Google Chromebook, anyone try it?

[Don Shepherd]

I recently made the switch from my 12-year-old Windows XP machine to a Toshiba Chromebook 2, a beautiful little laptop. The students in the school in which I teach are each issued a Chromebook to use in school for all of their classes. I don't use it in math class, but I was intrigued on how it worked and I bought one.

What attracted me the most was its very fast boot time and the fact that it can never get a virus. Over the years, my XP machine seems to have gotten slower and slower, and during the past year I have had several problems with Windows wanting to install the same 3 updates every night, periodically freezing the screen requiring a turn off/turn on sequence, taking forever to "save my settings" on shutdown, and taking in excess of 3 minutes to boot. I got a "tune-up" which improved the performance very much, but still I am intrigued by the Chromebook.

It has equivalent free products corresponding to MS Excel, Word, and Powerpoint. The scripting language is based on Javascript, which is very different from the VBA for applications that I am used to, but I'll learn it.

Anyone else here make this switch? There are still a couple of things I have to do on my PC, like creating a file from scanned documents, for example, but I have been able to pretty much get totally away from Windows. Fortunately, my Brother wireless printer I've had for awhile was "cloud ready" and connecting it to work with the Chromebook was a snap.