Chromebook - Opinions ?

[rich_tech]

Hello Fellow Geeks,

 

I am after opinions on these devices for a possible personal device for me, my aged laptop has given up the ghost with a disk dying, my wifes laptop was an awful advent 9415 which shes blown the speakers on and mangled the power connector on the back of, so I am looking at possible replacements, I trialled a Samsung celeron based one of these for work in the summer term for a fortnight and was very impressed by the device, especially when I looked at the spec first off and thought it would be crap without actually diving in to try it.

 

In terms of my day to day, I generally only use chrome to browse the web and I can live with not being able to play WoW on a laptop if its something fast, light with good battery life.

 

I use google+, gmail, google drive and the usual on-demands from sky, bbc, itv, ch4/5 and netflix with a couple of other websites.

 

I would like opinions off someone who owns them or uses them in their school, on a more regular basis than I do.

 

I am looking at possibly the Toshiba/Samsung Models (I won't touch Acer or HP because of my own "quality" issues with acer and I have yet to see a HP laptop not want to spontaneously combust or burn up in some way) I would prefer an intel/AMD based processor rather than ARM with the exonyx.

 

Thanks,

 

Richard

[crc-ict]

I would say you need to think about how good your internet connection is when considering a Chromebook.

 

I was at a seminar before Christmas with a hands-on with various devices. The hotel it was in seemed to have very dodgy wifi internet and the Chromebooks were almost impossible to get to do anything. I think they have a reasonable offline mode if you have no connection, but with a poor connection, they were very frustrating.

[pcstru]

In terms of my day to day, I generally only use chrome to browse the web and I can live with not being able to play WoW on a laptop if its something fast, light with good battery life.

 

I use google+, gmail, google drive and the usual on-demands from sky, bbc, itv, ch4/5 and netflix with a couple of other websites.

 

I would like opinions off someone who owns them or uses them in their school, on a more regular basis than I do.

We use them in classes and I've made some use of one. I think if your use is as stated, restricted to web apps and you have a reasonable expectation of internet connectivity most of the time, then it could be a good solution.

 

You might try the USB Chromium OS build on your laptop. It shouldn't matter that there is no HD.

[Kenny_G]

Sky Go needs silverlight. I don't think this is available for chromebooks as of yet.

[Arthur]

Sky Go needs silverlight. I don't think this is available for chromebooks as of yet.

Silverlight will never be available for ChromeOS.

[Arthur]

You might try the USB Chromium OS build on your laptop.

FWIW, Hexxeh no longer maintains his Chromium OS builds - the last update was April 2013!

 

Arnold The Bat's website would be a far better place to download Chromium OS since he updates it daily, includes additional wireless/graphics drivers and you can update the operating system via his dev server.

[rich_tech]

Thanks guys ill give it a try I think, I liked the light feel of using it when I had the trial samsung one, I had a feeling silverlight would be a minor issue, similar to me having with Linux on my desktop machine, can get around that though on the wifes ipad if need be.

 

Dont think it would be a massive problem, at home we are 120mb VM and all family have decent internet thankfully, just wait on the toshiba chromebooks to make an appearance I think, as all Samsungs on offer now seem to be that exonyx processor which I find offputting.

[SovietRussia]

Netflix website also requires Silverlight, this is what has stopped me from going down this route.

[rich_tech]

People report it working though on there, so it makes for confusing reading on that, I get silverlight is an issue there, It does do the majority of stuff I want though looking at it, the chrome plugin which I use to watch american shows on fox/cbs and the american networks all works like a charm

[Arthur]

People report it working though on there, so it makes for confusing reading on that

NetFlix uses the Widevine plugin on ChromeOS now.