One glance at the specs on Walmart’s cheapest laptop—the EVOO EV-C-116-5—makes it clear to any technical enthusiast that the device is not exactly going to be a powerhouse. But the little laptop only costs $139, and its stats appear to stack up well with $200-$250 Chromebooks. So recently, I ponied up my credit card and ordered one. In purple.
Amongst us Arsians, it’s obvious that the EVOO is not going to be a good choice for a Windows laptop. With only 2GiB of RAM, the EVOO won’t be able to run anything without hammering virtual memory (swapping data from RAM to disk and back again). Beyond that, a 32GB SSD simply is not enough room for Windows itself, let alone any applications. The first time the EVOO tries to upgrade to a new build of Windows 10 (for example, Windows 10 build 2004, which just released last month), it will fail due to lack of space.
That doesn’t necessarily mean the laptop is entirely useless, though. Perhaps it could be reloaded with Linux—even “heavyweight” distributions like Ubuntu are considerably easier on both RAM and storage than Windows is. Heck, maybe even the assumption that a 2GiB RAM, 32GB SSD laptop can’t run Windows 10 well isn’t quite right. There was only one way to find out.
