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The last time I went to see my in-laws I was challenged by the most important persona to impress, the father-in-law to find him a new laptop to fulfil a specific purpose. A few years ago I recommended and he bought a rather snazzy enterprise Windows laptop which he totally loved. But as a mechanic he wanted something that he could use in garage when working on projects but without putting his pride and joy at risk.

All he really wanted to do was to access internet content and most importantly all of his bookmarks for technical manuals and schematics. Well, the answer was simple, that’s a Chromebook, but which one? There are so many. So with the threat of being branded not good enough to be married to his daughter I started to investigate.

The Chromebook has seen a meteoric rise in the last few years and every man and his dog has tried to make one but there are advantages and disadvantages to all of them, plus I wanted to keep the budget under 200 quid so this narrowed the field, or so I thought, but actually there are a few options and I am here to tell you about the one we settled on and why.

The winner by a clear mile was the Acer Chromebook 14. One of the main reasons for this is that I trust Acer in their build quality and this does not disappoint. Unlike a lot of sub £200 Chromebooks which are mostly housed in plastic this bad boy has an all aluminum alloy casing and it feels lovely.

But most importantly for the price I was looking for performance. This particular model comes with an Intel Celeron processor, 2GB of RAM and a 16GB SSD. Now that doesn’t sound like a lot but it’s only running Chrome OS which is notoriously not resource heavy (there are options for more RAM and storage) and when you fire it up it literally boots up in seconds and once you log into your Google account even with this spec it zips along like a demon. The best thing is that as my father-in-law is a Chrome user on his Windows PC so the second he logged in all of his settings, bookmarks and history were there. It even pulled across all of his Chrome extensions.

Some reviews say that the screen is a little cheap but from what I saw and for what we needed it for it was perfectly up to the job, and remember how much it cost.

Chrome OS is a joy to use. In this day of modern technology the majority of users only really need to access to their browser and as this is the heart of the OS you can imaging that this works seamlessly. Also the settings are really easy to access and change. It just takes away all of the stuff that you don’t need to worry about such as updates and security and let’s you just get on with using it.

Connectivity-wise you get 2 x USB 3 ports, HDMI and a headphone socket, all you really need. There is also a full multi touch trackpad. And yes the design is a complete rip off of a Macbook Air but which laptop nowadays isn’t.

So if you are looking for a laptop for someone who just needs to do the day to day things that the internet offers then there is nothing better than this for 180 quid. I have tried other Chromebooks and this is most certainly the best out there right now.

Author

Paul Wright

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