Google pk Microsoft whose cheap notebook is more worth buying?

Notebook computer can be said to be the most mainstream desktop computer products, many friends need to use them every day to office, the Internet. Of course, because of the popularity of mobile internet devices such as smartphones and tablets, traditional computer products have been hit more and more, so the attraction of laptops has gradually declined. Obviously, the price war to any product is extremely effective one kind of promotion way, the notebook product is no exception, for instance the low-end Windows notebook is more and more, the Google Chromebook such similar "netbook" the product also gradually popular, then who is the better "light experience" computer? We might as well test it by actual comparison.

In my personal case, my family has used three notebooks in the past two years, but has been looking for better ones. Their requirements are simple: they can send and receive emails, look at social networks, online videos, create documents, and store photos, with a budget of no more than 3000 dollars. They usually choose some low-end windows notebooks, but slow, often blue-screen crashes, which require me to reload the system or check for hardware failures.

This time, I decided to give them a try at the same time Chromebook and low-end Windows 8 notebooks, models for Toshiba Chromebook and satellite nb15t, the price is equivalent (1870 Yuan and 2200 yuan respectively), to see which system is more suitable for them.

Chromebook: Low price but limited system

Toshiba Chromebook has a 13.3-inch screen with a design that resembles an Apple MacBook series and is the only 13-inch Chromebook model available, taking into account portability and practicality. Samsung also unveiled a new 13-inch Chromebook that will soon be available, meaning that the size of the Chromebook area will be more and more.

The Chromebook of the flagship Low-cost feature will naturally not have a high hardware configuration, such as the Celeron processor on the Haswell platform, 2GB RAM, 1366*768 resolution, and 16GB solid-state drives, all of which are entry-level configurations. However, because the Chrome OS itself is a very lightweight operating system, the performance is very fast.

The main obstacle to Chromebook is not performance, but system limitations. Browser-based features make it necessary to network operations most of the time, although some applications can support offline downloads, but the overall still relies on the internet and cloud storage. So, if the internet is in bad condition, it may affect your experience of using. The most important thing is that the use of the network is not psychologically as stable as local use, after all, save the file on the hard disk, is already a general computer operation.

Of course, we have to look at cloud services with a development perspective, by the end of 2013, Google Cloud services have 120 million active users, Microsoft and Dropbox also have a large number of users, so cloud storage is an inevitable trend, but we still can not completely out of the hard drive, cloud storage is more like a backup solution.

Cheap Windows 8 Notebooks: Low-end hardware affects usage experience

Take another look at the cheap Windows 8 notebooks. Toshiba Satellite NB15T is equipped with a 11.6-inch touch screen, Celeron processors at the same level as Chromebook, 4GB RAM, and 500GB hard drives, which means you can store multiple files locally instead of relying on Google Drive cloud services. In addition, its battery life is actually similar to Chromebook, basically can guarantee 6 hours of endurance, not good but also enough.

Although it is a low-end notebook, Toshiba Satellite NB15T is generously equipped with a touch screen to better use the Windows 8 tile interface. However, due to low hardware configuration, high system resource consumption, in use will appear screen operation Cotton, slow, and have to restart the operation.

As a more advanced local operating system, the use of Windows 8 in high-end notebooks is obviously better, but low-end products are limited. In other words, it can't be exhaustive, and you'll find that using the Metro mobile platform is not as effective as the ipad or Android tablet, and the traditional desktop experience is also because of the low-end hardware that has the cotton, which affects the overall experience.

What exactly is the choice?

Obviously, the experience of both Low-cost notebooks is not perfect. In theory, a low-end Windows 8 notebook will give you more features, richer software, and good compatibility, but requires a high level of hardware, and if you want to use large software such as Photoshop or play games, the 3000-dollar and below models are not a good choice.

As for Chromebook, we only recommend that it be used as a "netbook", that is, browsing the web, chatting or infrequently text processing, and if a lot of office and multimedia editing is required, a broadly compatible Windows product is more appropriate.