Lenovo Chromebook 3

Early in 2020 I complained about a cracked screen on my HP notebook computer (model 15-b0015dx) which HP refused to fix under their warranty.  However I continued to use the machine for web browsing.  Besides the cracked screen the computer was prone to overheating and shutting down.  Perhaps this was causing long term damage as recently the disc drive appears to have progressively failed making the machine unusable.  The symptoms were as follows.  First the computer started closing some windows immediately after opening them.  This made some programs like Microsoft Solitaire unusable but others like the web browser continued to work normally.  Various purported remedies found on the internet failed to fix the problem but I didn't suspect a hardware issue at the time.  Then a few weeks later I noticed some of the icons normally on my desktop were missing.  I tried to reboot the computer to fix this but I ended up in the Windows Recovery Environment instead after some messages about automatic repair failing.  The recovery environment provides a MS-DOS window.  MS-DOS commands seemed to be working normally and I was able to save a couple files by copying them from the C: drive to a memory stick.  Then perhaps unwisely I tried running chkdsk.  This ran for over a day reported numerous errors and seems to have damaged my hard drive further.  When it finally finished MS-DOS could no longer find the C: drive making it hard to do much of anything.  Fortunately I had already saved the file I cared about most.       

My older Dell laptop which I had not been using much had failed more abruptly (probably also with a bad disc drive) a few months earlier so I needed a new machine for web browsing.  I ended up ordering a Lenovo Chromebook 3 - Model 82BA001FUS (11.6" HD Laptop - Celeron N4020 - 4GB Memory - 64GB eMMC - Onyx Black)  on sale from Best Buy for $79.  It was delivered a few days ago and I have been trying it out.

Chromebooks use Google's Chrome OS instead of  Microsoft Windows.  Together with a somewhat different keyboard layout this took a little getting used to.  It seems to work okay for web browsing the primary intended use.  However I don't (at least so far) find it as pleasant to use as the HP notebook (even with its problems).  The screen is noticeably smaller and displays less of a typical web page making for more paging up and down.  And I find the keyboard a bit awkward.  Although this is in part lack of familiarity.  It takes a little time to get used to using the alt key to emulate some of the missing keys (so for example delate is alt + backspace, page up is alt + up arrow and so on).  On the plus side the machine seems sturdier than the HP notebook and hopefully will hold up better over time.  The solid state drive is faster and may be more reliable than a mechanical disk drive but it offers considerably less storage and won't last forever as each memory cell can only be written to a limited number of times before becoming unreliable.

Bottom line I was attracted to this machine because of the cheap price and it seems functional.  However it is clearly low end, many people will prefer to pay more for a better machine.