Ask HN: What's your favorite, cheap throwaway computer? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's your favorite, cheap throwaway computer?

23 pointsphilippnagel14 comments

I got the blue HP stream 13 for about $200 and it's remarkably versatile. I was able to get Photoshop and Illustrator and Visual Studio Code running on it, which covers most of my needs for portable computing (only thing it doesn't cover is iOS mobile dev, but there's no cheap throwaway solution for that).

And its memory is all solid state, so I don't have to worry about screwing up hard drives when transporting it like has happened with every single past laptop computer.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2472573,00.asp

Interesting. How is battery life? Have you used other development tools aside from the ones mentioned?

I mean, I don't use much else on a regular basis outside of work, but I don't see why it couldn't handle most things except maybe the full Visual Studio suite (and I've been tempted to install it to try it, but there's not too much more space left in the main memory, because small SSD).

Like Atom, Sublime, Notepad++ all that should be fine. Maybe it'd struggle with Eclipse. I wouldn't expect it to work as well as a $400 computer, though. This is a dirt cheap computer, on about the same level as basic Chromebooks, but you can install desktop applications on it (my main requirement at the time).

I mainly bought it for: writing python scripts, writing stories in coffeeshops, and some light graphic design work (thankfully it handles medium graphic design work, because I do a lot more of that nowadays), while on the go, with an SSD, and as cheap as possible. It's handled all of that much better than expected for the price.

Though I'm not the OP, thanks for the details. I looked at your link for the Stream 13. It says it comes with Windows 8.1. Do you know if it works with Windows 7? Prefer not to use Win 8 or 10.

Chuwi Hi10, it's a touchscreen Windows 10 tablet with 2 usb ports, HDMI out, 4GB ram, 64GB storage, 64-bit Windows. Currently on sale for $170. Unfortunately I dropped mine and broke the touchscreen but I still use it on my TV.

http://www.banggood.com/Chuwi-Hi10-64GB-Cherry-Trail-Z8300-Q...

I have an Acer Aspire 1810TZ (11.6" 768p, Pentium dual core, 4GB RAM, SSD) which still runs Debian and OpenBSD really well.

People love to hate on Acer laptops but this one proved to be extremely reliable.

I bought it 7 years ago for about £400. I have the impression netbooks / chromebooks these days don't offer much of an improvement over this little machine for the price.

Actual x86 computer:

dirt cheap Thinkpad/decommissioned business laptops from ebay

Microcontroller:

arduino clones

4 dollar cypress PSoC 4 kits

Acer C720 Chromebook I picked up for $130 off groupon a couple years back.

Old MacBooks, just because I like osx.

This $49 one is interesting: https://getchip.com/pages/pocketchip

On the higher end I like my Chromebook, for projects I like the PI.

Chromebook 11 ($150)

Arduino

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