Acer C7 C710-2847 Chromebook 11.6″ Intel Dual Core B847 1.1 GHz 2GB DDR3 320GB 5400RPM HDD Wifi HDMI USB3.0 VGA Card Reader
Your favorite Google products built-in: Search, Gmail, YouTube, and Hangouts. So you can work, play, and do whatever you want, right out of the box. With thousands more free apps in the Chrome Web Store, you can watch movies, play games, or get work done (if you really have to). The Acer C7 Chromebook is simple to use and stays up-to-date automatically. It boots-up in less than 20 seconds, never slows down, and requires almost zero setup or maintenance.
Product Features
- Screen Size: 11.6″
- Screen Resolution: 1366 x 768
- Processor Type: Intel
- Processor Model: Celeron 847
- Processor Speed: 1.1GHz
Delightful and versatile computer for a great price Update, December 2013: at this point, almost all users should get the instead of any of the C710 models.Update: In my opinion the right Acer C7 to buy is the . As of late September 2013 it may not be shipping for a few weeks from Amazon, so you might want to wait for the C720 instead! If you can’t wait, consider the , which is available for $199 from other Best Buy and Newegg. Either the 2833 or the 2834 has a 16GB SSD instead of this model’s 320GB slow spinning hard drive; that is an important and noticeable performance upgrade, at the cost of disk space which is simply not that important on a Chromebook for most users.Executive summary: $199 is a great price. Chrome OS is quite an interesting and enjoyable computing environment which serves a wide range of needs (close to all of my family’s computer use for sure). The Acer C7’s performance is noticeably better than that of the $249 Samsung ARM Chromebook for certain things, notably 720p video and Flash games. Plus, the Acer can be opened up and upgraded, unlike the Samsung. Along with “cheaper” those are basically the only areas in which the Acer beats the Samsung, but those made my decision for me. The major flaws of the Acer C7 are the tiny hard-to-use cursor keys, and the downright horrible speakers; the major flaws of Chrome OS, for me, are local network file access and limited supported media formats. Those are significant problems, but for $199 they are not showstoppers.I’m quite fond of my Acer C7 Chromebook. The overwhelming feature is the price. $199!Chrome OS offers a zero-maintenance solution to having a second computer around for family members who essentially only need a web browser anyway. I’ve come to really enjoy using it. I enjoy knowing that I will never need to provide much tech support for it.A potential buyer of the Acer C7 might also be considering the $249 Samsung ARM Chromebook. I think the Samsung Chromebook is substantially more beautiful, has no fan or spinning hard drive, and has a much better keyboard and speaker. However, it is underpowered. At Best Buy I was able to try them side by side. The Acer was able to handle 720p video from YouTube almost (though not quite) perfectly; on the Samsung dropped frames were much more noticeable. I also tried a Flash game, Bloons Tower Defense 5, which I’ve noticed is surprisingly stressful for my older laptops. It runs fine on the Acer C7, but is very choppy on the Samsung. Finally, it is easy (if potentially warranty-breaking) to expand the RAM on the Acer C7 up to 16GB (!), and even to replace the silly hard drive with an SSD. The Samsung ARM Chromebook is essentially impossible to upgrade. That, for me, was the clincher.The Acer C7, though not actually ugly, is not a particularly pretty machine. The plastic around the display has a particularly cheap look-and-feel. The hinge at least feels strong. The display itself is reasonably nice, with a decent viewing angle. It’s glossy.I do not like the keyboard. I think overall it’s not a great keyboard (especially compared to the Samsung ARM Chromebook which has a lovely pleasant-to-use keyboard). The really awful thing is the cursor keys, which are startlingly small and also scrunched up with the page up and down keys. It is really, really unpleasant to use the cursor keys on this keyboard. There are other oddities, if not real problems. The Enter key is oddly shaped for no apparent reason other than gratuitous ugliness. The keyboard has a Caps Lock key (usually replaced by Search on Chrome OS keyboards), and also a Fn key, the only purpose of which is to have a Wifi-Disable keypress Fn-F11 (did anyone really need that?) and to send function keys over Chrome Remote Desktop (I suppose someone might need that—but I regret having a whole key for it in prime territory). This keyboard puts the Chrome OS Search key down with the Control and Alt keys, which is unusual in Chrome OS devices, but it does work to my benefit as it sends Command to Macs over Chrome Remote Desktop. In case it helps anyone, right-Control also sends Command.I like the Chrome OS keys for back, forward, refresh, full screen, and next window.The touchpad is quite a bit more resistant to clicking than I would like. I use tap-to-click instead, but there’s no tap-only variant of click-and-drag. (I want the 3-finger drag from Apple.)I often use this Chromebook attached to an external display (and keyboard and mouse… think of it as a desktop replacement!). When I first posted this review I mentioned some issues with this configuration. A Chrome OS update in…
This is not a regular laptop 0