I bought an HP Stream 11" Windows 8.1 laptop

I have good intentions of starting to give talks at my small town's local library on safe internet browsing, privacy issues, and any topics that I get requests for. I bought a $200 HP Stream 11" laptop to get up to speed on Windows 8.1 since I only use OS X and Linux.

I am pleasantly surprised at how much I like this laptop! The display is pretty good, the keyboard is also OK, and the no-fan design is nice. It works well with a second 1080p external monitor also. I ordered the laptop directly from Microsoft: their "signature editions" come with no crap-ware; just Windows 8.1 and nothing else.

The shortcomings:

  • Only 32 GB of solid state disk space. After installing Ruby, Java 8, IntelliJ, git command line tools, Pharo Smalltalk, Chrome, and cloning several git projects I have about 11 GB free.
  • Slow CPU. For using Pharo Smalltalk this is no problem. It is a small problem for Clojure development. I use IntelliJ with the Clojure plugin for editing and have a lein repl running in a command window. Not too slow, but not great either.

I bought this laptop just to experiment/play with Windows 8.1 but I think that it will become my travelling laptop. It is very light and small to carry around. The build quality so far seems very good for a $200 laptop.

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