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Portables Windows Hardware

Reporter Tests Walmart's $140 Laptop 'So You Wouldn't Have To' (arstechnica.com) 200

Posted by EditorDavid from the thanks-for-the-memory dept.
Ars Technica's technology reporter Jim Salter tested Walmart's 11.6-inch EVOO laptop, which sells for $139 and ships with just 2GiB of RAM and a 32GB SSD, which he worries "simply is not enough room for Windows itself, let alone any applications." The first thing I noticed while looking through the Windows install is that our "internal" Wi-Fi is actually a cheap USB 2.0 Realtek adapter — and it's 2.4GHz-only 802.11n, at that. The second thing I noticed was the fact that I couldn't install even simple applications, because the laptop was in S mode. For those unfamiliar, S mode locks a system into using only the Edge browser and only apps from the Microsoft Store. Many users end up badly confused by S mode, and some unnecessarily buy a new copy of Windows trying to get out of it. Fortunately, if you click the "learn more" link in the S mode warning that pops up when you attempt to load a non-Store app, you are eventually led to a free Microsoft Store app which turns S mode off. On my first try, this app crashed. But on the second, it successfully disabled S mode, leaving me with a normal Windows install....

I verified that I was on an older version of Windows 10 — build 1903, from March 2019 — and initiated an upgrade to build 2004, from April 2020. Windows 10 was having none of it. It wanted at least 8GiB of free space on C:, and I couldn't even get to 6GiB free, after only a day of using the system.... Meaningful benchmark results were impossible to attain on this laptop, since it was too slow and quirky to even run the benchmarks reliably. But I didn't let a silly thing like "being obviously inappropriate" stop me from slogging painfully through the benchmarks and getting what numbers I could. The first suite up, PCMark 10, eventually produced a score of zero. I didn't know that a zero score was even possible. Apparently, it is... Cinebench R20 also took several tries to complete successfully, and eventually the test produced a jaw-droppingly bad score of 118...

Under Fedora 32 — selected due to its ultra-modern kernel, and lightweight Wayland display manager — the EVOO was incredibly balky and sluggish. To be fair, Fedora felt significantly snappier than Windows 10 had on this laptop, but that was a very, very low bar to hurdle. The laptop frequently took as long as 12 seconds just to launch Firefox. Actually navigating webpages wasn't much better, with very long pauses for no apparent reason. The launcher was also balky to render — and this time, with significantly lower memory usage than Windows, I couldn't just blame it on swap thrashing... [W]ith the laptop completely open, several questions are answered — the reason I hadn't heard any fan noise up until this point is because there is no fan, and the horrible CPU performance is because the CPU can't perform any better than it does without cooking itself in its own juices....

At first, I mistakenly assumed that the A4-9120 was just thermally throttling itself 24/7. After re-assembling it and booting back into Fedora, I found the real answer — the normally 2.5GHz chip is underclocked to an anemic 1.5GHz. The system BIOS confirms this clockrate but offers no room to adjust it — which is a shame, since the system never hit temperatures higher than about 62C in my testing.
His verdict? Walmart's EVOO laptop "doesn't have either the RAM or the storage to do an even vaguely reasonable job for normal people doing normal things under Windows, even when limited to S mode...

"There may be a purpose this laptop is well-suited to — but for the life of me, I cannot think what it might be."
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Reporter Tests Walmart's $140 Laptop 'So You Wouldn't Have To' More

Reporter Tests Walmart's $140 Laptop 'So You Wouldn't Have To'

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  • "There may be a purpose this laptop is well-suited to â" but for the life of me, I cannot think what it might be."

    • Elevator controller
    • Embedded controller for a toaster
    • Childs' toy computer.
      Honestly it sounds like an RPi hooked to your TV via HDMI would be better bang-for-the-buck.
      But just like buying a bike (or should I say 'BSO', 'Bike Shaped Object') from Walmart, you get what you pay for.

      • Re: Jobs it's suited to (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Anonymouse Cowtard ( 6211666 ) on Sunday June 21, 2020 @08:55PM (#60210500) Homepage
        You could buy two rasp pi's. Or one and a 64GB microSD card and still have change for a HDMI cable, keyboard and mouse.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by gl4ss ( 559668 )

        once you add keyboard and screen and (now more than ever gah) psu to it, it starts adding up.

        there are some uses for it as it is, like just as a writing machine or whatever, which is weird for a journalist to not see as a valid use case, because the journo could 100% have done his job with it.

        and the idea of hooking up a raspberry to a tv still needs the tv and controller and everything like that. this is suitable for all the jobs you would otherwise use an old laptop for like an interface for a 3d printer

        • The "journo" failed right at the start. Instead of looking at it and asking "ok, what it is supposed to be for", he went full-on lets install Windows and pretend its a $1000 desktop.

          Then Fedora, you know how he wanted the article to turn out before he started.

          So its really a tablet running a web browser. A chromebook clone.

          And it "only" has a 802.11n wifi, seriously a couple of years ago that would have been so cutting edge you couldn't buy one. I doubt anyone but a tech snob like this guy would care.

          • The "journo" failed right at the start. Instead of looking at it and asking "ok, what it is supposed to be for", he went full-on lets install Windows and pretend its a $1000 desktop.

            No I think he did exactly this. The laptop is for a poor (or cheap) person to facebook and watch youtube, and it's barey functional at that due to the 2gb of ram and 32gb emmc.

            I had to get my parents an emergency laptop during the height of covid here and I only had a Thinkpad T61 with 2GB and a 32GB SSD I found. It's decent enough in terms of CPU performance but with 2 gigs of memory you can barely open a page or two before it starts swapping everything. And with an actual SSD it's at least usable, a glori

          • What? Did you read the article?

            It CAME with Windows. But the SSD was so small that they couldn't put a current version on, so they put on a smaller 2019 version of Windows 10.

    • So basically it's a turbo charged liquid cooled Arduino?

    • Probably would work with Debian running xfce

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Actually, this makes a reasonable terminal with Linux. That is basically it.

    • Re:Jobs it's suited to (Score:5, Funny)

      by stevelinton ( 4044 ) <sal@dcs.st-and.ac.uk> on Monday June 22, 2020 @02:00AM (#60211308) Homepage

      Handy if you have a table with one leg shorter than the otherts..

      This laptop fills a much needed gap in the market

  • Walmart has damaged its reputation? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Sunday June 21, 2020 @08:50PM (#60210482) Homepage
    It seems that Walmart has damaged its reputation.
    • They'd have to try hard to do that wouldn't they?
    • In many countries there is a consumer 'fit for use' test. Fail that and you can return it to the point of sale. This is below crap level. Can't upgrade/apply security updates - the Microsoft rep who approved this needs to be dehired. I have an Acer with a piss weak config and faulty keyboard ribbon - same question, can you do a Rossman and upgrade the pathetic memory. Wonder if a 32gig super fast ramdisk flash memory would help.
  • It can't have cost them much more to ship it with 4GB RAM and a 128GB SSD. Cheapest Chromebook is $179. So they could have aimed for $169 and still come in as the (slightly) more affordable option. Or shoot for $199 and tout the fact that it has full-fledged Windows and not Chrome OS.

    • There is another model that does include 4GB, though still coupled with the 32MB eMMC flash, at the $139 price point. The problem is more a lack of effective passive cooling (a sheet of thin copper and electrical tape). I have an old Acer ES1 Celeron N2840 that also has passive cooling but a much better heat dissipation than this laptop does.

      • Which means there's a good chance of this laptop failing entirely due to thermal shutdown in Florida, Texas and Arizona in the summer. (And right now, Siberia, Russia oddly enough.)

      • My tablet has passive cooling too which boils down to a thin sheet of aluminium on top of the CPU. It's a Core m3 too so it turbos to like 3ghz, and while it does get toasty, even after throttling the performance is more than acceptable even for photo or light video editing, let alone web or office tasks. It might be down to the actual CPU, I think it's using an older AMD chip which wasn't as good as the Intel stuff or recent Zen 2/3.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday June 21, 2020 @10:41PM (#60210822)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )

        Yeah 32GB is just too small, I got a NUC for my dad a while back (because with his vision a big screen was a must) and I was looking for a 64GB SSD. Or actually I think was some eMMC junk but it's not spinning rust. It had only 2GB of RAM but I could pop in an extra 8GB SODIMM which meant that despite the channel mismatch it had 10GB of RAM total so you wouldn't hit the storage very often. The user experience was actually considerably better than I expected. If the RAM had been fixed at 2GB.... hard no.

      • Walmart sells a budget HP laptop with an AMD CPU. But it's a Ryzen 3 3250U, it has 4GB RAM and 128GB SSD, and it costs $300. And it runs fine. It could use more RAM, but it has two SODIMM slots and only one is populated, so it's cheap to upgrade. It could use a faster (and larger) SSD too, but I doubt that they ran any PCIE lanes to the M.2 slot. This CPU is anemically short on them.

  • How much does this say about us? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JoshuaZ ( 1134087 ) on Sunday June 21, 2020 @08:55PM (#60210506) Homepage
    How much does this say about where we've gone with computers. 20 years ago, 8 gigs of memory was gigantic, and 1.5 ghz was about 5 times the speed of a lot of the commercial desktops. There should be a machine functionally like this which can check email and be used for basic word processing without much else. On the other hand, cheap Chromebooks are cheaper than this machine and would be able to do that. So maybe the lesson is just get a Chromebook instead?

    • There was a dilber on this...

      https://dilbert.com/strip/1995... [dilbert.com]

      • I have that one on the wall of my office, and was working on various HP-UX and SGI systems (though I never had a scruffy beard or suspenders) when this comic came out. The comparison between those systems and the available Windows systems (3.1, 95) would make one think there would be change back from that nickel.

    • Less than 20 years ago, my 2002 Mac Quicksilver came with 2 - 1 GHz processors, 1 GB RAM and an 80 GB hard drive. I think the stock video card was 64 MB.

      I upgraded it to have a SATA card for a pair of 500 GB hard drives, a USB 2 card, and a better video card.

      It still runs well on MacOS 10.4.8, and I still use it on occasion. The DVD drive ignores region encoding.

      • Pretty well. Ran Word, Excel, EMail, Web with almost all the useful features that are available today. Most ordinary non-gaming users would not notice the difference to a modern computer other than a larger screen.

        Amazing how much bloat there is. A computer needs to be almost 1000 times bigger to do pretty much the same things.

        Now, I just need to add those seven obscure new features to my own application...

        • Re:16 MEG Ram, 100 Meg disk ran Windows 98 (Score:5, Insightful)

          by sound+vision ( 884283 ) on Monday June 22, 2020 @01:19AM (#60211234) Journal

          To be fair, what people ask of their computers has evolved a bit in the last decade. It goes beyond "Encarta & email" now. Even Grandma needs simultaneous real-time video encoding and decoding for Facetime/Zoom/Skype with the niece. I doubt a Windows 98 machine could do it on 16 MB, even with a period video card - which she wouldn't have had anyway.

          I realize that this still shouldn't need 1000x the resources. But it's not as bad as it looks at first glance. Especially when you consider we are comparing a $1000 PC to a $120 smart phone, not adjusted for inflation either.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            The other thing about Windows 98 is that it was built on DOS, unstable and developing decent software for it was difficult. At the same time it was slow and clunky. Going on the internet with it was highly unsafe.

            All the layers of security and crash recoverability and frameworks take up RAM, but for a lot less money than a Windows 98 PC cost back in the day you can get a Chromebook that performs decently.

  • There's an open version of chromeOS, which is pretty damn lightweight... How about giving that a try and reporting back?

    • Re:How about Chrome? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by TheReaperD ( 937405 ) on Sunday June 21, 2020 @09:45PM (#60210670)

      Why? The point of the review was made: This is garbage, don't buy it. You don't need to do 20 different tests with a dozen OSes to verify it.

  • The way to get current Windows 10 on this (if you must) is to download the 32-bit ISO from Microsoft, copy to USB, and do a fresh install, reformatting the drive.
    Trying to upgrade in place is theoretically possible, but way too hard.

    https://www.microsoft.com/en-g... [microsoft.com]

    • A really good idea on any pre-installed OS, but sadly, beyond the typical user. Plus, on a PoS like this, can you even get the Windows drivers? A lot of times, on garbage like this, they only slop together one set of drivers that just barely compile, throw them into the pre-install ISO and call it a day. They rarely post them where you can easily find them. If you have the skill to find and install the manufacturer reference drivers (which are usually better), great, but very few people do.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by quenda ( 644621 )

        Plus, on a PoS like this, can you even get the Windows drivers?

        I think Windows-10 has fixed that problem. Unlike earlier versions of windows, I've not needed to manually install drivers from the hardware provider. There is a lot less built-in than for Linux, but it will download them from Microsoft automatically, in my experience.

        • Often, these are re-badged chromebook-style hardware that is "not normal", such as having things living on SPI bus and pals.

          While win10 does have drivers, they often do not have them for these bus architectures. You need the drivers that got cooked up for the device. (See also, the CoolStar drivers and pals for liberated chromebooks.)

      • You can use nLite to extract the drivers from the still running version, then bake a new install disk with it.

        So the answer is "yes", if you are savvy.

      • Plus, on a PoS like this, can you even get the Windows drivers?

        You are mistaking this for an ultramodern system and Linux.

    • Upgrading in place is very possible. When windows 7 hit EOL for support i used Microsoft's own free upgrade tool to salvage many boxen. Failed on 1 out of 10.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by quenda ( 644621 )

        Did you have an almost-full 32GB SSD? That tends to be a problem for Win-10 upgrades.

        • Did you have an almost-full 32GB SSD? That tends to be a problem for Win-10 upgrades.

          That is a valid point, and the answer is no. I haven't worked with a machine with less that 32 gb disc space since my very first pc in the late 90's. It was a Sony Vaio with a 10 gb hard drive. At the time, my father commented that i would never be able to use that much memory. Napster and lime wire were soon to prove him wrong.

    • You are aware that the person you're trying to make this do is someone who bought this box in the first place? I'd be surprised if they can identify the "on" button at the first try, let alone understand where they should insert their pistol [wikipedia.org].

  • Was it yesterday we were talking about a Windows competitor to the $140 Chromebooks that schools hand out to kids? This is it. Runs only apps from the store, same price point and roughly the same specs, etc.

    Windows certainly does have its niche. In the office, when the company is spending the money, and spending enough for a 3Ghz CPU, and the task at hand is editing MS Office documents, Windows works. It's a great fit.

    On lower-budget hardware such as this $140 laptop, a Linux-based system such as Chrome

  • Sure its pretty sad, but are there better options for a windows laptop? $140 is still a lot of money for some people.

  • I think Walmart's specs are not quite right (Score:5, Informative)

    by rakslice ( 90330 ) on Sunday June 21, 2020 @09:28PM (#60210628) Homepage Journal

    "I found the real answer—the normally 2.5GHz chip is underclocked to an anemic 1.5GHz."

    "I reached out to AMD to inquire whether this was a standard, supported configuration for the CPU—my AMD rep declined to comment initially and suggested reaching out to Walmart PR instead."

    I feel bad for Ars' rep giving them the runaround like this, but I'd give it even odds they thought the answer was obvious enough and expected Walmart to break the news: As other sites that list Evoo EV-C-116-5-* with specs indicate, such as Walmart's own page for an item shipped and sold by VIPOUTLET [walmart.com], the processor is actually an A4-9120e which is a version with 1.5GHz base clock and maximum turbo 2.2GHz [cpu-world.com].

    Also the A4-9120 (with no suffix letter) processor only turbos to 2.5GHz, its base clock is 2.2GHz.

  • Fedora 32 on this system? Really? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sombragris ( 246383 ) on Sunday June 21, 2020 @09:31PM (#60210638) Homepage

    Please. At least use Debian, Slackware or even a lightweight Linux such as Puppy or DSL. Fedora is nice but it is not economical in its resource usage. I would never put it on such a low-spec system.

  • Choose an OOS computer like the Pine Book : https://store.pine64.org/?prod... [pine64.org] starting at 99$ with free software.

    • If you want a cheap and good laptop that runs windows:

      Type "T430" into ebay, get yourself a well-engineered i5 laptop with 4GB/8GB RAM for $100. You can thank me later.

  • "...well-suited to â" but for the life of me, I cannot think what it might be."

    dumb terminal, digital typewriter, kiosk, spare parts are three that i can come up with my coffee-deprived mind at 6am on a monday morning having been rudely awakened.

  • 2007 called, they want their netbooks back (Score:4, Interesting)

    by spiritplumber ( 1944222 ) on Sunday June 21, 2020 @10:12PM (#60210746) Homepage
    I legit wonder how well this would work with windows xp on it.
    • Actually, the specs on this blow away most high-end 2007 laptops [notebookreview.com]. For example, the top-rated Dell Vostro 1500 [notebookreview.com] had a 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo, with 1 GB of RAM.

      The problem is software bloat. Not poor specs. Probably the reason why Chromebooks (and tablets and phones running iOS and Android) are able to do so much more on lesser hardware. For nearly 3 decades now, the rate at which computer hardware has sped up each year made it not worthwhile to optimize software to run faster and tighter - because in a year yo

  • Sure, one might be bad (Score:5, Funny)

    by The_mad_linguist ( 1019680 ) on Sunday June 21, 2020 @10:13PM (#60210748)

    Yeah, the specs of one laptop are low, but imagine a Beowulf cluster of them!

    • but imagine a Beowulf cluster of them!

      Does anyone have a link to a Youtube video of Beowolf spinning in his grave at 1.5 GHz?

      • but imagine a Beowulf cluster of them!
        Does anyone have a link to a Youtube video of Beowolf spinning in his grave at 1.5 GHz?

        Beowulf was cremated. [wikipedia.org]

  • Pre-installing windows is a mistake. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Truth_Quark ( 219407 ) on Sunday June 21, 2020 @10:35PM (#60210806) Journal
    I wonder why you would pre-install the massive pile of bloatware that is windows on a this little machine.

    Mint requires 1 GB of RAM for a minimum with 2 GB being good enough for comfortable usage.

    In the bad old days, M$ required that retailers not sell other OSs, or they would charge them enough for their own bloatware that they would be priced out by the competition. I wonder if they're still up to that old probably-illegal monopoly leveraging.

    Curious that Fedora was still slow though. 12 seconds to open a browser doesn't sound like a resources issue, or even a heating issue. Might be a configuration problem.

  • Can Windows even update within 32 GB? I highly doubt it. If it can it would barely be able to. Good lick if you have any files or applications on there.

    • You would need to turn on disk compression, turn on the "Compress OS" feature, then use the advanced compression options to use "more compute-heavy, but better compaction rates" algorithms (they were added with win10) for various file types. (there's some optimized for .exe files for instance)

      Then delete the hibernation file by disabling hibernation.

      THEN defragment the volume real good...

      THEN try to upgrade-in-place.

      MAYBE you will get lucky.

  • 1d10t reviewer (Score:4, Insightful)

    by flyingfsck ( 986395 ) on Sunday June 21, 2020 @10:42PM (#60210824)
    He ignored the installed system and immediately tried to overload it with giant OS versions that are already known not to work on small computers. If he really wanted to hack it in order to actually use it, he could have put any number of light weight systems on it. Anything from Fedora XFCE spin, Xubuntu, Slackware or OpenBSD will make that machine fly.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gTsiros ( 205624 )

      there is no mainstream lightweight os anymore. No matter what you install, you would also install a browser alongside. The only conformant browsers are heavy. How many mainstream, living engines are there? There's chrome's, firefox's and edge's (and i've heard rumors edge is switching to chrome's?).

      this will be faster if you stick a 4g dongle on it and turn it into a dumb terminal for any other computer

      the reviewer reviewed for the baseline audience. You or i don't need a review to guesstimate the performan

  • The cheaper something is the worse it gets.

  • EVOO? Great Name (Score:3)

    by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Sunday June 21, 2020 @11:23PM (#60210920) Homepage Journal

    But they owe Rachel Ray [rachaelraymag.com] for the trademark.

  • ...are not always what they seem to be.

    A lot of big-box stores in the US want to offer the lowest-priced item in every product class they sell. They prefer to have a popular name-brand item, and they're not real concerned about the actual quality of the thing. They specifically request extra-cheap versions from manufacturers.

    Some examples of this:
    ...soaps and cosmetics from big-box stores are often diluted/formulated differently, with less expensive ingredients so that they can be sold cheaper. Smaller
  • OK, but how does it work with MS-DOS?

  • I've got 512MB RAM on an Arm SBC running Linux (Allwinner H2, quad-core A7 with Mail 400). It's enough to run Chromium under X11/Xfce and to read Slashdot and to watch videos.

    selected due to its ultra-modern kernel, and lightweight Wayland display manager

    The guy is just your average dumb Joe. "ultra-modern", meaning beyond modern ... there is no such kernel. It's however how somebody talks who hasn't got a clue. And "lightweight Wayland display manager" means he started up Gnome with all bells and whistles including compositor. Anyone stupid enough can run any computer with even 16GB o

  • It's anyone surprised that Walmart is selling an item that will likely be in the dumpster within a year? Walmart is probably the single worst thing that had happened to the US economy over the past 3 decades.

  • Why? (Score:2)

    by nagora ( 177841 )

    My wife's laptop cost £144 about four years ago and has a 1TB hard drive and 4GB of ram running Linux very happily. Why the hell would I want to try working with 2GB of RAM and 32G of storage for any price?

  • If you are going to run Linux on a system like this, you need to custom build the kernel for the machine. He would have been better served sticking a minimal install Gentoo on the system, compiling the kernel to the machine, then compiling the applications he wanted. Generic installs are too bloated these days.

  • 32GB *is* enough for Windows 10 and to allow upgrades. Just.
    It didn't used to be, but MS has made serious improvements with delta upgrades. I have an old Win 10 tablet with 32GB emmc & 1 micro USB port for power & accessories. It was originally a nightmare, needing a powered hub for external storage to enable updates which took so long that mains power was required.
    This has improved and is now not a problem.
    I also have a mini PC with 4 core Atom, 32GB emmc and 2GB RAM which is just for Netflix, Kodi

  • We bought a Toshiba laptop back in the day, with 512mb Ram. It came with a sticker on it saying 768mb minimum optimal. I'm not even sure if this was an official Toshiba configuration, or just a local store configuration from some jerks. I assume the sticker was from Toshiba saying to stores you really shouldn't do this.

    Sure enough it took many minutes to start up (I'm talking every time, not the first time when it autoconfigures.) And apps were excruciatingly slow. I upgraded to 1 gig and it was much b

  • Fedora (and Ubuntu) are quickly becoming a bloated mess comparable to Windows. Luckily, there are Linux distributions that will run well in that device.
  • ... turned on once or twice, sit for 6 years, and end up in the landfill.  It's a stupid waste.

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