My wife bought a netbook. She didn’t buy it yesterday, but a couple of years ago she bought a small, underpowered Windows XP netbook.
Most people (not people who read this blog, but most others) do just a few things with their computers. They surf the net, check email, and use office programs like word processors and spreadsheets.
Back to my wife’s netbook. It’s needed a reinstall of Windows twice. The problem is that it doesn’t have an optical drive, but came with a restore disc. The first time, I got a friend to fix it. The second time I tried everything I could think of before I gave up and decided for a radical new approach.
You might have seen the ads for Google Chromebooks. They’re very inexpensive (about the cost of a netbook a couple of years ago) and basically they’re just Google Chrome. That’s it. There are no viruses, no other software, and for most people that’s great.
[tentblogger-youtube 0QRO3gKj3qw]
They surf the web, access email, and can even do basic editing or creation of office documents. That’s exactly what most people need.
If you’ve got a spare 4 gb thumb drive, you can turn any computer that can boot from a usb drive into a Chromebook for free. That’s what I did and I’m glad I did.
Doing all this is easy. Head over to chromeos.hexxeh.net and check out the instructions.
At least on the Mac, formatting the drive is easy. You just download and run a little app. It downloads the rest and formats the drive appropriately.
There are instructions on how to do it in Windows and Linux as well, so just about everyone ought to be covered.
Now, my wife’s netbook has all the functionality that she needs and she can even take Chromium with her just by popping out the usb and booting up any other computer. When I first showed it to her, she even said it was snappier than it had ever been before.
What tricks to you know to breathe new life into old computers?
[Image via -eko-]
Daniel Berman says
How is the wireless support these days? How is printing handled? Are there good instructions for installing this straight on to baremetal to go chromium all the way?
Paul Clifford (@PaulAlanClif) says
I don’t know how it is on everything, but on the Acer Aspire, it works perfectly.
Brad Caldwell says
I’m having a problem trying to create the USB drive using the Mac version. Does anyone run into an error with opening the USB stick? I’m running the latest version of 10.8.
“Sorry, an error occurred (failed to open the USB stick, Permission denied). Would you like to try again?”
Paul Clifford (@PaulAlanClif) says
Hmm. I’m using Snow Leopard (going to upgrade VERY soon) and it worked great. Anyone else have trouble?
Paul says
I am having the same exact problem. Would really love to give this a try if I can ever get the image creator furnished by Hexxeh to function correctly. Ive looked extensively on the web for information, but am coming up empty
Blane Young says
I had the same problem too but the answer is here:
http://superuser.com/questions/542246/installing-chromium-os-on-usb-throws-error
Eric Dye says
Thank you for the link, Blane!
Eric J says
I’ll be trying this out thanks!
Eric J says
So it is working out ok but it didn’t recognize my trackpad!
Paul Clifford (@PaulAlanClif) says
What computer are you using? Can you use an external mouse temporarily?
Raoul Snyman says
Linux FTW.
Raoul Snyman says
BTW Paul, Chromium is the name of the open source project for the Chrome browser. What you installed was ChromeOS.
Raoul Snyman says
Which, by the way, is a stripped down version of Ubuntu.
Paul Clifford (@PaulAlanClif) says
Just going by the website which says, “ChromiumOS is a lightweight, lightning-fast operating system for your netbook, laptop or even desktop.”
I think ChromeOS is the official Google version and Chromium is the open-source variant, but I could be wrong.