It's been 4 months 6 days since I started living in the Cloud. When I started it was a month-long experiment for a blog series that I decided to write, and I was just living in Chrome on Windows 7, this worked fine but there was still the temptation to use Windows 7. I soon moved over to the open source Chromium OS, and with the temptation to use Windows now gone I was able to throw my life 100% into the Cloud for the rest of the month-long experiment.
When the month was up I then replaced my Laptop with an official Chromebook and on the 14th of January this year and I'm now entrusting my life to the Cloud, but for the price of entrusting my life to the Cloud I've got an easy to use Laptop that requires no maintenance where I can just simply get on with the task at hand.
4 month conclusion
After nearly 4 months and 1 week of living in the Cloud I'm more productive as I don't have to wait for my Laptop to boot up and all the startup programs to start before I can use it, which means I can start being productive as soon as I take my Chromebook out of my bag, and the long battery life means that I can be productive all day, and if I don't use my Chromebook all day I can use it for several days between charges. With my Windows Laptop I was lucky if a could get an hours worth of use out of it even after changing the battery for one with a higher capacity.
My Chromebook is light enough that I can carry it with me everywhere that I go as I went for the 11.6" Acer C720 which is a lightweight powerhouse that does everything that I do on a day-to-day basis, that was the reason for me choosing a Chromebook over a Windows Laptop or Ultrabook. My first choice was a MacBook Pro closely followed by a MacBook Air, but as they were way out of my price range I went for what is basically the new comer to the computing world.
Chromebooks are nothing like what Microsoft tries to lead everybody to believe, as now that everything is connected to the Internet even Windows and Mac Laptops can't do most things without an Internet connection. Sure you can use Office programs Offline along with other tasks, but for the day-to-day things like browsing the Internet or sending and receiving emails can't be done without an Internet connection. As Chrome OS matures more and more things can be done Offline as Google Drive has the ability to view documents Offline, but at present has limited Offline creation options, as you can only currently create and edit documents Offline but once you've named a document you're unable to rename it until you're back Online.
I'll probably do another review post in 4 months time.
Roland
