Chromebook Experiment Results

This is a followup to my Chromebook Experiment post from November of 2011.

I did purchase a Chromebook a few years ago. A Samsung Chromebook 3. Overall, I'm pretty satisfied with it. Yes, it can be slow (it uses a Celeron processor and has 2 GB of RAM), but as far as limitations imposed by the OS, I haven't really found any. To be completely honest, it's faster than the little desktop computers provided by my employer.  It's not by any means usable for more than casual gaming, like Solitaire, but it does what I need it to do, it's lightweight, and has incredible battery life. I have two users set up on it, and I'm thinking about adding a third one (don't ask 😆). I can access pretty much any document I need to, and I haven't really found a website that won't work with it. Granted, I miss MS Office, since we use it heavily at work.

The main thing I miss is good design programs. But, I'm not doing nearly as much design work as I used to, and if I need to I can use my desktop at home. So, my verdict?

I don't regret getting it. It suits my needs, although I sometimes think about getting one that's a little more powerful. As long as you understand it's limitations and can work with them, It's an excellent little laptop. I love the way I don't have to worry about updates. Chrome OS just does them, and if I need to restart, it tells me (which, btw, is a lot faster than restarting Windows or Mac OS X). If you're on the fence about Chromebooks, and you can find it at a good price (mine was about $150 US), I think you'll be pleased with it.

IE 9 Automatic Updates

As reported around the net today, Microsoft has announced that beginning in 2012, Internet Explorer 9 will be included as an important update in the automatic updates system. This is going to be a problem for me at work. A lot of our staff don't care for IE9 and will seek out computers with IE8 to do their work. The biggest problem for me is that there are an unknown number of web sites that just don't yet work well with IE9. Granted, that's the fault of the site creators, but it's still an issue for our IE9 users. Three sites that I know of in particular (the Kentucky unemployment site, our library's payroll service site and our library's book discussion site) have serious issues when using IE9. In fact, the Kentucky unemployment site simply won't work at all with IE9. This is a huge problem for our patrons, many of whom live in Kentucky but for various reasons use our computers to file their claims.

Fortunately, Microsoft is providing a tool to disable the automatic update to IE9. Unfortunately, that means I have to install it on every computer we have (currently around 100 public and staff computers). This is additional workload I don't need right now.

Chromebook Experiment

I've been interested in the Chromebooks ever since they were first announced. At first, I thought the price was too high, but now that it's coming down some, I'm getting interested again. I can see how connectivity might be a problem, but I'm pretty much always on a Wi-Fi network, both at home and at work. I already use an Android phone, Chrome is my default browser on every desktop I use, my personal mail is Gmail, my weblog is Blogger, and I use Google Docs. I suspect that Chrome OS can handle everything I need to do in my personal life, and possibly 90% of what I need to do in my professional life. So I'm going to try an experiment.

Windows 8 Developer Preview: First Impressions

I finally got Windows 8 Developer Preview installed on my old computer. It's an eMachine W3400 from some time ago, with an AMD Athlon 3000+ 64-bit processor. I had installed more memory, so it's up to 1GB of RAM. I had to find another hard drive, since the original one had failed. That's why I just now got Windows 8 installed.

I haven't had much time to play with it yet, but here's my initial impressions of Windows 8:

I love the tile interface. I think it's one of the most user-friendly UIs I've seen. Of course, I had used a similar interface briefly on a Samsung Focus (before I couldn't take ATT anymore). It seems to work pretty well on a desktop, although it takes a little getting used to. Live tiles update just as expected, and I've only noticed a couple of issues, which I'll come to later. Unfortunately, I'm not sure we could use it at work without a lot of training both for staff and for customers. That's a shame, because I believe it could help increase productivity in the long run. At least the standard desktop is available, although there are some differences there, too.

I haven't had time yet to install any software, other than Silverlight and Flash. Silverlight, of course, installed flawlessly. Flash was only slightly more tricky. The Adobe website didn't recognize the operating system, of course, so I had to select the correct version. I went with the Windows 7 version for Internet Explorer, and so far I haven't seen any issues. So much of everything is web-based these days, those two plug-ins were necessary right away. My next plan is to try to install MS Office 2010 and Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview this evening. If those work all right, then I'll try to install some other programs, such as Zune and Java.

At this point, I've only seen two issues. There doesn't seem to be a driver available for my ATI Radeon Express 200 video card. It may just be that I haven't had time to find one, yet, but I suspect it's just not there. However, even running in Aero Basic mode, everything looks good and moves quickly. Obviously any kind of serious gaming is out of the question. It probably would be even with a driver, though. That's not too big a concern for me at this point. I don't do any major gaming, and this is, after all, a preview.

The second issue is more irritating, but I'm sure it's just that I haven't had time to find the answer yet. If I start an application in tile mode, i.e. not from the standard desktop, I haven't found a way to close it. I'm currently using a workaround that involves going into the standard desktop, starting Task Manager (which is much improved, by the way) and ending it from there. Not very elegant, but I'm sure I've just missed something.

So that's my first impressions. I'll post some screenshots later, and have more information after I've had a chance to work with Windows 8 more this evening. If there's any questions I can help answer, please let me know in the comments. Thanks for reading, and I'll be back later.

Update on My Netbook

I finally got everything working again. I went ahead and installed SliTaz on it. Even after installing some additional programs, I still have almost three-fourths of my 4 GB flash drive left. I've got a bootloader error I'll need to fix soon, but other than that, everything's fine. Considering how lightweight a distribution SliTaz is, I'm quite happy with it. I still love Ubuntu, but it just takes up too much room for my netbook.

Messed Up My Netbook

I've had Ubuntu installed on my netbook for some time now. Recently, I've been getting error messages saying the system is very low on disk space (not surprising, since it's only 4GB on the drive). So after thinking about it for a while, I decided to remove Ubuntu and install one of the lighter versions of Linux. I did some research, and decided the best options would be either Puppeee or SliTaz Linux. I've tried them both now, and they both run very well in RAM. My netbook is faster than ever. Both of them will install to the internal drive. But neither of them will boot from the internal drive. Grub errors. I suspect what's going on is that the mount point of the internal drive changes when the external drive is no longer attached, and the Grub can't find the operating system.  I don't have any more time to work on it today, but I'm going to do some more research and see if I can find a solution.

If anyone has suggestions, I'd be glad to hear them. Thanks.