As I’ve gotten older, small screens have increasingly become a problem. I love the real-estate of a full-HD (or bigger) screen, but when they’re smaller than 15.6″, the fonts are getting hard to read for these old eyes.

There aren’t many 15.6″ laptops that met my requirements (1080p, long battery life, 4GB or more, core i5 or better, light weight), especially when you want it to be inexpensive: I prefer not to carry something that costs more than around $200 because laptops get broken/stolen/lost/etc.

So I bought an Acer Chromebook 15 on eBay for $180 and so far, I like it a lot. I replaced the stock 32GB SSD with a KingSpec 256GB SSD (M.2 2242) bought on amazon for $34.15 and installed Windows 10 Pro 64-bit from SCDKey using coolstar.org replacement BIOS. It’s a bit over budget, but still pretty close to the $200 target and it is now a very serviceable Windows laptop with decent battery life, speed (core i5-5200), and a screen I can read. The battery is replaceable and widely available so when that run-time starts to decline, that’s fixable too.

It could be a little lighter and I would have liked more RAM, but it runs all of the software I use and is pretty snappy. Overall, Acer chromebooks continue to impress me!