Lenovo N23 Yoga Chromebook

Lenovo N23 Yoga Chromebook

A few weeks ago, when our daughter's ten-year-old DEL laptop had a fall and met an untimely end, our three-year-old Acer Chromebook got moved on and a new Chromebook took its place - the Lenovo N23 Yoga.

At NZ$481, the N23 Yoga isn't the cheapest Chromebook around though it was cheaper than our old Acer Chromebook had cost three years ago. We chose the Lenovo, based upon its excellent reviews, physical flexibility (it is a Yoga, after all), ability to run Android apps and its price. We have not been disappointed.

Chromebooks make great family computers. As I write this, I have another family member's Windows 10 laptop sitting on the table. It is only a few weeks old and was driving the user crazy because it had slowed to a crawl. On inspection, it seemed to have slowed because it had started a Windows update. I let it run its course and the update eventually took about six hours - this is not a problem Chromebook users experience.

Having a Chromebook that can run Android apps is a huge advantage. No longer are users limited to a relatively small number of Chrome apps and cloud services, but a vast array of Android apps can be installed and used locally just as you would on a phone or tablet. Nearly all my photo editing is done on a desktop, but, when not in the office, it was great to be able to edit pictures on the Yoga using the Android app "Snapseed" rather than having to upload the picture to a web service and edit it in the cloud.

The Lenovo comes with an ARM processor (as did the Acer). Booting from cold in the morning takes less than 10 seconds and during the day it is instantly 'on' from standby. The battery lasts about 8-10 hours of actual use. Fold the touch screen into tablet mode and it effectively becomes an 11.6inch Android tablet (though a rather heavy and thick tablet). With 4Gb of RAM and 32Gb storage, the Lenovo is no slouch either - even with several Chrome tabs open, it flys along at a more than acceptable pace. The keyboard is a typical chicklet 'button' type, though it is good and responsive and I can keep up a good typing pace.

Chromebooks are great for non-technical users or as a spare device and the Lenovo N23 Yoga is a great Chromebook at a reasonable price.

Cosmic Surfer

My first fractal for a while and my first on the new PC. I recognised the Cosmic Surfer as soon as I saw her on the screen; it was just a case of drawing her out from the mathematical mist. When rendering fractals, I am used to it taking hours, sometimes many hours, so when I saw the number '8' in the 'time remaining' I thought, 'eight hours; I'll let it run over night' - only it wasn't 8 hours, it was 8 minutes - oh the joy of a processor with 4 physical and 8 virtual cores!

Last August I wrote about the ease of upgrading to Windows 10 and how, in my view, it was the sweetest Windows upgrade ever. Well, that was nothing compared to Windows 10 on a new PC. Unconstrained by legacy decisions about which storage devices things should live on, Windows 10 looks neater and tidier than it did as an upgrade. And it does what an operating system is supposed to - gets out of the way and lets you get on with actual work. In fact, working on the new PC makes me feel a bit like the Cosmic Surfer.

Windows 10

I have been with Windows from the beginning - when Windows shipped with MS Word  and Excel so that those programs had something to run in. I was there through most Windows versions, up to and including Windows 7. I learned to wait until Service Pack 1 before installing a new version, I learned to skip every other version of Windows because it would be a 'dog' (I'm looking at you Windows ME, Vista and 8.0). I learned that upgrading meant hours of reinstalling apps and searching for new drivers. I learned to be very, very, careful.

So why, on earth, did I choose to upgrade to Windows 10 only one week after official release? Well, because for once I wasn't hearing howls of pain from every corner of the Internet. For some reason, even the usual Microsoft haters were strangely quiet. Then there was the fact that it was free, I didn't want to fall too far behind in my versions, and I wanted to try Windows 10 to see whether my next PC needed to be an Apple device.

The upgrade process was a breeze. Going from Windows 7 to 10 seemed like a rather large 'patch Tuesday'. The download was 3Gb and, once finished I said 'yes' to the upgrade and then went out for a walk (madness, I hear you say). When I returned an hour later, the upgrade was almost complete - just a couple of setup questions to answer and a short wait later, Windows 10 appeared:

Moving from Windows 7 to 10 is no drama; it looks a bit different (in a nice way) but everything is pretty much where I would think it should be - not just because I have known Windows 7, but because I  also know tablets and phones - It's not a mish-mash but things have moved closer together in terminology and in use, and its all good. Everything just works; programs, hardware, the lot without having to hunt around for any updates. This, without any doubt, is the sweetest Windows upgrade there has ever been and it's hard to imagine that it could be any easier.