You Can’t Judge A Book By Lookin’ At The Cover

 

Got a ChromeBook today.

I am, in fact, updating this blog from said ChromeBook today.

I’ve never used one of these things before, I always thought they were somewhat stupid, honestly. Well, now I’ve used one and my belief is bordering somewhere along maybe not super stupid, and possibly somewhat useful, depending on the task the task.

Chrome OS is now, apparently on version 78, so I assume there has been some pretty serious work done on it over the years. Mine had version 61 out of the box, and it took less than 10 minutes to update to the current version over the Starbucks WiFi.

This particular computer is an HP Chromebook 11-V010NR which is rated pretty decently for a super inexpensive PC. It has 4gb of RAM and 16gb of built in storage. It boasts an 11 inch display, 1 HDMI port, 2 USB (3.0?) ports, an audio output and a Micro-SD slot. Allegedly the battery will last something along the lines of 10 hours, and with virtually no moving parts, that is probably not a hard claim to actually adhere to.

At a guess, I would have to say that this thing will do a pretty good job of what it is made for…Surfing the web, light document creation and editing, playing a few lightweight games and scrolling mindlessly through Facebook/Instagram/Twitter.

I haven’t yet ventured into the world of photo editing or graphic design, which is primarily what I am using PCs for these days, but I don’t expect things to be all that great on that front, since, well, Chromebook.

So far as I can tell, Word and Excel are pretty solid and more or less fully functional, there will just be a learning curve associated with figuring out where everything lives now.

I don’t understand why Microsoft doesn’t port Publisher to other operating systems, because that would make this thing a lot more likely to come out of my bag rather than the laptop, but, alas.

I am having a much easier time adjusting to this than my iMac, partially because a lot of the shortcut key combinations still work, but I do miss the F keys, along with the fact that there are certain things I have to look up. For instance, screen shots, but either I will adjust or I will never use this thing again after today.

Amazon Music is streaming well and the sound is quite excellent via the headphone jack at least!

This thing doesn’t seem likely to be consigned to the “Never to be used again” pile of computer crap that I own though. I’ll probably use it for what it is designed for. Doing simple tasks quickly, watching videos and streaming music.