

This triggers our anti-spambot measures, which are designed to stop automated systems from flooding the site with traffic.

Windows 10 loads and runs, but it’s pretty painful once you start actually doing anything. The same goes with 2009-era Netbook: Underpowered even when they first came out, you’d better take meditation lessons or you’ll find yourself smashing it into the ground in frustration. Even there, it’s almost useless, as the CPU seems to be under heavy loads constantly. The 2006-era Pentium D is a borderline lost cause for all but the most basic computing tasks. Windows 10 on an older PC is a compromise, at best. If I ran on a tight budget, a Windows 10 upgrade over, say the original Vista, along with cheap SSD, would give me another couple of years’ service for general computing.

My verdict: This is a very usable experience. Opening the five media-heavy sites in the Edge browser put a hefty load on the CPU, while a 2015 laptop would almost idle. Drop an SSD in there and for most people, they’d never know the difference between this seven-year-old PC and a modern laptop. That’s no surprise: The dual-core T8200 is a good little CPU, and for general computing tasks is very usable. Of the three here, it felt the fastest and snappiest. All I know is the X61 worked fine except for the Wi-Fi, so my browsing was done over the LAN port.

Equipped with a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo T8200 and 3GB of DDR2 RAM, I literally rescued this laptop from an e-waste bin, where it may have been sent because of problems with its Wi-Fi card. The last machine I tried was a 2008-vintage Lenovo X61 that originally came with Windows Vista. If you’re on Windows 7 or Windows 8, the move isn’t a bad idea, either, as you get access to a more modern OS. If you’re running Windows XP and must have Windows 10, it’s a better choice because at least it’s a supported OS. Let’s be frank, Netbooks were poor performers when they came out with Windows XP, so Windows 10 won’t magically make them better. It doesn’t make the Netbook experience any better. My Verdict: It works and installs just fine. The S12 with the Chrome browser and Windows 10 was no different, as it would continually drop frames and pause playing a 720p movie trailer. I’ll give the S12 and Windows 10 this, though: The new Edge browser was capable of playing Youtube videos with far fewer hitches than Chrome.The last Netbook I played with years ago would not play Youtube videos in the Chrome browser without major hitches. Windows 10 Edge though, will at least work in Youtube while Chrome chokes. Just running a single instance of Youtube on a Netbook will eat most of the CPU cycles.
