I love my cheap little chromebook, it’s perfect for bringing on trips. It’s small, light and the battery lasts for ages. For weekend trips I don’t even bring the charger. I can download movies from my home and watch them in a hotel room by plugging it into the HDMI port. It cost so little that I wouldn’t even mind too much if I lost it or it got stolen. I’d probably miss the yubikey more.

I paid $65 for a used one, but you can get them as cheap as $49 right now.

If you look at the Chromebook specs the C740 is in the 2015 and before category so you have to unhide. It gets an octane score of 14,100. That’s really high for the low cost chromebooks. I keep track of them every now and again when they go on sale and the C740 always beats whatever’s the current deal, even really new models like the HP Chromebook 14 (sometimes available for $150 which is a pretty great deal) get the same score.

If you’re going to get one, make sure you get the 4GB model Ebay search for Acer C740 4GB

When it arrives, go to chrome://system/ and make sure meminfo says 3,976,576 kB I got one that was sold as 4GB, but meminfo revealed it was really a 2GB model. That extra memory is critical for good performance.

Sure it’s going to EOL in June 2021 and stop getting chrome updates, but for now it can’t be beat. The C740 developer notes are interesting too.

UPDATE 2024-10: I’m running ubuntu now, spread over two disks and setup like this.