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A $200 laptop is a difficult thing to assess.
The trade-offs the buyer must be willing to make are not trivial.
And that’s before we acknowledge that the Acer C7 runs Chrome OS rather than Windows.
The most interesting question then, is who exactly is the C7 for?
At exactly three pounds, the C7 is light but it doesn’t feel compact.
The gray-blue hue of the lid is the sharpest looking part of the laptop.
It has a speckled shine to it.
The hinge that attaches it to the rest of the chassis is a gloss black.
When pressed, it audibly pops in and out of place.
It’s much less than reassuring.
The bottom of the PC is black plastic with the speakers near the front.
Speaking of, they’re mostly terrible.
The sound comes from the high ranges.
There’s a predictable absence of bass, and at loud volumes the sound becomes grating to the ear.
Luckily, there’s a perfectly serviceable headphone jack on the right side of the deck.
What’s worth mentioning about the charger is that it has an impressively small power brick.
It’s slightly larger than the palm of my hand.
On the left-hand side of the deck is a third USB 2.0 port and a few surprises.
There is an Ethernet port, a full-size HDMI plug and a VGA port.
The SD/MMC reader on front lip rounds out the port selection.
Opening the laptop reveals Acer’s Chromebook’s 11.6-inch, glossy screen.
This is the only physical difference between the C7 and the many netbooks of yesteryear.
The resolution clocks in at a predictable 1366x768 and a webcam sits exactly where you would expect it to.
The deck is fitted with a full-size, chiclet-style keyboard.
Here, it is replaced with two keys, a function key and a dedicated search key.
We will dig more into their functionality later.
The keys feel okay.
It’s a perfectly serviceable keyboard for day-to-day use, but it is nothing more than that.
The trackpad is very good.
Sitting flush in the palm rest, the trackpad is parallel and equal in length to the space bar.
It’s plastic rather than glass, but its texture is pleasant and easy to work with.
Pointing around the desktop is as easy as it should be.
Aside from occasionally desiring the trackpad to be a bit wider, there isn’t anything to complain about.
The internals are solid for the price.
A dual-core Intel Celeron clocks in at 1.1GHz, supported by 2GB of RAM and a 320GB HDD.
The Celeron hums through Chrome OS, booting in between twenty and twenty-five seconds.
The Chromebook gamely chugged throughBastionwithout complaint or much in the way of heat and noise.
In fact, firing up ten different tabs in Chrome didn’t seem to trouble the machine.
Only one test perplexed the Chromebook.
Loading photos from an SD card was nigh-impossible.
I repeated this action, with the same crashy results multiple times.
The C7’s battery life was good for just under four hours under regular usage.
That’s less than four hours of browsing and word processing.
This laptop runs on netbook internals, so in my book less than four hours is insufficient.
