Do I Really Have to Buy a $2000 Facebook Machine?

So, I just bought a Samsung Chromebook for $199 at Best Buy. I thought since we mostly use our Macbook for web stuff and email, a Chromebook would be a good replacement for our old Macbook (2008 or 2007). It still works, but because it is running an older operating system and can’t handle the upgrade to the latest OS, it’s kind of ending its years of usefulness. It still works, but it’s very slow and some webpages won’t load because the browser is out of date.

So, I’ve been reading up on Chromebooks as an alternative — and a cheaper one a that — and decided to plunk down my $218 + some change for a web-only computer. The verdict? I might take it back. I cannot believe how slow this thing is. It’s slower than our older Macbook! I went on a bunch of forums to see what’s what with these things, and it seems if you have a lot of extensions on your Chrome browser, it’ll slow things down. Well, I disabled a bunch of extensions, cleared my cache and rebooted the whole thing. Did it work? Not really. It’s still a very slow computer that doesn’t even work as it’s supposed to: a computer designed for surfing the Internet, updating social media sites, blogging, word processing, and the like. I tried to send an email through Gmail and it took over three minutes to send the message. What that what?!

Maybe I got a defective model…I just don’t know. What I do know is that I’m not pleased with what Google wrought — and Samsung manufactured. So, I return to the question I wrote in the blog heading: Do I really have to buy a $2000 Facebook machine?