Acer Aspire One Cloudbook with Windows now available for $190

1. They need one with an hdd. All these cheap windows Laptops with ssd have barely any storage.

   1. So go and get one of the many low end laptops with a slow mechanical drive. But with a name like “cloud” book it’s clear this is intended for a different usage.

2. I spotted an E403sa (Asus Eeebook) at the official site I think this is a good alternate to Acer Cloudbook

   https://www.asus.com/Notebooks/E403SA/overview/

3. I had one of the first iterations of these super cheap netbooks. The ASUS model. I loved the fact that it was super light and had very long battery life. I travel a lot, and on some trips I can get by with a laptop for just document editing and web browsing. I loved that fact that if I dropped it or spilled coffee on it, no big deal. I could extend the life of my pro laptop by only taking it when I needed the horsepower. HOWEVER, the 32gb SSD was my undoing. It was simply too small. The structure of my OneDrive is sufficiently complex that even the “placeholder” files in Windows 8.1 wouldn’t fit. And, of course, with Windows 10 the placeholders are gone, leaving even less room for files. At first I tried to sync the files to a 64gb microSDXC, but these cards are too slow for the task, and the continual reading and writing sends them to an early grave. I’ll gladly buy another device like this, but I need AT LEAST 64 gb.

   1. On the contrary, the lose of the placeholders fixes the problem where even thousands of placeholders would take up room. You can still choose to only have some folders or files synced on Windows 10. So this is an improvement in terms of not taking up space.

      Windows 10 also requires significantly less space, upgrading on my T100 freed up 7GB.

      Whilst more space is always good, I manage to use my 32GB T100 even with Office and GBs of Visual Studio installed on the primary drive, and that’s more demanding use than many will need. 16GB may be pushing it, but remember these are intended as ultra-cheap laptops competing with Chromebooks.

4. When posting on Windows hardware now it really would be helpful to always collect an important spec. Whether it has an unlocked bootloader or not. We know that no tablet infected with Windows 10 can be unlocked but some laptops can and some can’t and if one intends to load Linux on one that is the only spec that matters.

   One clue seems to be whether it is loaded with Windows with Bing or not but it would be severely unwise to make a purchasing decision just on that. We need to have a way to know if a product is usable.

   1. i can’t agree more. being a linux user, it’s the first thing i look for… can i install linux? And this info is not always easy to come by….

   2. Two problems:

      1) That type of information isn’t typically available to the public, and it would get a little repetitive to say “I don’t know” that the end of every article.

      2) Very few (and I mean *very* few) customers are interested in that type of information anyway, and spending time on esoteric issues like this general interest articles isn’t going to do anything for Liliputing’s viewing numbers overall.

      Far better to have occasional separate articles about Windows devices that have been discovered to be particularly suited for installing Linux on.

      1. Many readers of Liliputing are interested in this. Probably not the majority. But certainly a sizable %. A writer should know his readers.

         1. Writers, like a person running a business, ultimately has to go after the majority of their customers/readers and can’t always cater to every single minority faction that may also be out there.

            But it depends on what you mean by locked, for most modern PC’s any OS that can work with UEFI will work. The only ones really locked down are mobile devices and systems based on mobile hardware. Higher end laptops, etc. will usually allow you to alter firmware settings, like give the option to disable Secure Boot…

            However, some people mean locked by the UEFI even existing at all on the system and would prefer to replace it with something like Coreboot, which was previously known as LinuxBIOS, and is used by pretty much all Chromebooks to date.

            For those in the later category, they may be out of luck as far as Intel based systems goes as Broadwell and onward can’t use Coreboot and have to work with UEFI… basically, just check to see if the system has Intel’s new Boot Guard feature…

            Though, this new feature isn’t required to be enabled by Intel but most of the OEMs will anyway, as it prevents people running 3rd party firmware that could damage the system and most will only want to support issues with their own firmware, the only ones reporting so far that they won’t do this is Purism’s crowdfunded Librem 15 laptop maker, who will ship with a modern Intel CPU fused to run unsigned BIOS code and thus can have Coreboot installed on them…

      2. General customers perhaps, but not here. So just get in a habit of always asking sales weasels and include bootloader: locked|unlocked|unknown in the specs along with ram, cpu, etc. We know vendors read the site too, they might decide unknown sounds negative…. which it is but not as negative as locked. In the end, the terrible truth being covered up is that there is zero positive benefit to the customer in a locked bootloader so they don’t want to discuss it at all since every vendor now sells some locked gear. But any hardware that is unlocked IS at a competitive advantage, only the size is debatable, so if it was clear they could actually monetize that advantage by having people actually know it exists they just might go to the trouble of letting it be known. So vendors might be convinced to clear up the confusion and move unknown to unlocked but probably won’t ever admit to locked, that info would have to come from reviewers or end users.

         1. Vendors? You mean the manufacturers? Not a chance. The market for unlocked Windows devices is tiny compared with the overall market for this class of devices. It’s likely that more eight year-olds will be given a Cloudbook than there are Linux users that would buy one of these if the bootloader was unlocked. I really think you are reaching to claim that anything talked about on this site regarding boot loaders is going to influence the likes of Asus.

            Yes, Liliputing does cater to enthusiasts, to some extent, and there is no doubt they (we) are the most vocal readers by far in terms of comments, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they (we) are still a pretty small minority in terms of overall readership.

5. Would 16 GB of storage hold anything more than the OS of a modern Windows system??? 32 GB is little enough…

   1. Lol. U know why they it a Cloud book.

      1. … That doesn’t even have enough space to hold the web-browser’s cache!!! 😉

         1. a massive Arch linux install with tons of apps (vlc, audacious, kodi with all repo, gimp, libreoffice 5, Chrome, google earth; telegram, spotify etc…) stands at 10gigs Max. a normal install is about 6gigs. it would be alright with 16gigs ssd. i have an 8gig ssd in an old Mini-itx and i can run linux without problem and stock stuff on a USB stick ♡(*´∀｀*)人(*´∀｀*)♡

            Vista 10 is another story, i installed one and after 2 updates it clocked at 25gigs!!!! with no apps installed θ＼(；￢_￢)

            1. Yep, a modern linux desktop shouldn’t need more than 10 GB, it’s true! And that is a fully-stocked distribution. I still remember running OpenLinux off 300 MB HDDs!

               But you’re right… Vista 10 is big. Big and fat. Makes you wonder what grot takes up all that space!

            2. Vista was the most bloated Windows ever got, ever since then Windows has been on a steady diet :-p

               Windows 10 is pretty close to the requirements of XP… The need for a recovery partition is almost eliminated, the OS makes active use of smart compression methods and requires up to several GB’s less space than Windows 8 did…

               It’s still bigger than a typical GNU/Linux distro but it can actually make it to a 10GB partition… 16GB just gives it a little breathing room for updates, etc. that can take up space over time but most updates are actually replacing existing files now and not adding… but Windows desktop apps can take up a lot of space, which forces using WinRT apps but the WinRT app ecosystem isn’t ready to take over…

               It’s also a issue with things like OneDrive that are still a issue as that system needs improving still, especially if you want to sync all your files but you can still use the Cloud Drive separately without syncing and make a reference to it.

               So those two issues together usually mean 64GB or more is recommended but if you can keep to WinRT apps and don’t mind keeping most of your data in the cloud or on a memory card then it’s still workable but it would be a big compromise for most people who don’t want to be bothered with any significant system maintenance/management…

               Though, it can get a little better later when MS finally enables the feature to allow Store apps to be installed and run from the memory card but that isn’t a option at the moment…

            3. Whilst Windows does take up more space than Linux, my T100 with Windows 10 has 18GB in use, with plenty of apps included, including stuff like Visual Studio and Office, so not sure where your 25GB for a zero apps comes from (presumably you mean a fresh install, which already has plenty of apps included).

               So my 32GB machine is perfectly usable. My understanding is that 16GB Windows tablets have additional techniques to reduce the remaining size – no, you won’t have a lot, but they’re intended as being used as pure tablets or like Chromebooks.

               And seriously, I started to install Arch Linux once – halfway down the long list of manual installation instructions, I decided I had better things to do with my time, and scrapped the whole thing. It’s as is someone had intentionally tried to design the most un-user-friendly and time-consuming operating system ever.

               You’re right, Arch Linux takes up little space – it takes up 0GB on my hard disk.

            4. the w10 was an hour long fresh install on a blank hdd….
               i duno, i’m a linux user anyway. it just doesn’t make me want to get W10 on small hdd and ssd…

            5. Hi have you installed linux on this specific device?? ive been trying for almost a week and was wondering if you could help me. please email me at [email protected] thank you!

            6. Specifically arch Linux. Thanks

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