Its a shame, I have an ancient single core Panasonic Toughbook, that still works fine, but it weighs a ton and battery charge lasts less than half hour. In emergency it would still work as substitute desktop. Plenty powerful enough with Puppy Linux for day to day household stuff. But my 2006 HP desktop still works fine and only let me down once when one of memory chips went bad. So not like I need spare for that purpose. Desktop is hyperthreaded single core so can run 64bit system. It came with XP, but now has unactivated 64bit win10 for tax software since tax software no longer can run on XP, but day to day use is a 32bit version Puppy Linux. The old critter just keeps on, keeping on. Super reliable. Be pointless to replace it.
Now I have two of the mini netbooks I bought less than $30 to play with. Both win10 from factory, one had fubar install win10, the other a broken screen. New screen for the one was $18. I have less than total of $30 total in each. Both work fine. Both fairly new within couple years. Think they are still selling similar new for $150 to $200. Honest anybody giving that much is crazy, but fine for $30 laptop. They are all in one motherboard (like a tablet) with 32GB eMMC drive (somewhere between thumb drive and an SSD) soldered to the motherboard so you want more space, you have to do it via usb and external drive. The one still running win10, its relatively fresh install. Had to block it phoning home, first cause I only have metered cellular internet so the constant churning win10 updates would cost me a fortune. And second, lot people complaining win10 with its constant marketing updates quickly takes over all available space on the 32GB drive. You clean up win10 to where install is 9GB and lock it there, there is plenty space for this type machine. This is small super light weight machine for word processing, light surfing, and email. Not gaming or processing video. I use the one with win10 mostly for Kindle app, makes great light weight ereader. The other was just not getting used though win10 worked fine on it, so been experimenting to find a version of linux that will install to eMMC drive and boot reliably. ACER went out of its way to make a very linux unfriendly bios. Linux will boot, but sometimes can take multiple attempts to get it to boot without hanging or crashing, which is annoying beyond belief. I can easily put win10 back on but no real point as it would then just be another win10 netbook and be ignored. Trying to get linux to boot reliably has become sort of interesting project in of itself. I am getting closer. Found one particular version Slitaz Linux that will boot very reliably from live cd and external usb cdrom. No idea why that particular version boots so reliably on this netbook and no other linux does, newer version Slitaz wont boot at all, crashes mid boot with apic error like many other linux distributions. Use the noapic GRUB command and it hangs mid boot. The Slitaz installer wont see the eMMC drive so trying to get it installed manually, hoping it will boot as reliably. This is tricky but interesting puzzle.
I doubt the netbooks will last long term, they are made as cheap as possible. Quite opposite of that old Toughbook which truly is tough. The batteries are incredibly expensive on these netbooks, considering the price of the whole machine, and one of the netbooks, I am not certain could run without battery. You let battery completely run down, you cant just plug in adapter and boot up, you have to let battery charge for fifteen or twenty minutes before it will boot. So unlikely it would boot at all with a funky battery. Oh batteries on these supposedly not user replaceable, but they mean you dont just unsnap one and snap in another, it requires lot dissassembly. In other words they intend netbook as disposible item like those old sealed disposible flashlights that you couldnt open up to replace battery.