Garage Worthy

One time consuming aspect of the last project was the running back and forwards to my laptop to look up various technical points for the build, and I considered bringing the computer out to the workshop, but I considered there was no safe place to put it. The main bench was crowded and was used for packaging stuff for eBay, so it needed to be organized better.

A small, portable solution for good internet connection, fast web browsing, was researched.

It needed to be "garage worthy" and dependable, with a good battery life and WiFi, good screen, keyboard, trackpad and a big aspect of garageworthiness was that it had to be cheap as chips :

This Acer C720 Chromebook from around 2013 has found it's way onto my bench, and it should be noted that there are millions of these things in the market at the moment, millions...

Intel CPU, Celeron 2955U, Haswell, 4GB fixed ram, 16GB SSD (upgradeable) and a reasonable screen, keyboard and trackpad. In fact this trackpad, for workshop use, is very good as all actions can be achieved with two fingers of the same hand. 

A Chromebook uses ChromeOS and the target audience for these are schools, and as these units are no longer updated by Google, they have been replaced and therefore the C720 has become very cheap. I picked this one up for C$79.50 including taxes and Fedex shipping.

In my testing, browsing the internet is very quick, WiFi is strong, Youtube plays well, streaming is good and on top of that, battery life is around six hours or so. It is a perfect addition to the workshop and I expect it will also become a laptop for our hotel stays in the future.