Rui CarmoI bought one of these little Acer netbooks many years ago for my kids, but they soon outgrew it:
- The CPU is a feeble Celeron N2840 clocked at 2.16 GHz
- It shipped with Windows 8
- The 32GB EMMC storage is too small to upgrade to Windows 10 (or do anything serious with it)
- The 2GB of RAM made even web browsing painful
- It was constantly plagued with trackpad issues
A few years back I decided to install Elementary OS on it, and in 2020 it still runs Hera and Firefox quite well.
But using it without a mouse was still a pain, so I decided to apply Zach Poff’s touchpad fix, which so far has worked beautifully.
For reference, this is the RAM that shipped with mine, which I replaced with an equivalent 8GB DIMM:
(DDR3L, 1600 MT/s, PC3L-12800, SODIMM, 204-Pin)
Sadly, there is no easy way to upgrade storage (there are traces leading to where a SATA connector should be, and I can’t replace the EMMC on my own).
Post-Upgrade Notes
With the touchpad fix and 8GB of RAM in place, the ES1 is a great casual development machine (Elementary‘s Code editor, in particular, is pretty awesome, and I’ve always loved its terminal), with both Firefox and Remmina running well enough for this to be a light, throwaway thin client for short vacations.