Google Chromebook, anyone try it?

[Jim Horn]

With 250 GB drives down to the US$60 on sale, the massive speedup for a computer in general makes them really hard to resist. I'm figuring on adding one to our old desktop at home, while keeping the existing hard drive for large files where speed isn't important (videos, photos, music, etc.).

The almost immediate turn-on-to-desktop of my Surface Pro 3 is really gratifying. And the privacy settings are under serious control.

The biggest limitation of older PCs is their ISA disk interface which precludes easy upgrade to current SSDs. Yes, interfaces are available at very low price, but laptops don't have the room to squeeze them in. So my solid and reliable ten year old Dell laptop is running XUbuntu 12.04 and still chugging. I'd consider Chromium OS for it as it's usually used where there's internet access, but the Banias family CPU can't run more recent operating systems due to the lack of more recent CPU instructions.

By the way, Linux has been loaded on most Chromebook models by many users so there's always that way to use all the hardware...

Gad, how far we've come from saving every possible step of 49 bytes of program memory!