News
Walmart sells a $140 laptop – keep looking, it ain’t worth it
Seriously, it’s bad.
by
Joe Rice-Jones
June 22, 2020
Image: KnowTechie
If you’ve found yourself working from home without a company-issued computer, you might be looking to find a reasonably-priced, in-stock laptop to work from. I mean, with everyone who can work from home, actually working from home, all the normal laptops have disappeared from shelves. Like, gone. Poof. Vanished.
So, what can you do? Trawling Walmart for a laptop might not be your first choice, but if it’s all that’s on offer, you do what you gotta do. Oh, there’s
a $140 EVOO laptop
– let’s take a look at that because hey, you might not be reimbursed by work for this.
Ars Technica
thought the same, and bought one, so (in their own words) “you don’t have to.” Umm, yikes. That can’t be good.
I mean, just look at the specs, it’s not exactly going to win any power contests
A free year of Office 365 is a nice bonus since that’ll cost you $70 on its own. Maybe that will make up for the rest of the laptop…
Includes Office 365 Personal for One Year and 1TB Microsoft OneDrive Storage
11.6″ Ultra-Thin Laptop
AMD A4-9120 Processor
32GB Storage
2GB RAM
Mini HDMI
0.3MP Front Camera
Windows 10 Home
Okay, hold up. 32GB of storage. That might be fine for a
Chromebook
or an Android device but on a
Windows 10
laptop?
Ars
explains further, that that 32 is really 29.8 because of how Windows counts, and then it’s really only 25 or so that’s usable space.
In fact, they found “only… 11.4GiB free” on the first boot. Will Windows even update with that amount of space? Spoiler: No, no it won’t. Windows Update wants 8GB of space on the C: drive to update, so that means that anyone who buys this piece of shit will be stuck without feature updates and probably security updates going forward.
Okay, so what about wiping the drive and installing Linux?
That’s often the savior of underpowered devices, and that’s what
Ars
tried next. At this point, the time spent is probably equal to buying a properly-specced laptop, so really this is an “I spent my cash so I’m making it work” moment, rather than a productive use of your time.
Even simple web browsing was sluggish, and when they took the laptop apart to see what’s under the hood, they found why. Let’s start with no cooling. Literally, all the cooling was handled by a sheet of copper. Is that going to work without a fan? No, no it is not.
EVOO only managed to stop it cooking itself (and your thighs) by downclocking the CPU to 1.5GHz from the normal 2.5GHz of the chip. Really, this isn’t so much a laptop but rather an expensive subscription to Office 365. Don’t buy it. If you need something cheap, look through used ads for laptops as almost anything in this price range will be more powerful.
What do you think? Can you imagine a reality where you’d ever buy this laptop?
Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our
or
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Editors’ Recommendations:
How to choose the right RAM for your computer – 2020 edition
How to choose the right storage for your computer – 2020 edition
How to choose the right motherboard for your computer – 2020 edition
How to choose the right CPU for you – 2020 edition
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Related Topics
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