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Review on πŸ’» Acer Aspire 1 A114-32-C1YA: 14-inch Full HD Laptop with Intel Celeron N4000, 4GB DDR4, 64GB eMMC, Office 365 Personal, Windows 10 Home in S mode by John Walker

Revainrating 5 out of 5

Very basic student laptop with eMMC chip and only 40GB of free memory

Whether you're looking for a laptop for basic browsing and email (which most phones can do) or mainly word processing, this one can do it device may be a good option for you. Anything beyond that can cause you to run into storage and speed issues quickly. The laptop does not use a standard hard drive or solid state drive, but an eMMC chip. They're typically faster than traditional hard drives, but nowhere near the speed and performance of SSDs. There are some questions about how many rewrites they can do before it crashes, but given the rate at which most people are replacing laptops, it's probably not a big deal. What surprised me the most is that you basically get 40GB of storage (64GB before Windows 10 used 24GB). 40 GB is really little for a new laptop. Of course you can use external drives etc. but adding new programs takes up space on your main drive. Windows 10 S means you can only install Windows software from the App Store. This will probably be very frustrating for the average teenager, but if you want a laptop for a kid who doesn't cry at the thought of them blocking access to the latest popular app or game, then this might not be a problem. It also means that games like Minecraft need to be Windows 10 versions to run on this laptop. Windows 10 S limitations also mean that you cannot run Chrome, which will be very frustrating if you are used to it. I like Acer and have a Chromebook and laptop from this manufacturer that work very well. Like them, the keyboard layout works very well for me. I've attached a picture of the keyboard so you can see the layout. There are some keyboard layouts that I just can't get used to, and the lack of an intuitive layout can be a deal breaker. However, this laptop is a very basic entry-level student laptop that seems to be trying to compete with Chromebooks. Even if you're selling Windows, I think you can easily find a more powerful device with more memory for a comparable price at the current price point. You get an annual subscription for Office 365, which I personally don't like because after a certain period of getting used to it, you have to pay for an annual subscription again and again. If you want to install the free LibreOffice or OpenOffice, you need to get rid of Windows 10 S and switch to regular Windows 10. This might end up working for you if you have very specific requirements that don't change. Personally, I would pay a little more to get a more powerful laptop with more memory.

Pros
  • Nothing but positives
Cons
  • Infinitely sluggish