Saturday, March 30, 2019

Google Chromebooks 190330


      I am a big fan of Google Chromebooks. They come in many colors and from different manufactures. I prefer the Acer Chromebooks and mine is an 11 inch model like the one in the picture below. You can get one like the one below for $200. You can get a 15 inch for the same money. The more features you get, like more local memory or bigger solid state drive or touch screen add to the price.

      I use google as my search engine. I love using my Chromebook. It has built in antivirus. Its updates take seconds to install, restart and I am ready to continue. Compare that to Microsoft, when updates take a terribly long time and often fail to download, causing me to have to go through the process all over again. Microsoft's browsers are slower than Google, Ubuntu, Firefox and Opera. When last I updated my Microsoft operating system it decided that my Canon photo processing software was no longer acceptable and refused to run it. I am not the only one to experience that phenomenon. My chrome book has a lesser processor and less memory than my Microsoft computer, yet it does everything faster than Microsoft. My google browser gives me every possible web site I could want on a search; sadly Microsoft seems to only want to give me their choices. Lest I forget, my chrome book after 3.5 years still gives me 7 hours of battery use. When new it was 10 hours, but all batteries do not recharge as well as they once did after a thousand or more recharges. I never had a Microsoft computer with a battery that lasted more than 2 hours when it was brand new.
      Now I am the first to admit a chrome book does not do everything a Microsoft computer can do, but it does everything I want and even more than I use. Chrome does have its quirks, for instance to view an mp-4 video I have to download it first before it will play. It took me a while to figure that out. Chrome does have picture enhancement software that works very well for what I want to do, but it does not have every feature some people may want. Chrome does not run Windows software, but it has its own to do what a normal user wants to do. My chrome book with a google account gives me 16 gigabytes of local storage and 15 gigabytes free on line and of course with a flash drive or an SD card, that will both plug in, gives me all the storage I will ever need. If you have a gmail account all of that will sync automatically to a Chromebook. Chromebooks have solid state drives, while most Microsoft computers still come with spinning drives that work much slower. My Microsoft computer drive was so slow I had to replace it with a solid state drive like my Chromebook comes with. With the help of my friend Kevin it was easy enough to do and now it is ready to go in less than 30 seconds, instead of 10-20 minutes at times before. I use my Microsoft computer to play Joyce's vast music collection and nothing else these days.
      It may be difficult at first to use a chrome book if a person has never used Google before, but I think it is well worth the conversion. There is some good news for old-slow Microsoft computers now. It is possible to convert your old Microsoft computer to an Android operating system so you can have a Google computer that works faster, better and you can say goodbye to Microsoft forever.
      Our granddaughter knows how to use Microsoft, but so far in her education the school has used Google Chromebooks.

Copyright Bill Weber 2019 and beyond.

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