Chrome OS

[Stormborn15]

Has anyone tried to install Chrome OS to revive an end of life machine ? If so where have you sourced the OS from and anything to be aware of ?

TIA

[sted]

look up chromium os. yes ive done it on old netbooks. it was fine once booted but took longer than windows xp to boot on the laptop

[dhicks]

Has anyone tried to install Chrome OS to revive an end of life machine ? If so where have you sourced the OS from and anything to be aware of ?

 

We use Neverware's CloudReady. It has offical support from Google, so your newly-installed ChromeOS machine can be managed via the Google console just like a brand new Chromebook. CloudReady license their system to schools on a per-device, one-off payment basis (for businesses they charge an annual fee), and there's a separate one-off charge for the Google admin licenses. Both cost us around £70 all done, but I think there's a special offer on at the moment, you might be able to get both in a bundle for around £50.

 

Ideally, give your old machines an SSD each. It doesn't have to be a large SSD - 32GB is still quite large for a Chromebook - so you might even be able to get a bunch of smaller SSDs second hand. A device with an SSD should be quite quick to boot - maybe not the 8 seconds of a Chromebook, but still quite quick. More RAM in the device is always going to help, too.

 

The only thing your devices won't be able to do that /some/ new Chromebooks can is run Android apps. It depends what you plan for the devices, and what your user's expectations are. We've just bought a bunch of Chromebook Flips, which run Android Apps and have touch screens, so now everyone is used to the idea that Chromebooks are like iPads. We felt adding a set of re-conditioned laptops wirthout touch screens and Android apps would confuse people - teachers would come along to the laptops expecting to be able to use apps, then be confused when they didn't work. We do have some desktop devices running CloudReady set up as kiosks in our Reception classrooms, though, which seem to be working well.

[angrycomputingteacher]

I use Cloud ready. It's cheap and runs fast. It can be run on a USB so it does not need to be installed on the machine.