Also, an Anonymous Poll, for fun!!! (>1 choice possible)
(I paid for it, but haven't picked it up yet; have 2 weeks to pick it up, plus till January 14th to return it, but that's a hassle )

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-14...lack/6498806.p 'fair' condition

ASUS - 14.0" Laptop - Intel Celeron N4020 - 4GB Memory - 64GB eMMC - Star Black Model: E410MA-TB.CL464BK

https://www.techadvisor.com/article/...10-review.html
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Asus-V....529576.0.html


Future note2self: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...is-4175705458/

(Non)update a week later (so I don't wake-up thread with a post)
#11 "...dying" is good tho scary: planned obsolescence!!!
And I suspect the ? cents in increased manufacturing cost to include a socket for more RAM (to make it a more reasonable 8GB, for bloated web pages these days)
Would have been a significant percentage increase in manufacturing cost. Shame on ASUS! (But they're just struggling for adequate profit, down the chain)

I'm leaning more towards not getting it, but TBD... (a 5 week holiday horrifically painful learning experience with UEFI Lilo might be fun and worth it!!!)

Thanks for all the nice advice comments!!!

Re: #13 (superstitiously a bad number LOL):
There are two separate issues:
1) the soldered whatever Hardware chip 'RAM' with no socket, forever limiting it to 4GB memory
2) the whatever (hard silicon) disk storage device being of a technology that 'wears out' 'fast' electronically, versus maybe never for an old mechanical disk.


Another reason for no: I remembered my personal belief in only paying $10 per GB RAM, which would be $40 for this. Maybe $20++ for being new, but big minus for not being expandable. Another minus: I was poking around all the spam email BestBuy now sends the junk email account I used, and they listed the same 'fair' condition (oh: danger) device at some other un-determine-able location for $20 less.

I was looking for a computer for an acquaintance in Greenfield Mass and ran across this $50! Dell Inspirion 5559, 12GB RAM! (which is twice my best=6GB flaky BCM43142 HP I bought for $40: even if I get the Wi-Fi to work, once I suspend, the Wi-Fi get stuck hard blocked; IDK what magic M$Win driver does) https://westernmass.craigslist.org/s...551642217.html

So...
1. Nevermind, you added it 20 seconds after I submitted.
2. I personally wouldn't bother. Only 2 cores w/ no hyperthreading, 4G soldered ram, 64GB soldered eMMC, and according to all the reviews I could find, an extremely low light 1080P screen. It's only real good feature is battery life. Not something I'd want to deal with even for $100. I'd gladly spend 3-4x that much for 3-4x the performance. I don't mind low performance when it has a FANTASTIC screen (Chuwi!!), but low performance AND a horrible screen? Nope, I'm not touching that. My eyes are too important to me to deal with the discomfort of looking at crap screens.

1 members found this post helpful.

It's a fraction of a computer for a fraction of the price. If you get it, you can compute what fractions.

I would not buy, purely because of the MMC card. But if you keep a backup mmc card always, you won't lose too much data.

If you've already got something to mess with, I'd say stick with it, until such time as you can pick up another pre used bargain; that's what I do these days.

Let the Windows brigade pay high prices, & then when it's too slow for Windows, they'll sell it off cheap - that's the time to grab it & put Linux on it.

1 members found this post helpful.

I agree with the above, "Stick with what you have now". I have found my best deals on fleabay on used laptops with higher specs, no OS and/or no hard drive for around the same prices. Maybe a bit lower, the same or a bit more prices for better specs.

I use a Microsoft Surface Laptop Go, with only of 64GB of eMMC. I installed KUBUNTU, it runs just fine, though it does have an i5 processor rather than a Celeron.

Try UBUNTU or KUBUNTU, you'll probably get better results. I have a Microsoft Laptop with only 64GB eMMC and it runs fine with KUBUNTU. Sure, 64GB isn't very much, so if you have massive amounts of files or media, you might consider using external storage, preferably USB Flash drives or similar.

eMMC is not a removable card, rather it is non volatile memory soldered directly to the motherboard. Basically equivalent to an SD Card that cannot be removed.

Thanks. I didn't know that.

That's even worse. As an an Electronics Hardware ex-techie & engineer, I know you can only desolder dead components from boards these days. And ROM = Read Only = no writes. The only thing worse was WOM = Write Only. [Some guy shoved one in the Signetics datasheets in the 1970s as a joke]. Where do you write stuff on that pc?

My mistake, I shouldn't have said ROM, but whatever it is, it is non volatile memory, data doesn't get lost when the power is removed. I edited my post, corrected my error.

It's direct accessed NAND storage, same as a SD card or a USB flash drive (which was mentioned earlier). No controller for wear leveling, or speed boosts via parallelization of writes (not that at 64GB there'd be more than 1 die in order to do parallelization). It's incredibly cheap, accessible solid state storage so that they can advertise "xx GB SSD!!" and not be entirely wrong.

All that negative said, if it's a modern class of eMMC (they rarely tell you), they have achieved SATA SSD levels of speed, so the performance actually isn't bad. Still have issues with no wear leveling so it's going to start dying FAR sooner than a real SSD of the same size (plus no option of overprovisioning to have spare NAND to swap in to keep it going longer), so they're still not the ideal solution, but for a small segment, they can make sense, such as Chromebooks, or some embedded appllications where it only writes logs & cache and otherwise just reading the OS.

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I wanted to buy an affordable PC, but not have to use Windows. Ironically, I ended up buying a Microsoft Surface Go Laptop for only $349, because it is a decent computer for the price, and no Celeron either. Having only 64GB of eMMC helped keep the price low and I'm fairly certain that I'll have retired the laptop before it starts giving me any serious problems. I bumped off Windows with Kubuntu.

Whatever it is is a good question. It's all a question of technology. DRAM (Dynamic ram) doesn't survive a power down. SRAM (Static ram) is supposed to but was horribly slow. I never see it. EEPROM? Let's rely on the professorial types to inform us?

I looked it up, eMMC is NAND Flash memory. This type of flash memory allows multiple erases or writes during operation. This technology is primarily used for general data storage, as well as for the exchange of data between computers and other digital products, such as memory cards and U disks. Flash memory is a non-volatile storage, so it does not need to consume electricity in terms of storing data alone.

I read this, and according to it, it is Managed and there can be Wear Leveling, it just depends if it follows the latest standards. https://www.atpinc.com/blog/what-is-...naged-raw-nand