Sunday 29 December 2013

The Chromebook Test: Living In Google Chrome For A Month (Part 5)

google-chromebook-logo

After sorting out the weird behaviour that Windows was suffering I decided to continue my 1 Month of living in Chrome, and I'm finding myself using Windows less and less on a  daily basis apart from using it for the base of this experiment.

How I've got my Windows 7 Notebook set-up to look like Chrome OS probably isn't the smoothest of ways to go about it, but I find that it gives me minimal distraction from seeing the Windows Taskbar while still having access to the underlying Windows 7 OS (really essential for keeping Windows up to date & Hibernating my Notebook when not using it) as well as allowing me to do things that I can only do from Windows applications (Not much you can't do in the Chrome Web Apps apart from doing a system backup of my iPhone using iTunes and Windows gaming.

Since I prefer the Chrome Web Browser over the others out there then living entirely within Chrome is easy, but it's a bit of a learning curve when doing it on a Windows Notebook as the temptation to use the Windows Start Menu to use Programs is there, but I'm slowly getting used to using the Chrome App Launcher to Launch Chrome Apps.

One major benefit of using the Chrome App Launcher is that you can set Chrome Web Apps up to not open in Chrome but to open as if they're an actual Application, so you don't get the Tabs on the top of the Screen, no Omnibar & no Bookmarks bar e.t.c. or you can have them set to open in Chrome, which is also what you can set up in Chrome OS, meaning that if you've experimented with Living in Chrome & using the Chrome App Launcher within Windows or Mac OSX then the settings should translate over to Chrome OS. Another plus for Chromebooks is that Google gives away 100GB of Google Drive Storage for 2 years that has a retail value of $4.99 a month ($119.76 for 24 Months), where as with Microsoft you only get an extra 20GB of SkyDrive Storage with an active Office 2013 365 subscription, so if you're looking for a second Laptop, a cheap lightweight Laptop that you can carry around with you, a first computer for a family member or even your first laptop then for the price of a Chromebook you can't go wrong (especially when the nearest Laptop comparable in weight and size is the MacBook Air that is about 100x the price of the cheapest Chromebook).

Living entirely in the cloud has its advantages as if you lose your Chromebook all you have to do is change your Google password and all your personal data is safe.

Roland

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