So I was looking for a laptop with long battery life, SSD disk and i3 or i5 Intel CPU. I was going to use it for some emails, programming and general surfing when I was away from home. I was tempted to buy one of those expensive ultrabooks, but thought it was too much money for my casual use.
When considering what to buy, it’s always a good idea find your real needs. The laptop was only going to be used when I was not in my home office. My main i7 with 16GB RAM is really covering all I need. A laptop would mean that files and software would be on two machines and I had to think of a cloud solution to share the files.
Then it naturally struck me what I really needed. I want to be able to work on my main machine from anywhere.
Obviously when working remotely I never needed a expensive ultrabook because that would just be a total waste of system resources.
So I ended up buying an Acer Aspire One Cloudbook at $199. It has a Celeron N3050 CPU with 2GB RAM and 32GB eMMC drive. Off course the machine is barely useful for anything else than Notepad or Calculator except my main use…. working remotely.
Having used this solution for some weeks now I have all good experiences:
- The computer has a decent keyboard and a OK screen.
- Machine is fanless and makes no noise at all (YAY).
- It is lightweight and small (like an expensive ultrabook)
- Build quality in general is actually quite good
- It’s something odd to sit on a $199 computer and see you have 8 CPU threads, 16GB RAM and 3TB HDDs at your disposal.
- Outstanding battery life (double YAY)
Long battery life was one of my original demands and this computer runs 14 hours straight!!!
Working remotely means even a Celeron CPU have very little work to do. CPU is around 2-10% busy, and memory is using around 1GB (win10), and still there is 1GB left -again good news for battery life.
What about the internet connection with lag and response time working remotely ?
It is (almost) like sitting at my home office. It works amazingly well using Teamviewer. One day I was even connected via 4G using my smartphone to make a wifi signal. It worked impressively well, and it didn’t use much battery either, neither on the phone or the laptop.
So a $199 laptop really shines…when being used as a thin client.