I love my Acer Chromebook CB3-131-C3SZ. It’s an 11.6-Inch (30 cm) Laptop weighing 2.76 lbs (just over a kilo), which makes it extremely portable. Despite the low price tag, it’s proven very durable in the year and a half I’ve had it, surviving floor drops, daily travel and four months of intense use at a murder trial.
Under the hood, it has an Intel Celeron N2840 Dual-Core Processor,2 GB RAM,and 16 GB Solid State Drive. Needless to say it runs on Chrome.
If you’re researching Chromebooks, you probably already know something about them so I won’t repeat it all. These days you can run Word and Excel on a Chromebook but you have to be super techie and make all sorts of adjustments, which frankly defeat the purpose of a Chromebook. If you really need to run and use Microsoft software to do your job, a Chromebook is not ideal.
That said, I regularly convert between Word and Google Docs with nary a problem. I only switch over to Word in the very final stages when I am editing 100-page documents working with colleagues who are locked into Windows systems. That is when I require my faithful old Mac.
But enough about me, if you’re ready to make the Chromebook plunge or would like to try it out on a cheap but well made computer, I can’t recommend this machine enough. It’s my second Acer — back in the nineties I had a Windows laptop — and I have never had any hardware problems with them. The keyboard has a nice feel and the screen is as good as you can expect for the price. The battery lasts a full working day. And everything is automatically saved in the Google cloud. If your computer is ever stolen or crashes and dies, it will still all be there right in your Google account.
You can’t get better bang for your buck.
Check out this Chromebook and others on Amazon.com or if you’re in Canada, Amazon.ca.
AnnBrocklehurst.com 