We bought Walmart’s $140 laptop so you wouldn’t have to | Hacker News Reader

We bought Walmart’s $140 laptop so you wouldn’t have to

arstechnica.com

148 pointskeyi150 comments

After all these years, it seems like no one can beat the undefeated champion in this price range: a used ThinkPad with a Linux on it. Even today, for $140, I can find you laptop after laptop meeting that description that would crush this.

Maybe in 10 years, we'll finally see new laptops winning at this. But it's been a long wait, and we'll have to wait longer, still.

Where do you buy? eBay? Is there some other reputable place to buy used ones for a first time buyer?

I've bought a x230 on eBay for my partner, I installed Fedora on it and that has been fine, printers are working and most of the workflow is in a browser nowadays.

I've had to upgrade the keyboard once (2-3 keys fell off), but spare parts are available on eBay, and parts are very easily replaceable with an electronics screwdriver and a YouTube video, or by acquiring the Thinkpad service manual for more advanced procedures such as upgrading or replacing your screen (Which I've done to my Thinkpad X200 running Libreboot).

We are also considering a battery upgrade, which is still available on eBay even for older models.

I'm running windows 10 on my x230 (8GB ram / 240GB SSD) and I am more than happy with it :)

It's a great little machine.

Throw the classic keyboard from the X220 on there and you're really in the butter zone.

Just stay away from the x240. No buttons on the TouchPad. I replaced mine and it worked great with a x250 TouchPad, but took two hours to do the swap.

My 9 cell battery is dead (30 mins runtime) but I can’t figure out what battery to buy. Original Lenovo are either too old to be good because they were made 5 years ago and sat on the shelf for years and the cells have degraded even if it’s technically new, or they’re just fake. I have zero trust in the safety, performance, and durability of the third party batteries sold on eBay or amazon.

What’s your plan?

eBay. Just wait for good listings. It's true that there is a non-negligible chance of getting burned, based on the general used laptop purchasing experience - but I've bought several and they've all worked as expected, pretty much.

This isn't due to any good qualities of the sellers. It's because ThinkPad makes damn good, sturdy laptops that are quite idiot-proof. I mean if you sit on your balcony and drop your laptop off the edge - that might destroy it. But it's going to take something on that level, and most people aren't that careless with electronics.

So you can be reasonably confident that anything ThinkPad you buy, if it isn't visibly damaged in the picture, will work as expected, in my (anecdotal) experience.

Thank you for responding. Is there any particular model that is better off than others, used? My usecase is programming - I don’t game, but I edit videos

I think the main thing you're looking for is 1) RAM - as much as you can get for your buck (might be worth lurking for a week to find out how much that is) 2) SSD.

If you get a high number on 1 and a checkmark on 2, it's almost guaranteed to be good for programming - realistically, for allowing you to run your browsers and something like GIMP and/or video editing.

I have a ThinkPad with 32 GB RAM and it takes a really heavy workload to pause my computer.

I frequently have several browsers & several browser windows open (say 6 windows total, mix of Chrome Brave and Firefox), and GIMP. No slowdowns noticeable (EDIT: some things do take a few seconds, like filters & exporting images from GIMP). Most importantly, using my window manager, I can switch from a full-screen browser to Emacs to GIMP instantaneously - not even a millisecond of noticeable delay.

Even many new computers purchased today can't beat that.

Stick to the T-Series, avoid the budget E-Series.

Also check for the screen. For quite a long time there was an Option for an abysmal 1366x768 screen. The same notebooks can be had with a proper HD screen, so get one with those.

You want to check whether the BIOS has a password on it. Most corporates use one but don't reset it at end of life and after the T420 you can't reset it without replacing the main board.

That's a really important point. To amplify on it, every ThinkPad has as many as three BIOS passwords: the hard drive password, the power on password, and the supervisor password. (Maybe even more than three, as individual hard drives/SSDs could have different passwords.)

The supervisor password is the one you care the most about.

You may get a seller who says "no BIOS password, boots up without a password." But the machine may still have a supervisor password, and if you don't have that you can't change the BIOS settings.

Always make sure there is no supervisor password, or the seller gives you the supervisor password.

eBay. I'm in Europe but there are some really good refurb sellers in UK and Germany. Got multiple x230 for ~100 GBP (~130 USD). i5, 8 GB RAM, pop in an SSD and you are good to go. Much better than anything else you would find in that price range.

In my case - and I've purchased 10 of these over the years - it's exclusively eBay. I check the description and photos carefully to see if there are any issues or defects. Only one time did I receive a laptop that was basically a dud - an X61 from many years ago.

I've also bought a couple old 32-bit models from e-waste recyclers who were open to me just grabbing them from out of a pile of to-be-disposed-of equipment.

Not sure where you're located, but if there is a MicroCenter nearby, the I recommend them as well. Sometimes they stock these in refurbished condition, and from my inspections of the laptops, they're in good shape. Only buy if you can look at first-hand at the store.

Sites like NewEgg, TigerDirect, and Amazon also have these, but the reviews generally don't seem favorable. One major difference is that with eBay, you can view multiple pictures of the exact laptop you will be buying. With those other sites, it's just a stock photo, and it seems like there's less quality control over what's grabbed from their warehouses.

Also it's worth mentioning that refurbished Dell Latitude and HP EliteBook laptops are comparable. There seems to be less demand for these than Lenovo ThinkPads, so often you can get better specs for the same price. In my experience, the Dell Latitude laptops have maintained greater backwards-compatibility with older docking stations. If you're into embedded development or ever want to connect to a headless server directly, then only Dell will give you that docking station with a serial port. The drawbacks is the TrackPoint on a ThinkPad is always guaranteed to be there, while it's an optional feature with Latitude and EliteBook, and even when it is there, it isn't as good as what IBM/Lenovo has engineered. Another drawback is refurbished Latitude laptops often have dedicated GPUs, which is great for Windows, but often a pain for Linux.

> The drawbacks is the TrackPoint on a ThinkPad is always guaranteed to be there, while it's an optional feature with Latitude and EliteBook, and even when it is there, it isn't as good as what IBM/Lenovo has engineered.

My 5-year-old HP ZBook's trackpoint is abysmal. I stopped trying to use it about 2 months in, and after 2 years its top surface fell off and got lost. I didn't bother ordering a replacement.

Fully agree to alternatives like Lattitudes and EliteBooks. While the "ecosystems" aren't as large as those of ThinkPads, i.e. no Wikis and such, the hardware manuals are available and of the same quality/usefulness.

I think there is a certain inertness in perception of available choices, quality-wise. While ThinkPads were great for a time, that Nimbus should have faded by now, but it mostly didn't, although it makes no sense.

The really good ones are so old by now, that they are almost useless, except for terminal use.

The newer ones are only so, so, and the really good ones make no sense economically imo.

Then there are the mentioned alternatives. But it depends on geographic availability, time, i.e. when a large batch of refurbs enters the market, and so on. It has something of looking for flotsam on the beach :-)

Anyways, if you know hardware/what to do, then you can get great value with better options for periphery like docking stations, displays (ratio/resolution), simply more bang for the buck with about the same build quality as the ThinkPads of yore once had.

Prime expamples are small adaptors from the µSata for the 1.8" HDD to something more modern, for under 10USD a piece. Oh, and compressed air for really cleaning, new thermal grease or pads.

If you do this more often you can save insane amounts of money by getting a small compressor instead buying canned air.

Just saying...

I've had all three of these brands and Thinkpad is the best.

I've had Dell Latitude machines where the hinges break after about three years and will no longer hold the screen up. I've had HP EliteBook machines where the soft rubber touchpad buttons wear through (I had one with a three-year warranty and they did fix it while it was in the warranty period.)

Meanwhile the Thinkpad machines have had no issues even after more than three years. They just look beat up (for instance there's a rubber-like coating on the lid that wears off.)

But the one that beats all of them is Apple. My MacBook Pro is now over five years old and it feels almost like new. I've never gotten this lifespan out of any Windows laptop.

The work at home shift this spring basically tripled used laptop prices :(

Check out www.macofalltrades.com, have had good experiences there.

I'm in Germany and the last four times I bought via thinkpad-forum.de. As the name says, it's a board for Thinkpads which includes a marketplace. From my experience, it's considerably cheaper than buying in shops or on Ebay, and the machines are usually described very well. People on the forum are mostly very knowledgeable and include information like battery cycles and stuff like that, so you know very well what you can expect. I would think similar forums exists for other countries as well.

Sometimes Microcenter will have some decent refurbs, but they tend to pricier than you'll find elsewhere.

To add to your request: i would love to get some sites that deliver to Europe.

I've bought around ten used thinkpads from Ebay over the years. Mostly, they arrived exactly as advertised. I only had to ship one back, which was annoying but I got a full refund.

Two of them had minor issues that were resolved to my satisfaction when the seller offered a partial refund of $5 or $20 (and me keeping the laptop).

All of them are still working perfectly today, including the T420 I bought for $100 in 2013 and the T400 I bought for $25 (with free shipping).

tl;dr: Ebay is a perfectly good place to buy used thinkpads. reddit.com/r/thinkpadsforsale is also good, especially if you want to buy an older one that some enthusiast already meticulously restored.

Are there any that have good (8-10 hours) battery life?

Battery life isn't their strong suit; for that, I can see newer laptops having the advantage. My experience is closer to 3-4 hours, but then this isn't something I've much tested - even that's mostly an estimate. It's possible some can do much better, but unfortunately I wouldn't know.

My 9 years old X220 has been running for 2 hours of light use. Its battery status indicates about 3:45 hours left. This admittedly is with the 9 cell battery, but still rather good for a second hand laptop I bought four years ago...

Well, if you grab a new battery, then yeah. 8 hours of active use on any laptop is pushing it and Linux is generally a bit less optimized with the power usage so your mileage may wary. My old HP elitebook I bought for a 100 dollars (plus a new battery for about 40) managed around 6 hours on Ubuntu with no special config.

I have a T580 that is a couple years old (so not an older ThinkPad) that has the big second battery in it, and if I'm just coding and only keep one browser open and limit it to 7 or 8 tabs at a time, I can easily get 12 hours out of it (compiles take 2 minutes and run all 8 cores at 100%). I left it running once unplugged (forgot to suspend it) and when sitting idle the batter was still around 18% after about 24 hours, but of course that's far from typical use levels).

I just use Fedora and tuned profiles (which I adjust based on needs), but I've also heard testimonies of TLP[2]

[1] https://tuned-project.org/

[2] Example: https://www.fosslinux.com/2304/how-to-increase-laptops-batte...

Yeah you can upgrade the ram on those so its not limited to a certain soldered on amount like these cheap laptops. I did convert a lenovo e300 to an ubuntu tablet but with 4 gigs of ram and a 64 gig mmc its double the spec of the useless walmart laptop.

Yes, with all the startups going out of business, there're some nice laptops coming to the auction market. I picked up a two year old fully speced T470s for about $200. No OS though. Installed Mint and it ran like new. Also picked up an one year old MacBook Pro A1989 for 1/3 of the price. Good thing Apple honors the purchase of the OS with the laptop and allows a full reinstallation.

Hooray for recession.

Ha. Also picked up two designer brand height-adjusted desks for the cheap. Looks barely used. Still looking for an Aereon chair.

Aeron's are easy to find for 300-400 at a local used office furniture store. (I live in Houston, so your availability may vary) I have one I bought new at home, and used ones at the office. Can't really tell the difference.

Where? eBay?

How does one go about finding deals like this? I wouldn't mind a MBP for a third of retail price.

I asked before in HN and someone pointed me to hibid.com, that's where I looked. The auctions come in wave. Sometimes there's no companies need liquidation. Sometimes lot of companies need to sell. Just wait a bit for the upcoming auctions.

Edit: Here're some MacBook auctions currently. https://hibid.com/lots/?q=macbook. You might need to wait for an auction local to you to come up.

Just checked, some of the items look too good to be true

https://hibid.com/lot/67650485/lenovo-thinkpad-t410-laptop-w...

$30 for that?? What am I missing?

That’s the current highest bid, not what it will necessarily sell for.

If you are not familiar with EBay, auctions work with a max bid per bidder, but the displayed price is the lowest bid that beat the lowest bid by some minimum or matched the initial price. The way it usually works for a popular item is savvy bidders will wait til the last second to bid what they think will win or what they think the item is worth, no matter what the current price is, and the actual price is set by the lowest maximum bid, so if someone bid $10 on a $5 item, the price is $5, then I bid $8, the price goes up to $8 and the initial bidder is still winning. I only bid using an online service that enters a bid 3 seconds before the end of the auction. Some people do this manually. Sellers can set a reserve minimum price but otherwise the bids set the final price. Also shipping

> I only bid using an online service that enters a bid 3 seconds before the end of the auction.

I don't get why people do this. eBay has what they call "proxy" bidding, so in effect you're only paying the second-highest bid if you win the auction. You might as well bid your perceived maximum directly.

> Sniping helps to eliminate competitive bids. It also prevents other bidders from discovering your proxy (maximum) bid because your bid is kept completely private until the very end of the auction. It keeps your interest in an item private

From: https://www.ezsniper.com/faqs.php3

It's because for lots of people 'perceived maximum' isn't fixed.

Imagine you just lost an auction. I come up to you and say "Would you pay $5 more than your max bid if I guaranteed you'd win?" If you believe anyone would ever say 'yes' to the above then you agree the auction sniping service has utility.

Having the auction time extend if any bid is put in the last few minutes, ensures it will settle on the highest price anyone is willing to pay, and the best result for the seller.

I wonder if eBay doesn't do this, because the "fun" of sniping and not knowing until the end whether you win, and occasionally losing (variable reinforcement), and the feeling of getting a bargain less than someone else might have paid when it works, all combine to make it more like gambling and more compelling to potential buyers?

I bid $50. You bid $100. I check the listing and see I got outbid (it's at $50.01). I decide I'm actually willing to pay a little more, so I hike my bid up to $70 to try and outbid you. Doesn't work, and now you pay $20 more than you would have I'd you'd sniped and I didn't know I was going to get outbid.

Why one wants a thinkpad with the first gen processor? Here is a tip for thinkpad numbering. T4x0s = generation x or (x-1) processor, s for slim. Right now, Lenovo is selling 8th gen processor laptops: T480 and T490.

Better buy used P/W series laptops if one wants a workhorse.

You want to start at x20 at the lowest, Sandy Bridge generation.

I have a site that churns through the eBay API and dumps cheap but durable used laptops here:

https://createdtolast.com/laptops

It saves me time when friends/family ask me for used laptop recommendations, and the eBay referral program nets me some beer money on the side.

That's awesome! Would be curious to see a tab for servers too.

Thanks! Hopefully I'll get some time to add that at some point. LabGopher provides something similar for servers but with more advanced filtering:

https://www.labgopher.com/

This is a great site, thank you very much!

can you add Australia? Please.

Great tool thank you!

You aren't filtering out HDD, though.

A competent SSD is $30 or less. That upgrade cost is something to think about when looking at laptops in the $300 range but definitely not a deal breaker.

Many big players have off-lease or refurbished pages. Here is Dell's, for example: https://www.dellrefurbished.com/laptops?p=1. I have seen prices as low as $200 but rarely lower than that. Many of the least-expensive ones also still appear to come with mechanical HDs, not SSDs, and these days I'd expect to replace the former with the latter.

Sometimes looking for deals on craigslist. Every now and then you will see someone that doesn't know the value of what they're selling. In 2016, I was able to find a 15" MBP for only $750. The guy listed as a cracked laptop when it was a small 3 inch scratch near the corner of the screen, so no one reached out to him. It's hard to notice when the laptop is on even when you're looking at it. Probably the best purchase I ever made.

are these auctions in person, or online?

Online, see my other comment.

Lucky you. I've been scouring craigslist/ebay/offerup for good deals on T460s/T470s for a while. The cheapest I could get is $400 for a laptop with i7.

You know, that's still a really good price

Yes, if I were desperate. $400 for T460s i7-6600U 2.60Ghz, 8G ram, 256G SSD. I need to add extra memory and bigger disk to make it worthwhile. Still on the lookout for a good deal.

That’s amazing

I'd second (and third) this. If eBay sounds risky, in the UK there are companies that sell refurb Thinkpads with a year's warranty for in the region of £300 at the cheap end. I'm sure the situation is similar abroad.

Add an SSD and maybe a RAM upgrade and you've got a very capable machine for £350.

I got one from a local shop that also caters to SMEs. Paid around 400 Euro, if memory serves well. Still serves as my back up, does everything I want it to do. Even came with the large battery pack and Windows 10 Pro.

I just got my pinebook pro and it does the trick. Recommended. It is $200 and I have it ready and waiting for if my XPS ever dies. Fine as a daily driver running Debian Buster with Gnome3.

I bought a Lenovo Ideapad 100S 4 years ago for $160. It is similarly crippled by 2GB RAM but the board has footprints for an additional 2GB and an undocumented M.2 slot for storage. It's low end but has one of the nicer keyboards with usable edit keys which was my primary motivation for choosing it. I don't get why we still have to put up with crappy keyboard layouts on widescreen laptops.

The drawback of getting a full-sized keyboard on a laptop is that the main section of the keyboard won't be centered wrt. the screen. Reduced keyboards are popular for this reason.

Indeed - I hate off-center keyboards with a passion.

I’ve always owned laptops with 17” monitors and don’t remember having issues with the off-centre keyboard. It’s only since I got a laptop from my employer for working from home that I noticed it: I had no problems using the reduced keyboard on the work laptop but I found that when I move from it to my personal computer, I have to consciously shift my hands slightly to the left.

Don't go to Best Buy and ask for a ThinkPad they won't know what you're talking about.

Old thinkpads have usually bad display and bad battery life. Maybe if you replace half components it is decent machine, but I would rather use something like this.

The battery is trivial to replace and there are models with proper screens. They are still not as vibrant as those on multi media notebooks, but if you don’t do image editing they are good enough.

You would rather use the Walmart machine? Its battery life is worse and it doesn't actually work. The real question is what's better for the price point (and a used thinkpad is orders of magnitude better), not whether things that are better exist.

I had really bad luck with Thinkpad motherboards, I dont think quality matches the hype.

I would consider this machine: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0hMdQAjy43A

I bought a used ThinkPad T430 more than a year ago. I can't tell you exactly how much I paid for it because I don't recall the price in dollars (I paid it in Argentinian pesos).

It's a little battered (The case is broken in couple of places, the track pad is worn out).

The only complain I have about it is (2, actually, so "are") that you can't pump the memory that much (16 GB max) and the low resolution of the screen.

Besides that, I think it's an incredible piece of hardware.

Right now, I'm running Debian 10 with 16 GB of memory and a 1 TB SSD. I think it's very likely that I'll extract at least another 5 years of work of this one.

It comes with Bluetooth (Works with Debian), and I managed to make even the fingerprint reader work with this OS.

Just making sure you're aware of https://1vyra.in/

It allows you to (soft)flash a custom bios, mainly to kill the stupid wlan whitelist.

I'm starting to think low resolution is an advantage if you want to run Linux. Out of the three major OS choices Linux comes in last in terms of high-dpi support.

Have the same one, get the docking station for it, it's dirt cheap on ebay (~10€) and you can hook up 3 monitors to it, if two of same have the same resolution (2x DisplayPort + 1x VGA).

Our propensity as a society to buy garbage quality new stuff rather than good quality used stuff is frustrating.

Tech savvy folks know they can find a fully competent, user-serviceable used computer for basic use on eBay for under $200, but Joe Blow goes to Walmart or Best Buy and only has the choice of a crappy $300 computer or a good $1000 computer, both new.

The impact on the environment alone of trashing or recycling things that can be refurbished and reused is staggering.

Buying used can be quite a shitshow though. If there was an alternative to ebay, where the used stuff I'm buying can be certified that they have been properly cleaned, repaired as needed, and have whatever defects transparently labeled, I would love it. Oh, and they won't scam me hopefully. That's the biggest thing. I don't want to get scammed by someone trying to offload their garbage.

I’ve had good experiences with swappa, but I don’t think it’s quite as thorough as what you’re looking for.

Until swappa mails your purchase to where you lived 3 years ago because their integration with PayPal is broken, and then they won't help you hunt down your purchase.

Backmarket.com is much better.

I have about half a dozen EeePC 1001PX subnotebooks. I get them on eBay for about $30, and use them for things Raspberry Pi enthusiasts use boards for. You get a keyboard, screen, disk, power supply, and case. I wipe the disk as soon as I get them and put XUbuntu on them. None have failed in 8 years. I had to replace the battery on one, which takes 15 seconds, and you can buy replacement batteries.

Worth noting that some netbook/nettop class devices are 32-bit only, which might be a bit limiting these days. The EeePC 1001PX device you mention seems to come with a 64-bit capable CPU though, so you're probably OK there.

I found one forgotten on a shelf for years at the office. After wiping Windows XP and installing Debian, the failed battery for some reason decided that it was fine after all and healed itself into a working state. This is a perfectly usable free, ultra-small laptop :)

You don't get any GPIO though.

I bought a cheap laptop (very similar) from Dell. It was worthless. Ars is correct that the disk space available is completely insufficient to run Windows, no upgrades can be performed, and also you cannot turn off Windows upgrades, and also a pending Windows upgrade completely disables the machine, and also you cannot add external storage and run either Windows or the upgrade process from said storage (Windows MUST download, expand, and install the upgrade from the C:, no exceptions). So: it's a paperweight as sold, completely unfit for any purpose at all, and any class action lawyer who wants to can probably make their rent for the year by taking on these laptops sold from multiple major sellers. "A scam" would be a nice way of describing them, selling something completely non-functional.

They can run Linux, sort of. Not well. Acceptably for some purposes.

Does this kind of device work as a simple tmux or screen device? The review sounds horrible, but I can run a terminal from a RBP reasonably at a much cheaper price point. With the screen it might make sense to compare?

Maybe read page 3 before you try. It doesn't sound like it fared too well running Fedora, either. Maybe a really stripped down Linux, without X, would work, though.

Though, if your needs are so modest, why not go for an ARM-based linux laptop? You can almost certainly get something that will deliver a better experience at a lower price point. The only reason I can think of to choose something like this instead is if you absolutely need x86 for some reason.

The standard Fedora install runs GNOME and comes with lots of unneeded packages installed. Debian running Xfce (or even the old-style LXDE) will be a lot leaner and meaner on these specs, though sometimes Fedora has better hardware support.

I trialed a 2GB memory, dual-core-no-hyperthreading low-clocked Celeron ("hacked") Asus Chromebox as a workstation a couple weeks ago. As long as you can avoid running electron or other webshit and don't mind doing some things on the command line it could handle light tiling window managers (i3, dwm, awesome) just fine, even at 4K. Actually the Web was even pretty OK as long as I only had a couple pages open at a time and used Surf (just trying to open Firefox took so long I gave up—Surf is almost instant) If you've got a remote machine for you VMs or Docker and maybe for some remote X sessions for heavier web browsing, it's viable. Really as long as I avoided web garbage and used light software the thing felt fast. Very responsive, low input latency. Hell it even booted much faster than the beast of a machine I replaced it with (that's Void Linux's doing, by having a minimal default boot environment so the boot process isn't doing very much that I haven't explicitly told it to do, so no useless-to-me daemons or scripts slow the boot).

Which shouldn't really be that surprising since my primary development and gaming desktop at one time was a fraction as powerful and did GUI multitasking just fine (including Firefox—I maintain they really lost their way as the lightweight-but-still-featureful browser we all loved after the 1.x series and have never been as good since), but, it is surprising these days when we have single browser tabs that can just about fill 2GB of RAM all on their own and forget what modern computers can do when we're not using them to run the computing equivalents of 3-legged-races.

Only reasons I didn't upgrade the RAM and keep going with the experiment were 1) it could only drive my 60hz 4K display at 30hz, and 2) manually dicking around trying to fix 4K scaling issues isn't my idea of a good time and you pretty much have to run a heavy desktop on Linux to eliminate those problems without tons of fiddling, it seems, and such a machine cannot handle Gnome3 or KDE and all their background crap and Javascript (ew) and such.

They tried it with Wayland/GNOME. I'm guessing something like X11/i3 would fair a lot better.

I'd not buy one to test that theory though.

Or rather Wayland/Sway to get a modern i3 experience without the dead weight of X11.

My experience with that is that it runs hotter. X11 may be full of cobwebs but it doesn't run hot, at least in my experience.

With the dual core amd cpu throttled down to 1.5ghz, a cheap phone running termux is likely more performant than this laptop. For $140 you could buy a cheap android phone with a mediatek 2ghz octacore processor, 3gb of ram and 32gb storage. You can cast the screen to a chromecast, connect external/usb keyboard and launch termux, and you'll have a computing device much faster than this laptop. Heck, you can even run X via a vnc viewer if you want desktop linux running on termux.

It would depend on what services you'd like to run though. A decent chunk of apps may need proot to run in pure termux and others for you to root your device.

Mobile (proper) Linux support for devices is still not thst great even if arm support for most applications is there.

I hear the pinebook pro is pretty nice.

I'm kind of surprised that Linux wouldn't work well on it - the EVOO has better specs than an early 2000s PC, not to mention Unix workstations from the 1990s that people did all kinds of engineering, scientific, and programming work on.

> ultra-modern kernel, and lightweight Wayland display manager

That might not be good. How about a stripped-down kernel (Linux or BSD) and old-school X11 with twm (flwm if you must.)

> The laptop frequently took as long as 12 seconds just to launch Firefox

Ah well, that's the problem isn't it - the modern web and all of its baggage. I think we need something lighter than Firefox that still works OK with Youtube. Maybe NetSurf?

> Ah well, that's the problem isn't it - the modern web and all of its baggage.

Pretty much. You're absolutely fine on this class of machines and even quite a bit lower - unless you expect to browse a website that requires substantial JavaScript.

> The laptop frequently took as long as 12 seconds just to LAUNCH Firefox

Apparently, that needs emphasis.

I would love to have a cheap and ultra small laptop to carry with me while I’m on call but I need to go to the supermarket for eg. Wondering why they didn’t try a lightweight distro w/ Xfce.

Pinebook Pro. I use it for this exact purpose. Small, portable, cheap, and relatively durable. I keep it in the truck while I’m on call in case I need to jump in and fix things on the go.

Going to check it, thanks for the recommendation!

I'm lurking over currently sold low-spec laptops from Lenovo, Dell and HP, and I'm completely baffled these brands aren't even trying, even though the cheapest models end up ~2 times more expensive than those Chinese OEM machines.

I just want a sub 2kg machine in [11-14)'' range with FHD, CPU at least on par with Ryzen 2200g (which is not quite the newest model) and slotted RAM for under $400. All I see is 15" models with poor TFT displays and RAM sizes that would be a downgrade from my 10 year old Acer!

I wonder if its purpose isn't simply to watch Youtube. It has a Full HD screen. It's 11-something inches, but still Full HD.

I mean, your phone has a Full HD screen (or better). They keep getting more and more common in laptops as manufacturing switches over.

What screens aren't 'Full HD' or more these days? It's a really old low resolution.

Whenever I see Full HD, I think fist-sized pixels. However, it's an 11-inch screen and the article mentions: "The display on the EVOO is FHD 1080p, not the 1366x768 typical of many cheap laptops". So in this case, I think it's not all that bad.

Full HD is another word for 1080p. What about Full HD makes you think of fist-sized pixels?

Only a thousand rows is pretty low these days - you can definitely see the big pixels on everything except a tiny screen.

A thousand rows wasn't impressive in 2000. I think people've forgotten (or weren't around for, so don't realize) how big a step back we took on picture quality and pixel density for monitors, for many years, with the switch to LCD.

Right - I swear I remember running CRTs at 2000+ rows in the early 2000s. Now people seem impressed with 1000, even on fairly expensive full-sized laptops?

You weren't running those CRT's on laptops though. The laptops of the time had low res displays with very narrow viewing angles.

When I look on Amazon for desktop monitors, I also see products proudly boasting that they're 'Full HD'. And what's more we seem to have stopped at Full HD - weren't most LCD monitors Full HD like ten years ago? What's going on?

If you're not seeing 4k and 5k monitors, you're not looking hard enough. They're plentiful and pretty cheap these days.

> If you're not seeing 4k and 5k monitors, you're not looking hard enough.

I didn't say I wasn't seeing them, though did I?

I'm saying I still see monitors with this ancient low FHD resolution. When you search for hard drives you don't see 2005-era capacities as your first result. Why do we still see 2005-era resolutions as our first result for LCDs? And some of them cost hundreds of dollars - the same price as in 2005.

1080p Youtube is delivered as VP9 or even AV1. It has no hardware to accelerate decoding. And CPU seems to be too slow for 1080p VP9.

In my experience this part is simply untrue: "With only 2GiB of RAM, the EVOO won't be able to run anything without hammering virtual memory (swapping data from RAM to disk and back again). Beyond that, a 32GB SSD simply is not enough room for Windows itself, let alone any applications. The first time the EVOO tries to upgrade to a new build of Windows 10 (for example, Windows 10 build 2004, which just released last month), it will fail due to lack of space."

I have NO idea how... But my little media pc with 2gb and 32gb has not only worked great last few years, but literally last night went through windows 10 upgrade.. And has 16gb free space this morning (Did have to do disk cleanup to get there - but it was literally a single check box).

On my other Computers,windows takes 70 plus gb after a while. All articles indicate DO NOT delete winxs and other huge directories.. Yet this windows does something differently and has been ticking GREAT with those specs for years.

I've used PatchCleaner [1] for many years to make room. Sometimes I need to copy missing install package files back to Windows to complete an uninstall or upgrade, but that is small price to pay.

[1] https://www.homedev.com.au/free/patchcleaner

>At first, I mistakenly assumed that the A4-9120 was just thermally throttling itself 24/7. [...] I found the real answer—the normally 2.5GHz chip is underclocked to an anemic 1.5GHz. The system BIOS confirms this clockrate but offers no room to adjust it

Is this legal? I mean, it's technically true that there's a A4-9120 processor in there, and the clockrate isn't listed on the product page, but it's heavily misleading to the consumer what the actual performance is.

> Is this legal?

US Legal System: I will make it legal!

It's criminal to sell laptops with only 2 GB of memory. It's just enough to boot up and swap to death permanently.

I can't figure out why Microsoft doesn't enforce minimal requirements for OEM vendors to ship Windows. It's hurting their reputation and their userbase. Customers try shitty laptops like that and blame windows for being horribly slow and broken.

Because for a while they put a maximum on it instead.

At the time, netbooks were growing organically and could be had with 2 or 4 gigabytes un some cases, with Linux for less that the Windows version.

Microsoft countered this with cheaper versions of Windows that were limited to lower specs, such as 2 gb.

This was the so-called "starter edition" of XP and similar licensing programs for Vista.

The policies might have changed with Windows 10 (not sure), but the legacy remains.

In Brazil, if you want to go beyond the 1366x768 screen resolution, you'll have to pay a lot more than those $140.

Based on conversations with some colleagues from Brazil (working in the US under work visa) it is due to the taxes that Brazil has on imported electronics/computer goods.

This has had some notable side-effects on Brazil's computing and gaming industries however, perhaps the most visible of which Tec Toys and their Genesis/Mega Drive 'port' of Duke Nukem 3D.

hmm, I thought article would be about "Motile" which is Wallmart's private label (Tongfeng) and is pretty amazing for the price point, only issue I have noticed so far is rubber pads being damages because of the stupid glue they used. Other than that - It's a good one.

Do Walmart's tablets next https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/05/walmarts-99-android-...

Seems strange that they didn't include a fan...

I bought a $300 ASUS laptop a while ago, and it runs surprisingly well. In my opinion, the best 'budget' price range is 300 - 400, less than that will be too bad

Still not a better deal than the Acer C720 from 7 years ago. That thing was a legend.

They really shouldn't sell a product that doesn't work.

Sounds worse than explicit fake from Aliexpress.

TLDR: much worse than the Pinebook Pro, unfortunately. It doesn't even have a fan, it's underclocked to 1.5 GHz max, 2GB ram on Windows 10.

I'm shocked it even ran Windows.

Article has some funny quotes, like "I didn't realize it was possible to get a PCMark performance score of zero" and "We in the PC business refer to this as 'load-bearing electrical tape'. "

> It doesn't even have a fan

Nice for the reduced noise, and less moving parts to break down, though. And less dust buildup.

The article mentions that it doesn't even have _effective_ passive cooling, nothing beyond a thin copper heat-spreader. You can't possibly expect more than Raspberry Pi levels of performance from this device.

This would be good for a burner laptop running a Linux OS in RAM.

Well, no, because according to the article it didn't do too good a job with Linux either. An old laptop is a good Linux burner laptop (like what I use for DEFCON -- except I usually run Windows 10 on them).

I'm sure it would run, say, Arch Linux with a basic wm like tvwm or cwm just fine. I have a pentium 4 with 512mb of ram and everything works great. Even Firefox is reasonably snappy. The kernel, Xorg, and wm together shouldn't use more than 50-100mb.

640k should be enough for BASIC memes and 2Gb RAM should be enough for basic computing needs. Why they can't put together a hardware specific Linux build that performs on this sub-standard machine speaks of laziness.

They cover that in the article. The CPU is underclocked because the CPU has no active or passive cooling. And the disk has 4KB write latencies as high as 116ms. The device is designed to be legally sellable as a "computer", not to actually support workloads of any shape whatsoever.

It's criminal to sell such "computer" because it's useless for any normal use other than running Notepad or browsing sites with Lynx (text mode browser).

Only Linux distribution or some derivate can rescue such device from endless issues.

Actually, the article stated that Linux didn't do much better, because of lack of cooling of the CPU among other issues.

I used to have a 0.2 ghz computer with 0.1 gb of ram that ran linux 2.2 very well, graphical desktop with full app complement and all the process isolation and multitasking of a modern OS. Modern software is incredibly bloated. It’s not really the kernel though, it’s everything else.

The usages are differents. You weren't doing much on your old computer compared to what people are doing today on their smartphone.

I spend most of my smartphone use reading text, maybe with a few images, or listening to mp3s with the screen off. You can fit those uses just fine into a hundred megabytes of ram and a slow processor.

That seems nice if you install xfce on it... Honestly I don't understand why they're saying it's a bad laptop.

If you remember Wirth's law, you can easily understand that as long as you can manage to use a set of lightweight software, $140 will still do a lot. Some people can live without a pickup truck and ride a city car. It's all about learning.

I'm all for minimal, cheap hardware that can run lightweight software. I'm confused why some people seem to dislike cheap hardware. When climate change will hit and hardware price skyrocket, you will see software losing A LOT of weight.

It's mostly bad because it ships with Windows Home, and there's almost nothing you can do with a windows home box with these specs.

If you compare it to something like a raspberry pi (and consider that it has a much better CPU and a bunch of peripherals included), it seems a lot more useful. But even so, it's only useful to somebody with a specific use case in mind, and not the general audience who would buy a machine at Walmart and expect it to work.

I have an HP convertable laptop/tablet with similar specs. It runs Zoom fine which is the main reason that I bought it.

Not being able to update Windows 10 because of the size of the eMMC drive is a benefit. I keep Windows Update disabled anyway, newer Windows 10 versions keep re-enabling for you and download updates over paid network connections.

I also own one with similar specs but a lesser known brand. Something that worked for me to be able to upgrade Windows 10 was this:

1. Compact.exe /CompactOS:always

2. Enable compressing the whole C drive (right click, properties)

3. Clean %TMP% and C:\Windows\Temp

4. Use the new control panel storage options to clean temporary files

5. Use the old tool to clean temporary files (the one in C drive properties) because the new panel does a half-assed job

6. Defragment the disk

7. Manually remove old downloaded updates (I can't remember the commands for this)

After all those steps I had about 14 GiB free, enough to upgrade Windows. The problem with that cheap thing? Nothing after or before the 15XX editions of Windows 10 works well, Windows blocks the drivers (battery management, wireless, accelerometer, sound and a few others) due to "compatibility issues." Now I'm stuck with a version that doesn't work and unable to downgrade (windows.old is long gone). It doesn't help that Microsoft doesn't offer old .iso downloads.

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