Thursday, September 26, 2013

Life with the Chromebook

Just recently I purchased a used Acer C-7 Chromebook, and the first thing I did was upgrade the 320GB hard drive with a 32GB SSD.

The upgrade only had one issue: the new drive is slightly bigger than the old one. I made it fit.

The installation of Chrome OS went without a hitch. Everything went exactly as it should have.

The Chromebook itself is... Boring. Seriously.

Everything does exactly what it's supposed to.  All the apps imported from my Google Chrome, so there was no more setup than logging in. It powers up, shuts down, hibernates. The touch pad is a little weird, but very versatile once you get used to it.

Battery life is a little disappointing at 4 hours, but I was aware of that when I bought this model. I understand the Samsung does better.

I've only run into one thing that I use on a regular basis that it can't handle.  Microsoft Silverlight.

Actually, that's not bad.

I think the Chromebook does exactly what it set out to do:  bring the web to the desktop simply and reliably.  And as a result I've taken the drastic step of powering my laptop down and putting it on a shelf.  Let's see how long it stays off.