The $199 Acer Chromebook is one of the cheapest laptops money can buy — but the 11.6 inch Chrome OS notebook is also hampered by mediocre battery life. You’d be lucky to get 4 hours of run time out of the laptop.
But now Acer is introducing options with larger batteries and more RAM. .
The new Acer C710-2055 Chromebook is available for pre-order from Amazon for $280
The new model has the same processor, screen, keyboard, hard drive, and case as the cheaper Acer C7 Chromebook. But Acer has bumped up the RAM from 2GB to 4GB and added a 6 cell battery which the company says should offer up to 6 hours of battery life.
Want the RAM upgrade, but don’t need the extra battery life? There’s also a $260 model 
$60 seems like a lot to pay for a simple memory upgrade though… especially since it’s pretty easy to upgrade the RAM yourself.
I reviewed Acer’s original $199 chromebook a few months ago, and I was pretty impressed with the performance you get from a laptop in this price range, but still a bit disappointed in the battery life. It sounds like the new model may offer a better bargain for folks that need a longer-lasting laptop.
But at $280 and up, the Acer C7 is starting to encroach on Windows laptop prices — and given a choice between a chromebook and a PC that runs desktop Windows apps, I suspect plenty of folks would go with the latter.
about Windows vs ChromeOS…. Not if its competing against Windows 8.
Except, you can’t with new WINDOWS systems, dual book with LINUX, that is something you can do with the Chrome OS . HUGE advantage then will access to all those Linux apps.