Who remembers the $100 laptop?

[Xist]

I don't even know if I have a touchscreen. My first laptop with a touchscreen cracked and it thought that I was constantly touching all along the crack, so I couldn't use it. I had it repaired and something similar happened again.

[redpoint5]

There's some fantastic deals on laptops out there. Somewhere around Black Friday I bought a latest gen (10) Intel i5 laptop with SSD, high quality display, etc for $280.

https://www.costco.com/.product.1371...hipped_product

The ad says i3, but it's actually an i5.

I bought it to be a low energy consuming security camera recorder (BlueIris), but I've been using it as a laptop since I haven't got around to buying video cameras yet.

[Xist]

How did you like Windows S? Most of the 1-star reviews for Mom's laptop complained about it. I think that it is a great laptop, but this is what I said about Windows S:

I finally created a new Hotmail account just to change the password on the account that she has used for over fifteen years, gave all kinds of personal information, and it said they would respond in twenty-four hours.

Twenty-four hours! I would have reset the password on any other account already!

There is no way that we are waiting twenty-four hours to see if the computer even works or if we could get out of Stupid mode, so I used the new e-mail address that she doesn't want.

It is supposed to be easy to fix Stupid, but it was broken seven ways. Apparently the activation system is poorly-designed and it didn't work. I kept telling it to activate, and it merely said "Something happened."

Is it possible to be more useless?

Fortunately, Google told me that there was a Troubleshoot Activation option, which worked, but it did not change anything. I went through the menu over and over and finally the "Get" button appeared.

I am finally free to use Gmail, Chrome, Google search, and an adequate free office suite, which she will probably never use.

Why in the world would I make payments on my word processing software?!

I bought Mom this Acer Laptop with an AMD Ryzen 3 3200U for $313.68 in February. She hates it, but she doesn't like anything. I think that it is a great little machine. All that she really does with it is teletherapy, but since the SLP decided to take a walk when Mom did not connect after ten minutes I always try to get her set up, which is frustrating, because she still does not know how to use her fancy computer.

I use it to quickly show her houses for sale with a significantly larger screen than her iPhone or iPad and I am always envious of how light it is and how narrow the bezels are. However, my laptop may be three years older, but I am pretty sure that the i7 is still significantly faster.

I logged her in five times today when I really wanted to get back to sleep after waking up at 06. They hadn't turned off the water when I did go back to bed.

My brother hardly seems to benefit from teletherapy. If only there were a fully qualified speech therapist that could safely see him in-person!

[redpoint5]

I spent no time running S mode:

Go to Settings.
Then select Update & Security.
In the left sidebar, click Activation.
Then click “Go to the Store.” You will see this under the “Switch to Windows 10 Home / Pro” section.Windows 10 s mode go to store settings
Press the “Get” button under the “Switch out of S Mode” section and wait for the process to complete.

Windows 10 has been a good generation of Windows.

[Xist]

Mom did not remember her Hotmail password and there wasn't an easy way to reset it, among many other problems.

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

The first laptop I got was an Asus Eee PC with Windows XP in early 2008. I remember at least once I have been questioned if that was "the 100-dollar computer" while I was using it in a mall with free wi-fi. Not sure if the guy who asked me about the laptop thought that I was some sort of computer geek, but IIRC the OLPC wasn't commercially available in my country by then.

Well, sure the original development of the OLPC followed an approach not so likely to attract the average customers, and most if not all of its hardware became seriously outdated by now, but the purpose was remarkable.

[Xist]

The article that I linked mentioned the Ieeeeeeee. Was yours white and green?

They suggested the OLPC was responsible for ushering in the age of cheap laptops.

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

Originally Posted by Xist

yours white and green?

It was just white.

They suggested the OLPC was responsible for ushering in the age of cheap laptops.

Sure it did such effect, even though it may have influenced other segments more than educational users.

[JSH]

I've had very good luck with $300 Chromebooks. I ran an original HP Chromebook 14 for 5 years and updated to a HP X360 14 last Christmas.

It has OS update support through 2026. That is the crazy thing. Google supports a $100 chromebook for 7 years but a $1000 Pixel phone only gets 3 years of updates.

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

Recently I've been considering getting rid of Windows entirely, as it's now requiring so many updates, to which a "legacy" hardware might often not be suitable, while some Linux distributions can be as user-friendly as Windows and work with a simpler hardware.