Chromebook…Second Thoughts

Sometimes impatience leads to being wrong. Case in point, my recent purchase of a Samsung Chromebook that got me fuming on this blog and Google Plus about its shortcomings. At first, I was angered that this laptop with similar capabilities as a tablet wasn’t loading webpages as fast I my phone or even my old Macbook (circa 2007).

And then…

I rebooted my WiFi network and waited to see if things would get better as far as speed goes. Guess what? It did improve, but not as much as I thought it would. I’m used to pretty fast computers because I’ve been using Apple computers for decades. I just expected a Chromebook that’s basically an Internet computer to be as fast since it doesn’t run any native programs to slow down performance.

Now that I’ve been using the Chromebook for a few days, I think I’ve grown more accustomed to its limitations and its advantages.  On the advantage side, there’s the price.  $199 is incredibly cheap for a laptop. Then there’s that it has a flash drive and not a hard drive — which means the computer boots up in a matter of seconds.  And then, there’s a battery life. Over 8 hours of use on a single charge.  I took the Chromebook to work and was able to watch a couple of episodes of “Call the Midwife” on Netflix — and the Chromebook performed wonderfully.  No issues with buffering or poor image quality.  Now, you may be wondering “Wait. How can you watch Netflix at work?” Well, because I was working the evening shift reporting and producing traffic reports, there were some hours when not much was happening, so it’s not a big deal to my boss if we watch movies on our phones, tablets or laptops. It helps to stave off boredom when things get slow.

The disadvantages?  Well, the screen resolution isn’t all that great, the fact that you can’t do much with the computer if you’re not connected to the Internet, and limitations of programs it can run make less of a workhorse computer and more of social networking computer.  That’s not a bad thing for me (or why I bought it) because I just needed a laptop that can mostly do things on the Internet (i.e., a “Facebook Machine.”).

The verdict?  I’m liking the Chromebook more and more each day.  Heck, I even changed it’s nickname from “Shitty” to “Handy” as I got used to it.

Impatience, it seems in this case, is a vice.

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