Pupils in San Jose Unified School district are given Chromebooks – Dell 3100. This turns out to be one inexpensive, fanless, sturdy (rubberized to an extent) machine with ChromeOS.
While under-powered and constrained from operating system perspective, one can SSH into a powerful host and do whatever their SSH host allows them to do. (We happened to love SDF.org and use it for all sort of activities such as NNTP/Usenet, mail, gopher, chat, even some web browsing in text mode).
But the Chromebook itself (Dell 3100) is a tad bit under powered. It has Intel(R) Celeron(R) N4000 CPU @ 1.10GHz (2 threads, 2.60GHz)
