Acer Chromebook C7 Owners Lounge

I just picked one of these up, and it was ~$218 after taxes shipped. I'll be installing Chrubuntu on it tonight. Opened it up (oh no! voided warranty!) and stuck another 8G DIMM into it and it's still booting. So here's the specs for the Chromebook C7 model C710:

List price: $199
OS: Google Chrome
Weight: 3.0lbs
Battery: 4 cell 2500mAh (~3 to 4 hours)
CPU: Intel Pentium Celeron 847 dual 64 bit 1.1GHz cores 2MB L3 cache
Stock memory: 2G (one empty dimm socket)
Stock HD: 320G 5400rpm
Display: 11.6" 1366x768 glossy screen
Webcam: 1280x720
Memory card reader: SD and MMC
3 x USB 2.0 connectors
Networking: Ethernet 10/100Mb/s and wireless 802.11/a/b/g/n dual band

Quick review:

This machine is a slower CPU version of the Acer V5-171 laptop except instead of having the Intel Core i5 3317U 1.7 GHz CPU it has the slower 1.1GHz celeron CPU, and instead of 6G RAM it comes with 2G and instead of a 500G HD it has a 320G HD. Given that the V5-171 is still selling for $440, over twice as much, this machine represents a good price point for people who don't really need windows, or want to install Ubuntu etc.

This laptop is quite zippy and responsive, especially compared to my older AO722 that I picked up at Target a year and a half ago. Not surprising considering the CPU in this gets about twice the score of the AMD C50 in the AO722, no matter what benchmark you use. It plays full screen 720p flash video from youtube or vimeo or other sites flawlessly so far. I'll report if I find anything it chokes on.

Battery life in general web browsing mode is about 3 to 4 hours.

The keyboard feels like a slight step up from my older AO722 but it's still not a great or evern really above average keyboard. It's usable, and ok for a few hours here and there, but if you're typing the great American (or European, or Asian, or African) novel then you'll want to plug in a real keyboard after a while, but that's true of 90% or more of laptops. For general purpose use it's ok. It is NOT backlit, but not surprsing in a $199 laptop.

The touchpad is surprisingly good. It's not an Apple glass touchpad but it's well above the average for this size machine, both in size and responsiveness. It's a "clickpad" design with no separate buttons. But it works so well with single and double finger taps and scrolling that I don't mind the lack of discretely laid out buttons. Sadly there is no three finger tap for middle button, something unix / linux users would love to see.

So far I've only used ChromeOS. If all you need is a web browser and web browser level apps, then it's a GREAT little notebook. If you need more advanced software you're either gonna have to look elsewhere or get to hacking to put another OS on it. There's already a yourtube video on how to put Chrubuntu on it here:

Installing Ubuntu 12.04 on Acer C7 Chromebook [Complete Guide] - YouTube

OK so in the hour since posting the first review I now have Chrubuntu 12.04 and am now installing the updates (491Megabytes of them this might take a minute). But so far so good. It just feels like any other laptop running Ubuntu 12.04. Battery life indicator shows ~4.5 hours battery life, better than Chromos did, but it may be lying to me. Gonna install all my usually toys like mplayer and other things and I'll get back to ya's.

 

My GF was looking to replace her older laptop and she asked me about the C7. I suggested it and from what I have read, for the money, its a good buy for someone who only browses the internet and blogs.

 

For $200 you're getting a LOT for your money. And if all you do it browse the web and blogs it's perfect. Everything stored online in google drive (up to 100G free for two years.) and you can log in from any other chromebook and there's all your stuff.

Seems like there may be some issues with netflix on the intel machines right now not being quite perfect, and beware that ARM based chromebooks cannot use netflix at all at this time.

UPDATE:

OK after further use I've found a bug in Ubuntu 12.04 on this machine. If you suspend it by closing the lid, when it restarts dbus-whatever and a couple other processes start chewing up tons of CPU and memory and the machine runs like a dog. However, if you use the suspend option under the little gear icon in the upper right to suspend this doesn't happen. To prevent this you can go to the power settings and tell the machine to do nothing when you close the lid and then just use the menu to suspend. Pain in the butt but still pretty minor.

 

Surely you can find a way for it to run a command or shortcut on lid close. The shortcut the actual.suspend.button to it.

Sent from my MB860 using Tapatalk 2

 

Sure, but the problem is that is pretty much what the OS is already doing. I've read somewhere that this is a hardware bug that after being put to sleep by the lid closing, the BIOS starts generating lots of garbage data which gets logged and slows the machine to a crawl. I.e. I'm guessing that it's a physical hardware bug.

 

OK found the fix. Just do this:

sudo su -
echo 'manual' > /etc/init/acpid.override
rm /etc/init/acpid.override

and you should be good.

 

Hey, my names kevin and i have a few questions for you,.. I just purchased a chromebook c7 and i need it to run programs like lxi vinyl express, and multiple price estimate programs,, will running this ubuntu thing help me do that? im not really computer savvy, so any help you could give me would be much appreciated

 

Isn't lxi vinyl express an application working only on Windows and MacOS?

 

Yeah don't buy a chromebook to run Windows or Mac programs. You can get a windowified version of the C7 (C710 or something like that) for about $400 or $450. But at that price you can probably get more for your money.

Update: I've now been running chrubuntu on my C7 for a while and am VERY happy with it. 3 hours battery is plenty for what I do with it. For $218 delivered it's the best value in laptops I've ever used. My Sony is still my main machine, but when I go out to eat or camping etc I take the chromebook and don't worry too much about what might happen to it like spills or drops.