The box that was waiting on my doorstep this past Friday was bigger even than the 3.5lbs of free Purina (thanks Purina!) and seemed more like an Amazon.com purchase.
"What did you buy?" My fiscally minded hubsters asked, not amused.
"Nothing! Really!" I said, trying to wrack my brain just in case. "Probably only something we needed in any case." The perfect defense for shopping.
"You bought more mouse traps??" Hubsters gestured to the inner box that showed an elaborate diagram of a mouse and a disassembled rocketship.
Puzzled we stared for a bit longer, until we saw the packing slip. It was a Google Chrome OS notebook, and I was a lucky tester. The screaming, jumping, dancing, and whooping baffled the children and sent my downstairs neighbor running up to make sure we weren't seriously injured.
I was busy cooking for shabbos, so like any good wife, I let hubsters have the pleasure of the first test drive. Good thing too, since my perusing of other reviews says that one must connect to a secure network connection from the guest account and then set up the user account, which hubsters did by default as he was the guest, and I was the triumphant user/Googler.
The notebook is sleek, black matte, and minimalist.
It's light, as it should be. There is only one USB port, one video out, one headphone jack, an SD card reader and the power jack.
Well it was sleek, black, matte and minimalist until I tricked it out using the included decal kit. Now it looks a bit like something a middle schooler would use, but my excitement at my new toy overrode any sense of style and restraint my inner decorator would have tried to establish.
There is no software loaded into the system beyond the Chrome OS. It is built around cloud computing. Want to make a document? Use Google Docs. Want to play music? Stream some. There is an option to download apps from the Chrome Web Store. Some are addons to Chrome similar to the ones that work with the Chrome Browser, some are web apps like Tweetdeck, and others are basically bookmarks to webpages, while handy are not the same as an app. There is everything from browser games that pop down from the toolbar, to photo editing, basically anything you'd expect in an app store.
The idea, as laid out in the intro page, is that if your current laptop were hit with a steam roller, you'd lose everything. If a google machine gets hit with a steam roller, no biggie, just log into another google machine and it's like the steam roller was one bad dream, all your setting exist in the cloud and nothing is lost.
I quickly tricked out with some basic necessities. Web Of Trust to vet the links as I surf and protect my machine, bookmarks to my usual places, an add on for blogger, one for sharing across my social networks, and Tweetdeck. Now I've been using the desktop app for a long time now and the web based one took a lot of tweaking and fiddling to approximate the settings and features I'd been enjoying thus far. I wish it had just "poof" imported my settings, but such is life.
I will be posting more about my experiences in a series to keep the length down to just below War and Peace and "too long didn't read," I know ya'll appreciate it!
The box that was waiting on my doorstep this past Friday was bigger even than the 3.5lbs of free Purina (thanks Purina!) and seemed more like an Amazon.com purchase.
"What did you buy?" My fiscally minded hubsters asked, not amused.
"Nothing! Really!" I said, trying to wrack my brain just in case. "Probably only something we needed in any case." The perfect defense for shopping.
"You bought more mouse traps??" Hubsters gestured to the inner box that showed an elaborate diagram of a mouse and a disassembled rocketship.
Puzzled we stared for a bit longer, until we saw the packing slip. It was a Google Chrome OS notebook, and I was a lucky tester. The screaming, jumping, dancing, and whooping baffled the children and sent my downstairs neighbor running up to make sure we weren't seriously injured.
I was busy cooking for shabbos, so like any good wife, I let hubsters have the pleasure of the first test drive. Good thing too, since my perusing of other reviews says that one must connect to a secure network connection from the guest account and then set up the user account, which hubsters did by default as he was the guest, and I was the triumphant user/Googler.
The notebook is sleek, black matte, and minimalist.
It's light, as it should be. There is only one USB port, one video out, one headphone jack, an SD card reader and the power jack.
Well it was sleek, black, matte and minimalist until I tricked it out using the included decal kit. Now it looks a bit like something a middle schooler would use, but my excitement at my new toy overrode any sense of style and restraint my inner decorator would have tried to establish.
There is no software loaded into the system beyond the Chrome OS. It is built around cloud computing. Want to make a document? Use Google Docs. Want to play music? Stream some. There is an option to download apps from the Chrome Web Store. Some are addons to Chrome similar to the ones that work with the Chrome Browser, some are web apps like Tweetdeck, and others are basically bookmarks to webpages, while handy are not the same as an app. There is everything from browser games that pop down from the toolbar, to photo editing, basically anything you'd expect in an app store.
The idea, as laid out in the intro page, is that if your current laptop were hit with a steam roller, you'd lose everything. If a google machine gets hit with a steam roller, no biggie, just log into another google machine and it's like the steam roller was one bad dream, all your setting exist in the cloud and nothing is lost.
I quickly tricked out with some basic necessities. Web Of Trust to vet the links as I surf and protect my machine, bookmarks to my usual places, an add on for blogger, one for sharing across my social networks, and Tweetdeck. Now I've been using the desktop app for a long time now and the web based one took a lot of tweaking and fiddling to approximate the settings and features I'd been enjoying thus far. I wish it had just "poof" imported my settings, but such is life.
I will be posting more about my experiences in a series to keep the length down to just below War and Peace and "too long didn't read," I know ya'll appreciate it!
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