is the ease at which you can just reset the whole dang thing. A few keystrokes and bam, back to factory settings.

The biggest drawbacks tend to be their screen. It just isn't particularly sharp.

The best solution I have is HP's Chromebox. That thing is smoking fast for what it does and attaches to a monitor, so you get a nice screen resolution as well. It's more of a desktop deal though and not a mobile solution.

Chromebox seems like a good solution for them, her laptop lives on her desk anyways.

But what about printer drivers?? I have her set up with a Canon Network IP Printer, will that still work in chrome OS?

 

[Steve Simons]

Hey guys, i'm actually interested in buying one of these for my mom. She tends to google things, and can't understand that some links are full of popups and malware. Even with norton installed, i have to go over and spend 2-3 hours getting rid of some of these, and now just make disk images and wipe her computer back to the image.

Is the chome experience snappy?? Or will this celeron processor seem sluggish?

In our fleet we have some with Intel and some with NVIDIA processors. They are both quite snappy. I almost had my mom sold on one but she went with Windows because she's still very married to Excel (retired accountant/buyer). I sense more malware cleaning in my future as well...

The beauty of a Chromebook is the ease at which you can just reset the whole dang thing. A few keystrokes and bam, back to factory settings.

The biggest drawbacks tend to be their screen. It just isn't particularly sharp.

The best solution I have is HP's Chromebox. That thing is smoking fast for what it does and attaches to a monitor, so you get a nice screen resolution as well. It's more of a desktop deal though and not a mobile solution.

Chromebox seems like a good solution for them, her laptop lives on her desk anyways.

But what about printer drivers?? I have her set up with a Canon Network IP Printer, will that still work in chrome OS?

Should work fine, but I can't be entirely certain as our enterprise machines do not have printers installed on them and our printers are too old to cloud print.