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[parkdale]

So... my trusty Dell mini9/Lubuntu 18.04 is getting a bit long in the tooth these days with all these fancy web pages loading lord knows what in the back ground.
While sitting here on furlough I decided to invest in a newer lappy for night time browsing, giving myself a budget of no more than £350 ish.
I settled on a Starlabs starlite mk2,  (https://starlabs.systems/pages/star-lite) all aluminium shell, backlit keyboard and Ubuntu 20.04 installed £359 delivered  (was on special offer)
Intel Quad core pentium N4200 / 8Gb ram / 240Gb M.2 ssd.
Spec makes other laptops very lacklustre, oh and no Windows 10.... but can be installed for £100!
So far a very good second Pc for the house and it works well hooked up to the TV.
 

[Alex Atkin UK]

Intel Quad core pentium N4200 / 8Gb ram / 240Gb M.2 ssd.
Spec makes other laptops very lacklustre, oh and no Windows 10.... but can be installed for £100!
So far a very good second Pc for the house and it works well hooked up to the TV.

I'm confused what you mean here as that's one of the slowest CPUs on the market today, its comparable to a desktop PC about 20 years ago.  I'd rather have paid £100 more for something four times as powerful such as a Ryzen 2500U - you can even run lower-end 3D games on those.

I'm honestly not trying to be mean, its just very poor value for money.  I have a laptop not much slower than that sat doing nothing because its tragically painful to use on modern websites, even with an SSD.

[parkdale]

Most laptops have 4Gb ram... most low end are chrome books with borked bios so no other o/s allowed most have small 32Gb ssd, and most have 14/16" screens... too big for my needs.

[Ronski]

I'm confused what you mean here as that's one of the slowest CPUs on the market today, its comparable to a desktop PC about 20 years ago.

I think you're being a bit harsh there, it's comparable to a CPU of about 11 years ago. My comparison is of a Core i5-750 I've just given my brother, and it was perfectly usable, yes the N4200  is a little slower than the the i5-750, but only by 270 points, and with it running Linux I'm sure it will be fine for Parkdale and a big improvement on what he had.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Pentium-N4200-vs-Intel-i5-750-vs-Intel-Atom-N270/2886vs772vs614

From the above link you can see the N270 in the Dell Mini9 (hopefully I have the correct CPU) gets only 269 points on it's single core, the N4200 scores 2104, which is 7.82 time better, add in the extra memory and SSD and it will be perfectly fast enough.

Whenever I spec a new PC I always compare things this way, and match all components to the budget and needs, like this build for my brothers partner, she previously had an E8400.

[Alex Atkin UK]

I'm talking from experience though, when I upgraded from my own Atom Z3740 tablet/laptop to a Pentium 3805U I quickly got frusted with how sluggish it was on modern websites and ended up replacing it sooner than I'd liked for a Ryzen 2500U which is a night/day difference.  I guess my tolerance is just very very low.

I admit, I wasn't aware Chromebooks locked their BIOS, I thought they allowed installing any OS you wanted.

But yeah its fair to say its a HUGE upgrade over what they had before, I'm just confused at the "specs makes other laptops look lacklustre" because apart from the RAM and SSD size, it kinda doesn't.  I wouldn't be surprised if 4Gb RAM on a faster CPU still works out a better experience than 8Gb on a weaker CPU, as long as the SSD can keep up.  Plus if you pick the laptop carefully, slapping another 4Gb in is an option, I had to do that with the Ryzen.

[broadstairs]

Out of interest I just checked my i7-3537U laptop against the one used here and mine has a CPU Mark of 2329 on that site which compares with 2085 for the N4200. My laptop is fine on pretty much all websites etc so I think the N4200 will be OK, my laptop runs openSUSE Tumbleweed which I guess helps over the bloatware of W10  I also have another laptop which has an Intel Core i5-480M rated at 1283 CPU mark running Leap 15.2 Beta right now and that also seems fine on pretty much everything!

Stuart

[parkdale]

All chrome books have no upgradable ram... 4Gb thats it 

[broadstairs]

Sadly for me any laptop which has no upgradeable RAM and locked BIOS so no other OS can be installed is a no-no.

Stuart

[parkdale]

I like this one as it's very linux friendly

[tubaman]

That's a true quad core CPU and although running at 1.1GHz base it can burst to 2.5GHz. I'm sure with a SSD and Linux it'll be perfectly fast enough for standard browsing etc.
I've got a 2006 vintage Core 2 Duo laptop with only 2GB RAM and PATA HDD that is running Lubuntu 20.04. It takes an age to boot, but once running it's quite usable for browsing and email. It runs YouTube at 1280 x 720 happily enough (screen is only 1280 x 800) as long as you don't try and do anything else at the same time.
My son keeps telling me it should go in the bin, but while it still works that won't be happening.
It's also the one I take on holiday as if it gets lost/stolen/broken it really doesn't matter as it is worth next to nothing.
 

[Alex Atkin UK]

I like this one as it's very linux friendly

It IS very energy efficient, presumably allows them to use a much smaller battery and still get decent runtime, keeping the weight down?

A big problem with mine other than how slow it was feeling, was the screen sucked and it was still big and bulky.  Probably if the screen wasn't so bad (there is no viewing angle that doesn't leave part of the screen too dark) and it had been 1080p, I would have put up with it.

I also find I just can't handle 11", my base laptop is 15" (the one I take to conventions or use to lookup something quick on the web) and gaming is 17" (use it when I don't want to boot out of Linux on my desktop or to take to friends houses), they seem about the minimum I can comfortably use.