Stunning! I've started averaging 85 dollars/hourly since i started working online half a year ago... What i do is to sit at home several hours each day and do simple jobs i get from this company that i found over the internet... I am very happy to share this with you... It's an awesome side job to have http://orkan201.tk
Really though. The X205TA is far more exciting to me: fanless, 50% more battery life, super thin and light, and generally lower cost on Amazon. The performance difference shouldn't be significant -- if you're looking for performance in this category, you're looking in the wrong category.
He's saying that people will see "$200 laptop with Office included" and assume that's the whole price. The reality of the situation is that Office 365 Personal Edition is $70/year and Home Edition is $100/year. With only 17.5GB free to the user out of the box most users will start using their free OneDrive storage for documents and such.
What they may not realize is that they're expected to pay $70-100/year to use Office and that cloud storage and if they don't pay then they will lose the ability to work on documents and access their online files. The only saving grace is that OneDrive offers 15GB of free storage so if you're under 15GB and don't need Office then no biggie.
What it comes down to is that there will be people complaining a year from now that they bought a $200 laptop and now they're being asked to shell out another $70 to use Office (that was installed for free when they bought the laptop) and access their documents that they stored in the cloud. You don't get that with a Chromebook.
If you think Microsoft will out windows under a subscription, I highly doubt you're right.
IF that's right though, by some strange business decision of Microsoft, the idea that currently available computers that have been purchased already will need to pay is hilarious.
If the user decides to start using the Office 365 and Onedrive for all their data and such then they will have to pay a year later to continue using such features.
With not a lot of space I can assume the OneDrive will be very popular.
Folks don't think things through. They just see "$200!!!"
You don't have to pay for Onedrive storage. And I'm not aware of any platform where you get an Office license free in perpetuity, so the cost to use Office isn't any more than any other platform. If you don't care about using Office, you can use an alternative on the Stream just as well as on any other device. There is no extra $100 a year to use it.
LibreOffice is a fairly small install and something like a SanDisk Cruzer Fit in the 32-64GB range for under $35 for a one time purchase will solve both the office suite and storage capacity problem in a reasonable way. Those options may not be perfect for everyone, but they don't drive the total cost of ownership upward much and the thumb drive can be used on another computer later.
I admit that I'm curious about how well a Linux distro would work on the Stream 11. Without worrying about touchscreen hardware, it might be possible to get something like Mint 17.1 on it which would give the user a little more storage space at the cost of losing access to the Windows software ecosystem. At this price point, its cheap enough to buy one just to play with using a live disc or USB boot to see how it works and if all the hardware is supported in a fairly painless way.
Mint 17.1 runs very well on my Aspire ES1-111M-C7DE, which has the same cpu/ram/screen. The Aspire does have a 250GB SATA disk instead of 32GB flash, so I have never been worried about storage space to begin with. The Aspire has been on sale for as little as $153 recently.
The Stream 11 is supposed to be a Chromebook competitor, but there's no Chromebooks in the comparison charts. I'd like to see how this stacks up agains similar priced Chromebooks in web and battery tests.
We have not had any of the current Chromebooks in for review. The last that was reviewed was based on A15 ARM. Here's the performance of that one though if you are interested: http://home.anandtech.com/show/7418/hp-chromebook-...
I've spent a bit of time with one of these. Everything mentioned in the article is true, but what's really surprising to me is that the build quality is surprisingly decent. For $200 I expect a notebook built like tissue that looks like a brick and this feels quite good in the hand and looks quite stylish (color being extremely subjective or course). Other manufacturers could learn from this, it's not necessary for a notebook to cost $1000 to be built reasonably and plastic can be good.
Do you want a horrid blue plastic laptop with a comically bad screen, predictably bad cheap laptop trackpad, terrible wifi, no storage, and a universally loathed OS? Are you so bad with money that the concept of waiting and spending more to get something that will actually last is foreign and maddening? Good news for you, the netbook is back!
This would be an interesting laptop to get for a very young child who you also happen to hate, or to airdrop on 'developing nations' so they can burn them for warmth when nobody buys them.
This must be where the line forms for frugal hipsters waiting patiently for Apple to usher in that really big, long rumored price cut!
Fortunately, here in the good ole' U.S. of A. we are ALL One-Percenters. It would simply be so gauche were we forced to consider that, just maybe, not everyone gets to lounge about in entitled largesse.
While we're waiting, please pass the derivatives, won't you.
We purchased four of these for our older family members early Christmas presents. Actually the 13in version, to help their old eyes. They LOVE them!! Good battery and small size but they are coming from ancient laptops, my grandfathers was a PII Toshiba Portege.
We went with these over the Chromebooks for two reasons, first and most important Online Poker, there is no online poker games on Chromebooks (real people, real money). Second was the free office 365 for a year, our grandparents are die hard Excel users and do everything including grocery list in xls.
As jabber says, I bet they'll learn to love any of the MANY MANY other ways you can make grocery lists instead of paying $100 a year. Heck, they may even realize just why the other ways are far superior if they actually tried them out.
Eh if they purchased 4 of those they could get that 5-pack Office 365. 25/year with one extra license he can keep for himself. Full office + tons of online storage. Ends up about the same per person as 100GB google drive storage :)
As for other ways - sometimes people hate to learn new ways. I believe I don't need to give you examples :) Also, grocery list seems to be an example of how trivial tasks they perform in excel, not that this is the reason excel is needed.
It's not only the free "Windows with Bing" that's bringing real x86 windows tablets/netbooks price/performance competitive with Chromebooks. One aspect that most outlets miss is that Intel is subsidizing bay trail chips. They're losing money on every single one sold. That's why EVERYTHING is usual bay trail atoms these days, and why you don't see any more experimentation with ARM or AMD.
I don't know if that's really fair in this version of Bay Trail, but we don't know what they are paying either. HP has the HP Stream 14 which I mentioned has a AMD A4 in it.
Not sure what "gunky gel" you're referring to, but if you mean the distortion of the pixels, that's likely caused by the matte finish of the panel. As Brett mentions in the article.
It's interesting to compare against the iPad Air 2 which,for most benchmarks, comes out as 1.5 to 2x as good. I say this not as a "rah rah Apple" --- an iPad Air 2 is about 3 to 4x the price of this thing --- but more as a "who says ARM isn't appropriate for laptops?" I'd want rather more oomph from my laptop, which I run Mathematica on, but there certainly appears to be a market for which ARM levels of performance are acceptable. Which means hurdle number one has been overcome...
There are some remaining hurdles... We need an OS. Ubuntu probably ain't gonna cut it. God knows what the new, panicky and flailing, MS will do. They could offer up Windows RT for this class of devices. Or is Win RT dead and buried? Chromebooks may continue their slow burn trajectory --- I don't think anyone can predict how those will play out. And we need a CPU. Snapdragon 810 seems to be MIA for a few more months (and who knows how it will perform when it ships). The server level CPUs seem very inappropriate. But Denver is a serious possibility, and Samsung may one day ship an A57 Exynos that isn't embarrassing.
So I could see Chromebooks firing back with equivalent level HW, and higher performance in the form of a Denver CPU. If Google could then get its head out of its ass long enough to (a) make a deal with Citrix for a Citrix front end on Chromebooks that doesn't absolutely suck (one star on the Chrome Store! that's some fine going, Citrix!) (b) get Android apps (pretty much all of them) to run on Chromebook they might have a product that catches fire. (But WITHOUT BOTH of these, I suspect they're relegated to the "meh, interesting but not for me" category.)
ChromeOS does not exactly restrict you to Google's ecosystem. And while this might have more onboard storage than typical ChromeOS devices - the paradigm is a bit different for ChromeOS. Onboard storage is not as necessary as it has traditionally been on Windows.
Although I didn't crack mine apart, I believe it's mini PCI-E from what I could find.
Yes, you should be able to change it, but that doesn't excuse the one put in there. Also when you're dealing with something with a $200 price point, saying "just add a better card yourself" and it's $30 means that you are now 15% over the original asking price. That's a lot. Add in a new wireless and a good SD card and you're going to be closer to $300 that $200 and then your options for other devices increases.
The wireless is horrible. I knew it was 1x1 when I bought it, but didn't expect it to be as bad as it is. It took a lot of playing around with my router to get around all the interference in my area, but most of the time I am tethered to my gigabit Ethernet adapter so it doesn't bother me much.
From the breakdown manual, you can replace it, but I don't know if HP still blacklists cards or not.
The Stream, doesn't have Ethernet according to the specs. Are you using a USB3 Ethernet adapter for this?, you're still not getting anywhere near Gigabit speeds, not to mention you lose the single USB3 port for other devices (backup drive...)
This looks like a reasonable laptop as a standalone PC, but not suitable for any networking use more than browsing.
Surprisingly good. Move to an IPS screen, quad core CPU (with silent fan) and 64 GB of NAND and it should easily sell for ~250$, with better WiFi and higher resolution maybe even 300$. It would be nice to have both options.
Considering that i get 60-90fps in league of legends with good old amd 790gx (2008) integrated gpu @1024x768 medium/high details, how bad can be intel graphics?
its a shame none of these stream books have RJ 45 Ethernet. This is a perfect low cost laptop to use in the field fixing routers, AP's, and other networking gear.
ATM i'm using a venue 8 pro with a USB OTG ethernet adapter. It's a pain in the ass to lug all that stuff around but it'll have to do until someone makes a decent laptop with RJ45 priced $200 or below
I bought an Acer Aspire E 11.6 for a family member and I thinkit's basically the same platform. Celeron N2840 and 32Gb Hynix HBG4e. Overall I am impressed with how snappy the system is.
The only problem is the Acer only has 9GB free, that's after uninstalling most of the bloatware. There is a separate 10GB recovery partition that Disk Management reports as being 100% free space, that cannot be deleted. Even after creating a recovery drive, there is no option to delete the recovery partition.
Does anyone have any ideas on how to recover that 10GB? It looks like Acer's implementation of WIM boot is flawed. I've found quite a few people complaining of this in the Acer forums, but no solution.
When you have WIMBoot you can't remove the recovery partition because that's where the actual system files are. The flaw I see with WIMBoot (this is the first device I have reviewed which used it) are that they put too much stuff in the recovery partition - free trials to software, office, etc - and they all take up a lot of space. Since you can't remove the recovery partition it would be much better if they made it as lean as possible but depending on the OEM, it might be pretty large, negating the usefulness of it.
The HP Stream was 7.2 GB because I'm pretty sure it has the full Office files in the WIM as well. Just make it a download... I'd rather download it once if I need it than take the space hit on something with such a small amount of storage. This version was the MS Signature edition though so it has less of the bloat than most, and yet it is still 7.2 GB. The Windows install I can download is ~4 GB so clearly they could do a better job with either the WIM compression or keeping extra software out and allow you to move that to a recovery USB.
Cheers Brett, on the Acer the recovery partition is 10GB, but when you make a recovery drive it only uses around 7GB, so it looks like they didn't even try to optimise the size of the recovery partition, just went with 10GB!
And the windows installation takes up 10GB on the drive, so there's only 9GB user accessible space left out of the box, it just seems like they wasted a lot of space.
On the stream does it actually have 17.5GB user accessible space free on the drive out of the box? The stream isn't available in Canada yet, but I might return the Acer's, I bought two of them for our mothers! They don't need a lot of space, but 9GB is cutting it fine I reckon!!
UPDATE: I returned the two Acer Aspire E 11.6's for a HP Stream 11 and a Stream 13. They just came in to the local Microsoft store, so I got the signature editions and they both have 17.5GB user accessible right out of the box, much better than the 9GB in the Aceer.
Cheers Brett for the info, you helped me to make a more informed decision.
Let me know what you think of them once you use them for a bit. Tweet me @BrettHowse
I got this one from the MS Store in Canada so I was going to say yes you can buy them there :) Bit of a price premium over the US store but the CAD dollar has kind of tanked due to oil prices.
The 13" with touch is not yet available in Canada looks like maybe end of January for that one but you just never know.
RE: Wifi - you're looking at the Envy range before you'll get anything better than 2.4GHz only 1:1 N (and even then there are still some holdouts), so I don't see them including anything better any time soon.
RE: Display - Yuck, I really hope you just got a dodgy example there.
I've honest got to say "Boo hiss!" to these because they are expensive compared to the E5-571-5552 from Acer. Bigger screen, more hard drive space, more RAM, more powerful CPU (Core i5) for only twice the cost of this machine. Who are you trying to fool with these articles? These machines are craptacular for what you are getting. Not even worthy 90 dollars in the real world.
Do you mean that when I have 200$, I (magically) get more 200$ to get a laptop for browsing, officeediting, film watching instead of this "craptacular maschine"?
My son is having problems using flash player. Flash came preinstalled when we purchased it new Dec. 2015. Using it for school and some classes require flash. Keeps telling us that you must have flash but will not let us.
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59 Comments
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hojnikb - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
Are you guys gonna review the Eeebook X205, which is another lowcost laptop, but uses baytrail-t with 4 cores..asgallant - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
You mean this review? http://www.anandtech.com/show/8478/asus-eeebook-x2...asgallant - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
Crap, nevermind, saw the link without reading it.Dakosta Le'Marko - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link
Stunning! I've started averaging 85 dollars/hourly since i started working online half a year ago... What i do is to sit at home several hours each day and do simple jobs i get from this company that i found over the internet... I am very happy to share this with you... It's an awesome side job to have http://orkan201.tkcoder543 - Saturday, December 20, 2014 - link
Really though. The X205TA is far more exciting to me: fanless, 50% more battery life, super thin and light, and generally lower cost on Amazon. The performance difference shouldn't be significant -- if you're looking for performance in this category, you're looking in the wrong category.Shadowmaster625 - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
What sort of league of legends testing did you do? Did you try a 5v5 teamfight or just solo laning?jabber - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
Cue forward to this time next year as everyone that bought one moans bitterly they have to pay an extra $100 a year to run it.Not as cheap as some may think.
hawler - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
Did I miss something? What do they have to pay for to run it?WithoutWeakness - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
He's saying that people will see "$200 laptop with Office included" and assume that's the whole price. The reality of the situation is that Office 365 Personal Edition is $70/year and Home Edition is $100/year. With only 17.5GB free to the user out of the box most users will start using their free OneDrive storage for documents and such.What they may not realize is that they're expected to pay $70-100/year to use Office and that cloud storage and if they don't pay then they will lose the ability to work on documents and access their online files. The only saving grace is that OneDrive offers 15GB of free storage so if you're under 15GB and don't need Office then no biggie.
What it comes down to is that there will be people complaining a year from now that they bought a $200 laptop and now they're being asked to shell out another $70 to use Office (that was installed for free when they bought the laptop) and access their documents that they stored in the cloud. You don't get that with a Chromebook.
Drumsticks - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
What lol?If you think Microsoft will out windows under a subscription, I highly doubt you're right.
IF that's right though, by some strange business decision of Microsoft, the idea that currently available computers that have been purchased already will need to pay is hilarious.
jabber - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
If the user decides to start using the Office 365 and Onedrive for all their data and such then they will have to pay a year later to continue using such features.With not a lot of space I can assume the OneDrive will be very popular.
Folks don't think things through. They just see "$200!!!"
steven75 - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
Wouldn't they just switch to a free competitor after the trial?jabber - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
I tell customers about Libre Office and Open Office."Never heard of them!" is the same response I get every time. Average Joe hasn't a clue.
These machines are going to be pushing the use of Office big time so there will be a lot of moaning next year.
Going to be lots of moaning next year.
kyuu - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
You don't have to pay for Onedrive storage. And I'm not aware of any platform where you get an Office license free in perpetuity, so the cost to use Office isn't any more than any other platform. If you don't care about using Office, you can use an alternative on the Stream just as well as on any other device. There is no extra $100 a year to use it.jospoortvliet - Saturday, December 20, 2014 - link
Google docs & drive are free, so is LibreOffice.Ms has to somehow keep shareholders happy who are used to insane, monopolist margins, let's see how that goes...
BrokenCrayons - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link
LibreOffice is a fairly small install and something like a SanDisk Cruzer Fit in the 32-64GB range for under $35 for a one time purchase will solve both the office suite and storage capacity problem in a reasonable way. Those options may not be perfect for everyone, but they don't drive the total cost of ownership upward much and the thumb drive can be used on another computer later.I admit that I'm curious about how well a Linux distro would work on the Stream 11. Without worrying about touchscreen hardware, it might be possible to get something like Mint 17.1 on it which would give the user a little more storage space at the cost of losing access to the Windows software ecosystem. At this price point, its cheap enough to buy one just to play with using a live disc or USB boot to see how it works and if all the hardware is supported in a fairly painless way.
tidris769 - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link
Mint 17.1 runs very well on my Aspire ES1-111M-C7DE, which has the same cpu/ram/screen. The Aspire does have a 250GB SATA disk instead of 32GB flash, so I have never been worried about storage space to begin with. The Aspire has been on sale for as little as $153 recently.BrokenCrayons - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
Thanks! The Aspire actually looks like a better option because of storage space too. I think I might have to buy one. :)jsl4980 - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
The Stream 11 is supposed to be a Chromebook competitor, but there's no Chromebooks in the comparison charts. I'd like to see how this stacks up agains similar priced Chromebooks in web and battery tests.Brett Howse - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
We have not had any of the current Chromebooks in for review. The last that was reviewed was based on A15 ARM. Here's the performance of that one though if you are interested: http://home.anandtech.com/show/7418/hp-chromebook-...JarredWalton - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
Except Jarred has a couple so I've added numbers for C720 to the appropriate graphs. Chromebook 13 from Acer is up next for review....Cryio - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
I hate Bay-Trail so much.Where are all the Mullins/Beema laptops? :(
ExarKun333 - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
LOL, they don't exist. No one sells them. :)Flunk - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
Intel is basically giving the chips away, AMD can't possibly compete with that.Flunk - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
I've spent a bit of time with one of these. Everything mentioned in the article is true, but what's really surprising to me is that the build quality is surprisingly decent. For $200 I expect a notebook built like tissue that looks like a brick and this feels quite good in the hand and looks quite stylish (color being extremely subjective or course). Other manufacturers could learn from this, it's not necessary for a notebook to cost $1000 to be built reasonably and plastic can be good.herzigma - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
I'd like to see performance and battery life compared between a Chromebook at the Stream 11 running the Chrome browser in Desktop mode...tipoo - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
Doesn't seem bad for what it is. I'm interested in the Stream 8s or 7s as cheap tablets for my parents, any plans on a look at those?Brett Howse - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
Actually yes should be something up soon.tipoo - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
Awesome! Thanks for letting me know.Cygni - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
Do you want a horrid blue plastic laptop with a comically bad screen, predictably bad cheap laptop trackpad, terrible wifi, no storage, and a universally loathed OS? Are you so bad with money that the concept of waiting and spending more to get something that will actually last is foreign and maddening? Good news for you, the netbook is back!This would be an interesting laptop to get for a very young child who you also happen to hate, or to airdrop on 'developing nations' so they can burn them for warmth when nobody buys them.
Bobs_Your_Uncle - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link
This must be where the line forms for frugal hipsters waiting patiently for Apple to usher in that really big, long rumored price cut!Fortunately, here in the good ole' U.S. of A. we are ALL One-Percenters. It would simply be so gauche were we forced to consider that, just maybe, not everyone gets to lounge about in entitled largesse.
While we're waiting, please pass the derivatives, won't you.
dunce - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
We purchased four of these for our older family members early Christmas presents. Actually the 13in version, to help their old eyes. They LOVE them!! Good battery and small size but they are coming from ancient laptops, my grandfathers was a PII Toshiba Portege.We went with these over the Chromebooks for two reasons, first and most important Online Poker, there is no online poker games on Chromebooks (real people, real money). Second was the free office 365 for a year, our grandparents are die hard Excel users and do everything including grocery list in xls.
jabber - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
So what happens in a years time and they still want to use Excel? Switch them over to Libre Office?steven75 - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
As jabber says, I bet they'll learn to love any of the MANY MANY other ways you can make grocery lists instead of paying $100 a year. Heck, they may even realize just why the other ways are far superior if they actually tried them out.Zizy - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
Eh if they purchased 4 of those they could get that 5-pack Office 365. 25/year with one extra license he can keep for himself. Full office + tons of online storage. Ends up about the same per person as 100GB google drive storage :)As for other ways - sometimes people hate to learn new ways. I believe I don't need to give you examples :) Also, grocery list seems to be an example of how trivial tasks they perform in excel, not that this is the reason excel is needed.
schizoide - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
It's not only the free "Windows with Bing" that's bringing real x86 windows tablets/netbooks price/performance competitive with Chromebooks. One aspect that most outlets miss is that Intel is subsidizing bay trail chips. They're losing money on every single one sold. That's why EVERYTHING is usual bay trail atoms these days, and why you don't see any more experimentation with ARM or AMD.Brett Howse - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
I don't know if that's really fair in this version of Bay Trail, but we don't know what they are paying either. HP has the HP Stream 14 which I mentioned has a AMD A4 in it.tipoo - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
o_O That close up of the pixels, what's that gunky gel covering them? I havn't seen that in other close ups. Is it noticeable from a distance?kyuu - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
Not sure what "gunky gel" you're referring to, but if you mean the distortion of the pixels, that's likely caused by the matte finish of the panel. As Brett mentions in the article.jtharris3 - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
The crappy TN screen is a deal breaker for me. Not buying!name99 - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
It's interesting to compare against the iPad Air 2 which,for most benchmarks, comes out as 1.5 to 2x as good.I say this not as a "rah rah Apple" --- an iPad Air 2 is about 3 to 4x the price of this thing --- but more as a "who says ARM isn't appropriate for laptops?" I'd want rather more oomph from my laptop, which I run Mathematica on, but there certainly appears to be a market for which ARM levels of performance are acceptable. Which means hurdle number one has been overcome...
There are some remaining hurdles...
We need an OS. Ubuntu probably ain't gonna cut it. God knows what the new, panicky and flailing, MS will do. They could offer up Windows RT for this class of devices. Or is Win RT dead and buried? Chromebooks may continue their slow burn trajectory --- I don't think anyone can predict how those will play out.
And we need a CPU. Snapdragon 810 seems to be MIA for a few more months (and who knows how it will perform when it ships). The server level CPUs seem very inappropriate. But Denver is a serious possibility, and Samsung may one day ship an A57 Exynos that isn't embarrassing.
So I could see Chromebooks firing back with equivalent level HW, and higher performance in the form of a Denver CPU.
If Google could then get its head out of its ass long enough to
(a) make a deal with Citrix for a Citrix front end on Chromebooks that doesn't absolutely suck (one star on the Chrome Store! that's some fine going, Citrix!)
(b) get Android apps (pretty much all of them) to run on Chromebook
they might have a product that catches fire.
(But WITHOUT BOTH of these, I suspect they're relegated to the "meh, interesting but not for me" category.)
savagemike - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
ChromeOS does not exactly restrict you to Google's ecosystem. And while this might have more onboard storage than typical ChromeOS devices - the paradigm is a bit different for ChromeOS. Onboard storage is not as necessary as it has traditionally been on Windows.Mobile-Dom - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link
Is the Wireless card Mini PCIe? or is it soldered down? because im sure you can find 802.11ac Mini PCIec cards on ebay for like £25Brett Howse - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link
Although I didn't crack mine apart, I believe it's mini PCI-E from what I could find.Yes, you should be able to change it, but that doesn't excuse the one put in there. Also when you're dealing with something with a $200 price point, saying "just add a better card yourself" and it's $30 means that you are now 15% over the original asking price. That's a lot. Add in a new wireless and a good SD card and you're going to be closer to $300 that $200 and then your options for other devices increases.
jabber - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link
Well when I look at a customers laptop and I mention "Oh it's got Wireless N!" to a customer they will always say "what's that?"You spec according to the average Joe.
amdhunter - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link
The wireless is horrible. I knew it was 1x1 when I bought it, but didn't expect it to be as bad as it is. It took a lot of playing around with my router to get around all the interference in my area, but most of the time I am tethered to my gigabit Ethernet adapter so it doesn't bother me much.From the breakdown manual, you can replace it, but I don't know if HP still blacklists cards or not.
greenwavelet - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link
The Stream, doesn't have Ethernet according to the specs.Are you using a USB3 Ethernet adapter for this?, you're still not getting anywhere near Gigabit speeds, not to mention you lose the single USB3 port for other devices (backup drive...)
This looks like a reasonable laptop as a standalone PC, but not suitable for any networking use more than browsing.
MrSpadge - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link
Surprisingly good. Move to an IPS screen, quad core CPU (with silent fan) and 64 GB of NAND and it should easily sell for ~250$, with better WiFi and higher resolution maybe even 300$. It would be nice to have both options.Lolimaster - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link
Considering that i get 60-90fps in league of legends with good old amd 790gx (2008) integrated gpu @1024x768 medium/high details, how bad can be intel graphics?Morawka - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
its a shame none of these stream books have RJ 45 Ethernet. This is a perfect low cost laptop to use in the field fixing routers, AP's, and other networking gear.ATM i'm using a venue 8 pro with a USB OTG ethernet adapter. It's a pain in the ass to lug all that stuff around but it'll have to do until someone makes a decent laptop with RJ45 priced $200 or below
kgh00007 - Sunday, December 21, 2014 - link
I bought an Acer Aspire E 11.6 for a family member and I thinkit's basically the same platform. Celeron N2840 and 32Gb Hynix HBG4e. Overall I am impressed with how snappy the system is.The only problem is the Acer only has 9GB free, that's after uninstalling most of the bloatware. There is a separate 10GB recovery partition that Disk Management reports as being 100% free space, that cannot be deleted. Even after creating a recovery drive, there is no option to delete the recovery partition.
Does anyone have any ideas on how to recover that 10GB? It looks like Acer's implementation of WIM boot is flawed. I've found quite a few people complaining of this in the Acer forums, but no solution.
Brett Howse - Sunday, December 21, 2014 - link
When you have WIMBoot you can't remove the recovery partition because that's where the actual system files are. The flaw I see with WIMBoot (this is the first device I have reviewed which used it) are that they put too much stuff in the recovery partition - free trials to software, office, etc - and they all take up a lot of space. Since you can't remove the recovery partition it would be much better if they made it as lean as possible but depending on the OEM, it might be pretty large, negating the usefulness of it.The HP Stream was 7.2 GB because I'm pretty sure it has the full Office files in the WIM as well. Just make it a download... I'd rather download it once if I need it than take the space hit on something with such a small amount of storage. This version was the MS Signature edition though so it has less of the bloat than most, and yet it is still 7.2 GB. The Windows install I can download is ~4 GB so clearly they could do a better job with either the WIM compression or keeping extra software out and allow you to move that to a recovery USB.
kgh00007 - Sunday, December 21, 2014 - link
Cheers Brett, on the Acer the recovery partition is 10GB, but when you make a recovery drive it only uses around 7GB, so it looks like they didn't even try to optimise the size of the recovery partition, just went with 10GB!And the windows installation takes up 10GB on the drive, so there's only 9GB user accessible space left out of the box, it just seems like they wasted a lot of space.
On the stream does it actually have 17.5GB user accessible space free on the drive out of the box? The stream isn't available in Canada yet, but I might return the Acer's, I bought two of them for our mothers! They don't need a lot of space, but 9GB is cutting it fine I reckon!!
kgh00007 - Sunday, December 21, 2014 - link
UPDATE: I returned the two Acer Aspire E 11.6's for a HP Stream 11 and a Stream 13.They just came in to the local Microsoft store, so I got the signature editions and they both have 17.5GB user accessible right out of the box, much better than the 9GB in the Aceer.
Cheers Brett for the info, you helped me to make a more informed decision.
Brett Howse - Sunday, December 21, 2014 - link
Let me know what you think of them once you use them for a bit. Tweet me @BrettHowseI got this one from the MS Store in Canada so I was going to say yes you can buy them there :) Bit of a price premium over the US store but the CAD dollar has kind of tanked due to oil prices.
The 13" with touch is not yet available in Canada looks like maybe end of January for that one but you just never know.
Squinoogle - Sunday, December 28, 2014 - link
RE: Wifi - you're looking at the Envy range before you'll get anything better than 2.4GHz only 1:1 N (and even then there are still some holdouts), so I don't see them including anything better any time soon.RE: Display - Yuck, I really hope you just got a dodgy example there.
Lerianis - Tuesday, December 30, 2014 - link
I've honest got to say "Boo hiss!" to these because they are expensive compared to the E5-571-5552 from Acer. Bigger screen, more hard drive space, more RAM, more powerful CPU (Core i5) for only twice the cost of this machine.Who are you trying to fool with these articles? These machines are craptacular for what you are getting. Not even worthy 90 dollars in the real world.
avfreebird - Thursday, June 18, 2015 - link
Do you mean that when I have 200$, I (magically) get more 200$ to get a laptop for browsing, officeediting, film watching instead of this "craptacular maschine"?Pstenney - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link
My son is having problems using flash player. Flash came preinstalled when we purchased it new Dec. 2015. Using it for school and some classes require flash. Keeps telling us that you must have flash but will not let us.