Super Cheap Programming Laptop Opinions?

#1 Which "379.99" model were you thinking about choosing? There's three of them. I am concerned about the reviews where quite a lot of people are reporting those laptops freeze occasionally and requiring them to press the reset button to force a reboot.

I'm also concerned about the small onboard storage space, NAND Flash, that are in 32GB to 64GB options. With the 32GB models owners are reporting only 17GB is actually usable due to the base OS install occupying the rest. Sure you can add additional storage capacity by getting an SD card and use it on that laptop, but SD cards aren't known to be reliable to be used as a second HDD for that purpose.

Once you've installed all the developer tools and compiled Torque 2D's sources you'll use up a lot of that 64GB storage option, possibly impossible to do on the 32GB models due to the ~17GB real usable storage space according to the reviews. These Acer laptops you're looking at are designed for basic entertainment consumers, not content procedures like yourself. These are kind of like a slightly more capable computer compared to a tablet device that has a laptop base, but with an x86 processor and running full blown Windows OS.

Now you're probably wondering, what would I recommend for a laptop? Well first if I were you I would save up money to like $900 or so for an actual decent laptop that you can use for 2D game development purposes. Such as one with possibly 1080p display resolution (or smaller if a lower model has a better price range for you), a real hard drive or beefy SSD at least 256GB (none of that onboard NAND flash garbage), at least 4GB of RAM, and preferably made by Dell, HP, or other vendor that will actually stand by their product with decent warranties.

This was probably not the answer you were really looking forward to reading, but hopefully if you do go with my suggestion you'll be a lot happier with a better laptop spec wise even though it means you'll have to wait to save up the money to afford it later.

#2 In any profession, skimping on tools will bite you in the end.

I bought an Acer Aspire One about four years ago for around $250 - a gig of RAM and 250G hard drive - the screen resolution left the bottom of T2D chopped off (1024x600 display) so that's something to watch for... Other than that, the tiny keyboard made it pretty tough to do any extended work - mostly good for checking email and writing script in a pinch.

#3 Asus laptop

This one I believe, doesn't have an optical drive. Whatever you get, read a few pages of reviews and compare products.

#4 Yup - the one I have doesn't have an optical drive. I bought an iOmega USB DVD drive for about $100. It does have two SD card slots as well, but not much in the way of software comes in those....

#5 I ended up getting an Acer Aspire E11. It's from here in Japan, and its stats are as follows:

(Japanese Amazon Page)

Celeron N2830 Processor (Dual Core 2.16 GHz)
4G Ram
320G HDD
11.6 Inch Monitor (1366 x 768 Resolution)
Win8.1 with Bing (64bit)


It's not a gaming PC by any means, but it will let me run Notepad++ and test my TorqueScript on the go, which is all I need. Plus after all those Gift Cards I only spent 100 bucks. Any Photoshop or heavy testing/compiling I can do on my home computer.

#6 Sweet.

For me the tiny keyboards kill it.... lol

#7 Hopefully I can adjust. ;)