Two weeks into my Chromebook experience and my only regret is I didn’t buy one sooner. My MacBook is always tethered to my desktop by cables for external drives, hub, monitor, printer, etc… but the Chromebook is light, easy to swoop up and carry, and perfect for anything you want to do on the web. If I had kids in the house, this would be their daily PC. Google Docs does MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint compatible documents. No anti-virus software to keep up. And it’s cheap.
As far as usability, the keyboard and trackpad feel great to me. The battery will last about 4 hours of continuous use, depending on what you’re doing. Full screen streaming HD video will run it down in about 2 hours. In actual use though, it lasts me all day, because I use it for email, check the news, then close the lid. Later I may stream a podcast, check email again, close the lid. I am finding I turn to it more and more because it’s so convenient and fast, it’s private (unlike the shared iPads our grandkids use), and it is instant on when I open it. The Chrome browser synchronization across all my computers and devices also makes it easy for passwords on various sites. The screen is very good for what this computer does, but you need to have it lined straight up in front of you. The viewing angle up and down is pretty narrow.
100 GB of cloud storage for 2 years is also included – $120.00 if you paid for it outright. That makes this a $79.99 computer essentially. So after two weeks of Chromebooking, I find myself hoping this is not a fad that will fade away like netbooks, or if it does, something better on all counts will replace it.
it and was going to adopt it full time. Suddenly it was cool. Everyone began to “see the light” and Google went from crazy to insightful, and the Chromebook went from crazy to cool. Now I want one, dammit.
As the de facto family help desk employee it usually falls on me to fix and/or restore laptops, PC’s, etc… Usually the item has been used for 6 months or more without one update, either to the OS or security. Yesterday it was pretty easy, although lengthy. I brought back to life a Compaq laptop circa 2006. Luckily I had ram to upgrade it from 512 to 2 GB, and an HDD to boost it to 100 GB at 7200 RPM. I also lucked out in having the restore disks and Office 2003 Pro disks that were all once registered on it. It all did go back on seamlessly. It just took about 8 hours to cycle through the various 250 or so updates. But it works and works very well.
