You should be able to get Linux running on that thing.  You may be forced to stick with a major distro that knows how to deal with the new BIOS-ish situation, as opposed to something extremely "hipster"...but you're not stuck with Win8.x.

Jim



On Fri, Jul 18, 2014 at 1:31 PM, Kevin Fries <kevin@fries-biro.com> wrote:

Yea but it runs Windows 8, the worst OS since ME.

The Chrome book will save you in usability feature, plus not having to buy an office siite, and an antivirus, etc.

I'd go with the chromebook.

But that's me.

Kevin

On Jul 18, 2014 11:51 AM, <techlists@phpcoderusa.com> wrote:

Thanks for your feedback!!  The price point is very good!!  If the performance is there then it would be a steal.



On 2014-07-18 10:09, Jim March wrote:
If we check the CPU specs:

http://ark.intel.com/products/81071/Intel-Celeron-Processor-N2830-1M-Cache-up-to-2_41-GHz
[3]

...we see that surpprisingly, it HAS the Intel "VTx" hardware
virtualization
extension.  That means getting a virtual machine running on it for at
least basic stuff will work at reasonable speeds.

If we got to the CPUBench site we see it has a "performance score" of
just under 1,000 which...is...bad-ish but not terrible like some of
the Atom crap.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/midlow_range_cpus.html [4]

Upshot: you could do real work with that puppy, with a modern Linux
distro and even light virtualization (running a copy of WinXP or
another distro as a VM on it).

Jim

On Fri, Jul 18, 2014 at 10:02 AM, <techlists@phpcoderusa.com> wrote:

Better than a Chromebook?


http://www.dell.com/us/p/inspiron-15-3531-laptop/pd?oc=fndoc3001b&model_id=inspiron-15-3531-laptop
[1]
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Links:
------
[1]
http://www.dell.com/us/p/inspiron-15-3531-laptop/pd?oc=fndoc3001b&amp;model_id=inspiron-15-3531-laptop
[2] http://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
[3]
http://ark.intel.com/products/81071/Intel-Celeron-Processor-N2830-1M-Cache-up-to-2_41-GHz
[4] http://www.cpubenchmark.net/midlow_range_cpus.html

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