A $200 laptop is a difficult matter to assess. On one hand, the Acer C7 Chromebook has that shockingly low toll tag, on the other, at that place is weak build quality and a netbook-grade processor. The trade-offs the buyer must be willing to make are not picayune. And that's before we acknowledge that the Acer C7 runs Chrome OS rather than Windows.

The about interesting question then, is who exactly is the C7 for? Before we can get to who information technology's for (hint: at that place is more than than i correct answer,) we take to get to the bottom of what the C7 is and then more than importantly, what it tin do.

Hardware

In terms of hardware, the C7 is a barebones affair though to be honest we didn't look otherwise for the price. At exactly iii pounds, the C7 is light but it doesn't experience meaty. Since the entire machine is constructed of incredibly light (read: cheap) plastic, the battery at the rear of the car contains the vast majority of the Chromebook'due south weight. This leaves the computer's heft feeling unbalanced toward the back and unwieldy when being toted around the house and pulled from a purse.

The greyness-blueish hue of the lid is the sharpest looking part of the laptop. Information technology has a speckled shine to it. There's an off-white, silk-screened Acer logo in the middle and the Chrome logo badged along a top corner. The hinge that attaches it to the residual of the chassis is a gloss black. When pressed, it audibly pops in and out of identify. It's much less than reassuring.

The bottom of the PC is black plastic with the speakers about the front. Speaking of, they're generally terrible. The sound comes from the high ranges. There's a predictable absence of bass, and at loud volumes the audio becomes grating to the ear. Luckily, at that place'due south a perfectly serviceable headphone jack on the right side of the deck. Also on the correct hand side is a pair of USB two.0 ports, a Kensington Lock and the charging port. What's worth mentioning well-nigh the charger is that it has an impressively small power brick. It's slightly larger than the palm of my hand. On the left-hand side of the deck is a third USB ii.0 port and a few surprises. In that location is an Ethernet port, a full-size HDMI plug and a VGA port. The SD/MMC reader on front lip rounds out the port pick.

Opening the laptop reveals Acer's Chromebook's 11.half-dozen-inch, glossy screen. This is the merely physical difference between the C7 and the many netbooks of yesteryear. The resolution clocks in at a predictable 1366x768 and a webcam sits exactly where you lot would expect it to. The screen waxes between decent sharpness and bottomless colour reproduction on account of the enormous amount of light bleed on the panel. The 1366x768 resolution beyond 11.6-inches does manage to bring out a skilful bargain of particular, but often times the images expect washed out and devoid of color.

The deck is fitted with a full-size, chiclet-style keyboard. The keys are soft to the touch, a matte and slightly textured finish helps the fingers find their manner. The only major differences between this keyboard and the one you are used to is the absence of the Windows central. Here, information technology is replaced with two keys, a role central and a dedicated search key. Nosotros will dig more into their functionality afterwards. The keys experience okay. The travel is rather shallow, and some keys wiggle in their slots, leading to a few more typos than expected. It's a perfectly serviceable keyboard for day-to-twenty-four hour period use, but it is nothing more than that.

The trackpad is very good. Sitting affluent in the palm rest, the trackpad is parallel and equal in length to the space bar. It's plastic rather than glass, but its texture is pleasant and like shooting fish in a barrel to work with. Google'southward item gestures for Chrome OS all work well, which is more than than tin be said for many Windows laptops. Pointing around the desktop is equally piece of cake equally information technology should be. Bated from occasionally desiring the trackpad to be a flake wider, there isn't annihilation to mutter about.

The internals are solid for the price. A dual-core Intel Celeron clocks in at 1.1GHz, supported by 2GB of RAM and a 320GB HDD. The Celeron hums through Chrome Bone, booting in betwixt xx and twenty-v seconds. The Chromebook gamely chugged through Bastion without complaint or much in the mode of estrus and noise. In fact, firing up ten different tabs in Chrome didn't seem to trouble the auto. Only one test perplexed the Chromebook. Loading photos from an SD menu was virtually-incommunicable. The C7 would chug when opening the SD carte, and so crash when I would scroll through the gridded list of photos. I repeated this activity, with the same crashy results multiple times. Admittedly, the card was loaded to the gills with full-size DSLR shots, but a Windows machine would have taken its time, not made excuses and failed the chore.

The C7's battery life was good for just under four hours under regular usage. That's less than four hours of browsing and word processing. This laptop runs on netbook internals, so in my book less than four hours is insufficient.