My wife recently got accepted to college to further her degree, and our home laptop is a beater (on it now). I found a Win10 machine with quad-core intel processor, 4GB of RAM (upgrade-able to 8), 500 GB HD, and a touchscreen/broken-back Laptop mode for $270 on Amazon. It's from Acer, a company I have heard of but have never used, and I gotta say, I'm pretty impressed:
1) I don't (yet) hate Win 10- I saw something online that after June or July MS will stop pestering you for the free upgrade, which is good news, but if you want it after that, it's $119. Don't know if it's true, but I may now consider Win10 for our other PCs- anyone have it on a non-touchscreen device?
2) I expected this thing to be bursting with bloat-ware; maybe I'm getting rusty, but I only found two extraneous programs installed, both of which seem to me to have value (so maybe I AM getting old!)- both are from Acer- one is a quick launch util to reduce blue-light. I consider myself medically educated (I work in Pathology, but am not a doctor), and also a healthy skeptic. All I can say right now is the program doesn't use a ton of resources, and the display changes noticeably when I activate it, so it stays. The other piece is a "health check app" that I haven't played with, but seems to do good things- scan battery and drive health, defrag, etc. Also not a resource-hog, so it will stay.
I installed an AV program, and got it set up on our network...so far so good! Are PC manufacturers finally realizing that we're not fools? I'm seriously astonished that it didn't take longer to get this thing dialed in...so maybe Win10 is just really good at hiding a bunch of stuff.
1) I don't (yet) hate Win 10- I saw something online that after June or July MS will stop pestering you for the free upgrade, which is good news, but if you want it after that, it's $119. Don't know if it's true, but I may now consider Win10 for our other PCs- anyone have it on a non-touchscreen device?
2) I expected this thing to be bursting with bloat-ware; maybe I'm getting rusty, but I only found two extraneous programs installed, both of which seem to me to have value (so maybe I AM getting old!)- both are from Acer- one is a quick launch util to reduce blue-light. I consider myself medically educated (I work in Pathology, but am not a doctor), and also a healthy skeptic. All I can say right now is the program doesn't use a ton of resources, and the display changes noticeably when I activate it, so it stays. The other piece is a "health check app" that I haven't played with, but seems to do good things- scan battery and drive health, defrag, etc. Also not a resource-hog, so it will stay.
I installed an AV program, and got it set up on our network...so far so good! Are PC manufacturers finally realizing that we're not fools? I'm seriously astonished that it didn't take longer to get this thing dialed in...so maybe Win10 is just really good at hiding a bunch of stuff.
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