Is any of this salvageable?

[kennylmao]

I really liked netbooks when they were around. I used an Asus 1005HA-P for a long time as my daily PC/Laptop. You had to be mindful about what you were running (OS/apps) because of the low performance CPU, but once I got the hang of the limitation it was great.

I ran everything from Windows XP to Windows 7 Ultimate on it. Windows 7 need some tweaks to get it to run a little more lean than out of the box. I eventually settled on running CrunchBang Linux on it.

Mine had an Intel Atom N280 which was a slight upgrade over the N270, upgraded from 1gb to 2gb which was the max, and when the stock 160gb drive died I put in a 500gb drive then eventually switched that out for a 128gb SSD.

Nice! I actually wanted a netbook back then but decided it was unsuitable for my usage. I was eying the HP Mini, the one which had the keyboard that stretched from one edge to another. It was so cool.

 

[BobK]

Ah, thanks for clearing that up! So it's just like a laptop, only the HDD is essentially replaced with the cloud? 💡

Actually, no, not quite. For all practical purposes the only application it can run is the Chrome browser. No Office, outside of Google's Sheets, Docs, etc. No games, except Web-based games. Etc...

Actually this has advantages; for instance, malware is a non-issue. Also the machine is quite fast; bootup of eight seconds or less and shutdown even faster.

 

[kennylmao]

Actually, no, not quite. For all practical purposes the only application it can run is the Chrome browser. No Office, outside of Google's Sheets, Docs, etc. No games, except Web-based games. Etc...

Actually this has advantages; for instance, malware is a non-issue. Also the machine is quite fast; bootup of eight seconds or less and shutdown even faster.

It's name makes sense now. So Google is pushing their own OS, apps, browser, etc. with the Chromebook.
That quick bootup is too awesome.
Having owned one yourself, what would you say is the selling point of Chromebooks? Does it replace the role of tablets?

 

[BobK]

It's name makes sense now. So Google is pushing their own OS, apps, browser, etc. with the Chromebook.
That quick bootup is too awesome.
Having owned one yourself, what would you say is the selling point of Chromebooks? Does it replace the role of tablets?

Yes, you're firmly in the Google ecosystem with a Chromebook. Your music player is Google's player, your e-book reader is Google's. etc. Having said that, though, Amazon's music player and Kindle reader both work fine on it; note they are web-based apps. Most of the "apps" for the Chromebook are actually just URLs. This means apps don't consume storage space on the device other than the handful of bytes for the URL and the icon.

The main selling point? It's fast, lightweight, decent battery life and cheap. Does it replace the role of tablets? That's sort of a yes-and-no answer. Tablets are still smaller and lighter than chromebooks. Most chromebooks have an 11.6 inch screen (mine has a 14, so my battery life is a bit less than the smaller ones; that plus I have Bluetooth on all the time). They have real keyboards even though they're chicklet-style keys, which is good if you need to type much of anything and not so good if you don't.

 

[kennylmao]

Yes, you're firmly in the Google ecosystem with a Chromebook. Your music player is Google's player, your e-book reader is Google's. etc. Having said that, though, Amazon's music player and Kindle reader both work fine on it; note they are web-based apps. Most of the "apps" for the Chromebook are actually just URLs. This means apps don't consume storage space on the device other than the handful of bytes for the URL and the icon.

The main selling point? It's fast, lightweight, decent battery life and cheap. Does it replace the role of tablets? That's sort of a yes-and-no answer. Tablets are still smaller and lighter than chromebooks. Most chromebooks have an 11.6 inch screen (mine has a 14, so my battery life is a bit less than the smaller ones; that plus I have Bluetooth on all the time). They have real keyboards even though they're chicklet-style keys, which is good if you need to type much of anything and not so good if you don't.

Sounds like it will be severy handicapped without internet access. I guess that's the future huh, everything in the cloud.

 

[BobK]

Sounds like it will be severy handicapped without internet access. I guess that's the future huh, everything in the cloud.

Yes, that's a given; there's not much you can do without Internet access. You can store stuff for offline access, though. But think about it, how much stuff do people do nowadays that are strictly offline?

(actually nevermind; I for one do quite a lot offline )