There’s been a resurgence of small, low-cost laptops in the past few years. The term “netbook” may have died around the turn of the decade, but low-cost Chromebooks continue to grow in popularity, and in recent years Acer, Asus, HP, and Lenovo have all introduced small Windows notebooks with price tags in the $200 to $300 range.

Now Acer is taking things a bit further with its Cloudbook line of laptops. The Acer Aspire One Cloudbook 11 and Cloudbook 14 are basically the company’s effort to offers Windows laptops with Chromebook-like features and price tags.

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You can pick one up for as little as $169… but you probably shouldn’t, because for $20 more you can get a model with 32GB of storage, which is twice as much as you get on the entry-level model. The $189 version also comes with a free 1-year subscription to Microsoft Office 365, which is worth $70. It’s kind of like paying for one year of access to Microsoft Office and 1TB of online storage space and getting a laptop for $119.

OK, so the new Cloudbooks are cheap. But are they any good? It depends what you’re looking for.

Overview

Acer loaned me an Aspire One Cloudbook AO1-131 model with 2GB of RAM, 32GB of eMMC storage, an Intel Celeron N3050 dual-core processor, and an 11.6 inch, 1366 x 768 pixel display.

The notebook weighs about 2.5 pounds and measures 11.5″ x 8″ x 0.7″, making it small enough to slide in a bag and carry with you almost anywhere. Sure, it’s a bit heavier than a tablet, but notebooks don’t get much more compact than this.

Acer says you should be able to get around 7 hours of battery life from the notebook’s 4,200 mAh battery, and based on my tests, that figure seems just about right.

cloudbook battery

Other features include 802.11ac WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, a USB 3.0 port and a USB 2.0 port, an HDMI port, and an SD card reader.

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It’s nice to be living in an era where even dirt cheap notebooks have fast WiFi and USB (although pretty soon even USB 3.0 ports are going to start to look dated).

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The Cloudbook 11 has a pretty nice keyboard: the keys feel a little smaller than those on a full-sized keyboard and there’s a bit of flex if you push down on the center of the keyboard. But the island-style keyboard layout means there’s a little bit of space between each key, and the 1.7mm key travel feels pretty good too, making touch typing easy.

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I also think the keyboard layout makes a lot more sense than the one Acer used on the Aspire R11 convertible notebook I reviewed recently. The arrow keys are larger on the Cloudbook 11 and easier to find with your fingers when you’re not looking at the keyboard. Those keys also function as Page Up, Page Down, Home, and End buttons The volume and screen brightness shortcuts are in the Fn key row at the top of the keyboard.

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Below the keyboard is a fairly large touchpad which supports edge gestures and multi-touch input for scrolling, right-clicking, and more.

While most of the laptop case has a rough plastic texture, the touchpad is smooth, making it easy to slide your finger across the surface.

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Look up and you’ll see the laptop’s 11.6 inch matte display. While colors can look a bit more muted on a matte screen than on a glossy display, the screen also doesn’t reflect as much glare as it would if it were glossy. This makes it a little easier to see the screen when using the laptop outdoors or near a window.

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Viewing angles are limited: tilt the screen too far back and colors start to look washed out, making it hard to view images or videos. But things look fine if you view the laptop from the right or left sides.

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While wide viewing angles are nice to have on a laptop, they’re not really essential since you can adjust the screen until you’ve got the perfect angle and then leave it there. If this were a computer that’s meant to be used as a tablet (like the Aspire R11), then the poor viewing angles would be a lot harder to forgive.

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Turn over the laptop and you’ll find only two holes in the case: the grills for the stereo speakers near the front of the laptop (they’re certainly audible, but you’ll want to connect headphones or an external speaker if you want good sound).

The laptop doesn’t generate a lot of heat, so Acer was able to use a fanless design. That means there are no ventilation ports.

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It also means the computer runs pretty much silently. While the bottom of the laptop can get a little warm during extended use, it never gets uncomfortably hot.

Overall, the design is pretty good for a notebook in this price range. Performance, on the other hand, can be another story

Performance

There are times when it’s hard to remember that this is a $190 notebook. Fire up an app to watch a video, edit a document, or surf the web and it works as well as a machine that costs twice as much.

Other times, the Acer Aspire One Cloudbook 11 is so frustratingly sluggish that it’s hard to imagine you can use this laptop to do anything.

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In terms of raw power, the Cloudbook 11 has a 1.6 GHz dual-core processor based on Intel’s Braswell architecture. It offers a little more CPU performance-per-watt than the Bay Trail chips of yesteryear, but most of Intel’s Braswell chips also have lower clock speeds than their Bay Trail counterparts, so they may actually be slower in some circumstances.

That feels pretty true in everyday performance, and it’s also demonstrated by benchmark results.

handbrake

The Acer Aspire One Cloudbook takes longer to transcode video using Handbrake than any other computer I’ve tested in the past year. The same is true when it comes to creating ZIP archives using 7-Zip.

Computers with quad-core Intel Atom Cherry Trail and last-gen Bay Trail chips both outperform the Cloudbook 11. So does the Acer Aspire R11 with its quad-core Pentium N3700 Braswell processor. And it should come as no surprise that the Asus Zenbook UX305 with a Core M Broadwell processor is also faster.

lilbenchResults are a bit more mixed in our audio transcoding test. But suffice it to say that this computer isn’t the fastest thing on the market today.

The good news is that Braswell chips use less power than Bay Trail processors. The Celeron N3050 has a TDP of just 6 watts, which helps the Cloudbook 11 get close to 7 hours of battery life and which allowed Acer to use passive cooling instead of a noisy fan.

3dmark

There’s a little more good news: Braswell chips also offer better graphics performance than Bay Trail, which means this machine should do a somewhat better job with HD video playback and 3D graphics rendering than a computer like the Asus EeeBook X205 which has a Bay Trail processor.

But better is a relative term: neither laptop is really ideal for gaming. And both can handle 1080p videos without any problems, so it’s unlikely you’ll see much difference in performance for video playback.

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Which brings us back to CPU performance: when you’re running a single app at a time, you might not have any problems. But if you’re doing a lot of multitasking, or even running multi-threaded apps like a web browser with multiple tabs or windows open, the system can slow to a crawl at times.

Fire up the task manager when using the Google Chrome browser with more than three tabs open, and this will be a regular sight:

taskm

Notice how the CPU and memory usage are pretty much maxed out, with Chrome accounting for most of the resource usage. The only other third-party app that was even open when I grabbed that screenshot was Irfanview, a light-weight app for viewing and editing images.

In this instance, the CPU usage spiked when I opened a web page in a new browser tab. After the page was fully loaded, the CPU consumption dropped and stayed between 25 and 60 percent for a while and the computer felt very usable during that period… until I opened another page in another browser tab.

Try opening a handful of web pages at the same time and there’s a chance the computer will be unresponsive or that the browser will crash. I’ve found that the Microsoft Edge browser seems to work a little better than Chrome, but I prefer Chrome since it has my browser history and supports the LastPass password manager extension.

The notebook does boot and launch apps more quickly than the Aspire R11 convertible, even though the R11 has a more powerful Pentium N3700 quad-core Braswell processor and 4GB of RAM. I suspect that’s because the R11 has a hard drive while the Cloudbook 11 has a faster (but smaller) eMMC flash storage drive.

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The Acer R11 also has a lot more bloatware: both computers run Windows 10 software, but the convertible comes with a boatload of preloaded programs from Aer and third parties including CyberLink, Foxit, Spotify, Evernote, Flipboard, and WildTangent. Acer mercifully included just a handful of its own programs on the Cloudbook 11… possibly because there’s simply not enough storage space to hold much more.

But in terms of general performance, I was surprised at how much slower both of these machines felt during day-to-day usage than the many Bay Trail models I’ve tested over the past year or two.

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I don’t feel like opening a half dozen browser tabs, watching some online video, and composing articles in the WordPress web interface is too much to ask for… even from a $190 computer like the Cloudbook 11. I didn’t have any real problems doing those things with the $200 Asus EeeBook X205 notebook I reviewed earlier this year, and that system had an Intel Atom Z3735F Bay Trail processor.

That’s not to say that the Cloudbook 11 always feels slow. You’re just going to want to temper your expectations and limit the amount of multitasking. When you run one app at a time,  things can be pretty smooth. That applies to classic Windows programs and modern Windows Store apps.

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Fire up Netflix or Minion Rush in a full-screen window, and the Cloudbook 11 performs admirably for such an inexpensive notebook. But fire up more resource-intensive programs like Firefox, Chrome, Photoshop, or Office, and expect inconsistent results if you’re doing anything more complicated than loading a single web page at a time.

back_01All told, the Cloudbook 11 can offer acceptable performance… as long as you don’t expect too much from it. If you’re looking for a no-compromise machine that can handle multitasking, gaming, and other resource-intensive tasks, you’ll probably want to spend more money.

Hoping you can upgrade the Cloudbook 11? You can’t.

While it’s relatively easy to open up the case (just remove the 6 screws holding the bottom panel in place), once you get inside you’ll notice that there’s no way to upgrade the memory or storage. You could theoretically replace the wireless card, but WiFi and Bluetooth performance is actually pretty good, so I’m not sure why you’d bother.

cloudbook open

Want to try to improve performance by switching operating systems? The Cloudbook 11 comes with Windows 10, but it shouldn’t be too hard to install an earlier version of Windows or a Linux-based operating system such as Ubuntu or Fedora.

I didn’t spend a lot of time looking into this, but I did confirm that you can disable UEFI secure boot, enable legacy boot, and boot software from a USB drive by hitting F12 before the Acer/Windows splash screen comes up.

boot menu

Just want more reliable entry-level performance? You might be better off with an older system like the EeeBook X205TA. Or you could treat the Cloudbook 11 like a tablet that just happens to have a keyboard, and just run one app at a time.

But if that’s what you’re looking for, then maybe you should buy a tablet. Or there may be another option….

Would I be better off with a Chromebook?

Part of the appeal of a computer like the Cloudbook 11 is that it’s a small cheap laptop that can run Windows software like Microsoft Office. But what if you don’t absolutely need Windows apps?

Then you might want to consider a Chromebook. Most of the laptops that run Google’s browser-based Chrome operating system are portable, inexpensive laptops with reasonably long battery life and limited amounts of built-in storage (since you’re expected to run web-based apps and keep your files in cloud storage). Sound familiar?

In a lot of ways, low-cost Windows laptops like the Cloudbook 11 are positioned as Windows alternatives to Chromebooks.

But one of the key advantages to Chrome OS is that it’s designed to run on low-power systems, and for the most part you’re only really running one apps: the Chrome web browser. That helps even the cheapest Chromebooks punch a little above their weight class, allowing you to boot in seconds, resume from sleep even more quickly, and start surfing the web almost as soon as you can lift the laptop lid.

While you can’t install Office, Photoshop, QuickBooks, or other classic Windows apps on a Chromebook, you can use web-based office, image editing, and accounting software. There’s even a free, web-based version of Microsoft Office if you’re not satisfied with Google Docs or other alternative office suites.

Chromebooks are also relatively secure, since web apps are run in a sandboxed environment and cannot alter your system files. And Google rolls out regular updates for the operating system automatically, adding new features, improvements, and bug fixes.

There are a growing number of Chromebooks with semi-premium specs including high-resolution displays and Core i3 or faster processors. But there are also Chromebooks with low-power ARM-based or Intel Celeron chips with starting prices as low as $149.

Sure, you could pick up a Windows laptop like the Cloudbook 11 and install the Chrome browser to do just about anything that you could do with an actual Chromebook while also retaining the ability to run thousands of other Windows apps. But on a low-priced, low-power device like this, there may be some advantages to running an operating system that’s explicitly designed to offer a decent user experience on low-end hardware.

Verdict

The Acer Cloudbook 11 is a small, cheap laptop with a decent keyboard and touchpad, a matte display, and a fanless design. It boots pretty quickly and can run just about any app designed for Windows. You can use it to edit documents, watch videos, play casual games, surf the web, or most other common PC tasks.

But it’s slow.

If this laptop came out two years ago, I wouldn’t say it was too slow to recommend, but these days there are plenty of other computers that can do everything the Cloudbook 11 can… and do those things more quickly.

None of this is a huge surprise given the notebook’s low price: the Cloudbook 11 featured in this review sells for just $189, and some models are available for $20 less than that.

What is a little surprising is that the Cloudbook 11 with an Intel Celeron N3050 Braswell processor is slower than an Asus EeeBook X205TA notebook with an Intel Atom Z3735F Bay Trail processor in almost every way. Sure, the Cloudbook 11 has better graphics, but the Asus laptop outperforms the Acer model in almost every other way even though the X205TA features an older chip architecture and the laptop was released about 2 years ago. The Atom Z3735F is a quad-core chip, while the Celeron N3050 is a dual-core processor. But the newer chip has a higher clock speed and higher power consumption, so I expected better performance.

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I wrote most of this review by typing away on the laptop, and that was fine as long as I wasn’t doing anything else with the computer at that time. But run another app or two in the background and things can grind to a halt.

I wouldn’t recommend this computer if you expect to do a lot of gaming, video editing, or other resource-intensive activities, or even if you expect to be able to do any multitasking more serious than running a web browser, music player, and chat program simultaneously. The limited amount of built-in storage means there’s also not a lot of room for programs or files unless you add an SD card or USB drive.

Ultimately, the Cloudbook 11 seems like a good idea. The 2.5 pound computer is one of the most affordable Windows laptops ever released. But it’s not that much cheaper than the $200 laptops with Bay Trail chips that we’ve seen in the past year or two, many of which are now available for even lower prices. And those older models actually offer better performance in most tasks.

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28 replies on “Acer Aspire One Cloudbook 11 review: A Windows 10 notebook for under $200… but it comes at a cost”

  1. Switching to Linux makes a *huge* difference, for any common distro (and some less common ones).

    With Ubuntu MATE, I was able to open over a dozen tabs in chrome without even noticing. I was able to run Eclipse at reasonable speeds while having documentation open in Chrome (before I switched to Geany, which is better than Eclipse in basically every way). Gentoo was even faster.

    To be honest, I found this link because I was hoping to move a RAM chip from an old harvested Acer Aspire One Cloudbook 11 into the Acer Aspire One Cloudbook 14. Nope. I dug even deeper, removing the motherboard and some other pieces, and best I can tell the RAM is soldered/welded/etc onto the motherboard. So… yeah, that’s not happening.

    But hey, with Gentoo on there it doesn’t matter 😀

    Seriously, take the time to switch it off of Windows. You won’t be disappointed. This thing is downright *amazing* with Linux despite having a mere 2GB of RAM. The amazing graphics support is also really nice. 60FPS in a lot of games, full speed 1080p video over HDMI to my TV, and more.

    Basically, I *highly* recommend this computer to Linux users, as equally as I recommend avoiding it if you’re a filthy Windows user (no offense actually intended, I admit to dual-booting Windows on a couple computers).

    Not kidding. If you’re looking for a budget computer and you know how to navigate Linux, THIS is the computer for you. No ifs, ands, or buts. The 32GB of storage version can be made to work extremely well with Debian – I wrote up some scripts that use an SD card for extra space which actually *improves* overall throughput via parallelization. In essence, it installs packages into a fake chroot that isn’t actually chroot-able and modifies the PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH as well as symlinking some critical files to add them to the system. You can probably take five minutes to make such a system as well if you need extra space, or you can shell out another ~$20 and get the 64GB version.

    Seriously, this thing is amazing with Linux.

  2. I had one the Acer one 11 one week over the warranty it decided to go tits up on a win ten update ( common item ) so go for the reset they get the magical Acer figure of 66% then that’s it unless you know what your doing going its junk, Acer will repair it FOR A PRICE or you can put it into one of those rip off repair shops either way it’s going to cost you dearly,

    There seem to be a lot of Acers out there with the same problem, perhaps they are doing good an apple thing all I know is that mine only lasted 1year and 1week Acer just waved me onto their forum, the problem was the bios wanted a password that I was never given so can’t change the boot order in order to fix it with an image + record install, Acer said they don’t lock their bios, I said why is it asking me for the password then?, they did not get back to me on that one.

    Another thing they won’t tell you is it has a custom design battery £40 on Ebay if you can find one.

    Mine well I’ve tried so many times to get this pos working spent hours on the networks trying everything but now I can’t even get the blue screen options up my battery is going on ebay for £15 and the screen for £10.

    Now ask me if I’m ever going to buy another product again /no don’t ask !

  3. Is the Acer One Cloudbook 14 limited to installing only windows store apps?

  4. Downsides: Big ass charger, half-fit expansion slot.

    Is there anyway you could remove the battery? Maybe this is the way to access and swap the memory.. Because technically this processor can handle 8GB of ram, that would be awesome.

  5. I had exactly the same “slow” problem from an Dell 11 3000 with a quad pentium cpu that I upgraded to windows 10. Chrome would consume 100% of my CPU. I fussed with it for weeks, but then I started looking into the power profiles and the default battery profile was throttling the CPU down to what it claimed was 0% and it made the laptop run dog^$%^& slow.

    Even changing the minimum and maximum cpu settings had no effect as they wouldn’t stick. Eventually i created a new profile all together and set the minimum to something like 5 or 10% and the max to 60% on battery and performance has been much better. Chrome still uses the biggest chunk and thats unfortunate, but its not as big a hit now.

  6. Bump the memory up to 4GB, and these laptops seem to perform a lot better. I believe some of these chips have a 32 bit bus which cripples hard drive performance, and the constant caching of memory further clogs an already challenged bus.

    I was stuck using an Acer Aspire E3-111, which has similar specs, after my laptop crashed. Adding an extra 2GB of memory got me through until I could get another system. There were still stalls, but it performed well enough to comfortably use Visual Studio to develop software. I was definitely surprised by the performance increase.

    The biggest complaint I had was the mouse pad. It was nearly impossible to click without having the mouse pointer jump.

    1. As I said in my comment below, in my experience, it wasn’t a RAM issue at all, but an errant power profile. The Asus X205 works very well with only 2 GB of RAM. You are right about the 32bit bus though. in the Atom world, there is a variety of flavors of the Z37XX chips and some are much better than others.

    2. Your first paragraph makes no sense. Do you even know what you’re talking about?

    3. Please just RTFA memory CANNOT be bumped by any means on this device, period.

  7. Doesn’t chrome have known problems with Win 10? Or did google sort them out now?

    1. They had a memory leak problem that impaired performance, I’m unaware if they fixed it yet but it doesn’t seem like they made any announcements indicating they had… So, I would have to assume the problem still persists…

  8. I’ve seen reports that the n3050 passively cooled might be thermally throttling under high CPU load. This was on an Asrock Beebox and it was just a couple of private users, not a pro review with charts, etc… However Asrock has some literature saying the box should be stood a certain way for maximum cooling capability. So they seem aware of such issues themselves.
    I’d think these laptops have even more limited thermal dissipation off hand. I wonder if it’s an issue.
    I also wonder if they bothered using both memory channels with these setups or just stuck all 2GB of RAM on one channel, further shaving potential performance.

  9. “A Windows 10 notebook for under $200… but it comes at a cost”

    This part of the title kinda made me think back to that Windows NT joke.. “Did you know that if you play the Windows NT CD-ROM backwards you get a satanic message.. but that’s nothing.. if you play it forward it install Windows NT!”. Well, I thought it was funny at the time. Still do.

  10. The big problem with the Stream and Cloudbook laptops is that they are limited to 2Gigs of Ram. When web pages like gmail and face book can use several hundred MB, and even a simple page can add another 40-50 MB to Chrome’s overhead, its easy to see how anything more than half a dozen tabs can bring your system to a screeching halt. Even Chromebooks seem to be moving to 4 Gigs as a standard, Windows should as well.

    1. Windows devices are “moving to 4 Gigs as a standard” just as much as Chromebooks – as in, in neither case is it a standard (I see plenty of 2GB RAM Chromebooks still on sale), but things are moving in that direction.

        1. But that’s a $500 device… It’s much harder for them to offer that in a value price range device that’s near the bottom of the price range… Even cheaper devices, $99 or less, still push 1GB of RAM, for example…

  11. Do any of these netbooks offer non-soldered ram AND a spot for an SSD instead of eMMC?

    1. Laptop models can, Braswell and older Bay Trail M/D Celerons/Pentiums, but tablets with tablet specific mobile SoCs… No…

      Same goes for laptops using the mobile SoCs instead of a Celeron/Pentium… Though, you usually have to go around $300 or higher as soldering is one of the cost cutting to get them lower…

  12. This is an excellent, and honest, review. I was seriously beginning to question my own sanity after offering similar criticisms of this device’s performance myself, and then reading all the other reviews that praised it. The web browsing performance of this laptop is shockingly poor in real-life usage. When a $149 Chromebook can offer such shockingly good web performance, I have a hard time believing that most people will be better-served by a painfully slow, cramped Windows 10 laptop. If you’re considering buying the Cloudbook I strongly advise getting the Cloudbook 14. It isn’t much more expensive but has a much better, full-size keyboard, larger battery, and 64 GB of Storage which makes actually installing local windows applications a possibility.

    1. And it’s not like Win10 can’t run on low-power hardware. I’m just underwhelmed by Braswell chips so far. Theoretically they’re designed to offer slightly better performance-per-watt. But the chips I’ve tried seem to have lower clock speeds than their Bay Trail counterparts, which means they’re actually not faster.

      So for now you might actually be better off picking up an HP Stream, Asus EeeBook, or Lenovo S21e.

      That said… this thing isn’t useless. You just need to temper your expectations and treat it like a 1-app-at-a-time machine to get the most out of it.

      1. The HP Stream was just revised for 2015 to have the same N3050 Braswell Celeron processor. I have one downstairs waiting to be opened and reviewed, to see if it has the same performance issues. One weird thing is that the MS Office applications appeared to run very well on the Cloudbook, perhaps even better than the 3735F / N2840 devices from last year into this year, but on the other hand the Cloudbook 11 and 14 can’t run traditional PC Minecraft at all. I’m talking lag in the menus, and below 10 FPS, no matter how low you drop the settings. This despite the additional EUs for graphics… the Bay Trail systems could run Minecraft out of the box, and run it quite well with Optifine installed. Very strange to see such a drop in performance year on year.

        1. Let me know how the new Stream performs if/when you have a chance. The only Braswell hardware I’ve tested so far has been from Acer, so I wonder if the story might be different with a different manufacturer.

          I’ll probably request my own review unit, but not for a little while — I’m swamped with products to review at the moment.

          1. The Stream 11 2015 appears to handle Chrome slightly better as I’m getting Octane scores in the 7K-8K range vs. 6K-7K on the Cloudbook, but this is more or less the same story. Minecraft is unplayable, more than 2 tabs in Chrome makes the whole system choke, etc.

    2. I think it’s that this one is just a bit rubbish.

      If one can’t afford any more than the $149 Chromebook, then that’s cheaper than anything Windows anyway, including this one. If you can afford more and are looking at Windows devices, then personally I’d say spend the extra $10 and consider say the Asus Eee Book.

      My Bay Trail Windows device boots in 12 seconds, resumes from sleep instantly, is relatively secure and can also run Chrome web apps, and gets regular OS updates.

      If we’re praising boot times, I wish Google would do something to improve the painfully slow boot times of Nexus devices…

    3. I found the bottleneck is actually a problem with the power profile. My Minimum CPU was resetting itself to 0%, making chrome run at 100% cpu. I created a new profile and stuck in some better values and chrome runs much better now.

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