Skip to main content

Convert your SLOW old PC into a Chromebook

I had a cheap version of an Acer 11" Windows 7 laptop that was not performing well after a few years. The machine was practically not usable so I decided to research and install the open-source Chromium OS that would make this old laptop a relatively fast “Chromebook”.
Before I get into the instructions, let me share the final results. The Chromium OS boots up in 10sec on this “Chromebook”. Browsing internet is super fast and YouTube works great, but there are a few things that you have to watch out for if you are already used to using regular Chromebooks and you are doing a direct comparison:
  1. Chrome Web Store: This will not work as Chromium OS is not compatible with Chrome OS Web Store.
  2. You will not have access to Google Drive through the Chromium File Explorer the way you can do it in Chrome OS. This may not be important to you because you can still access Gmail, Google+ and Google Drive through your browser which is how I typically access it anyways.
  3. Chromium browser does NOT support Flash. So if you are used to playing games with Flash or watching movies from websites that are powered by Flash, you are out of luck. Keep in mind that you can still play HTML5 games but you will have to find them outside the ChromeOS web store (i.e. http://html5games.com/ )
After doing some quick research on YouTube, here are the exact steps for getting Chromium install on your USB drive and using it as a boot-up drive, or fully converting your PC into a Chromebook so you don’t have to use USB drives as boot-up.
  1. * Download and install Win32 Disk Imager that is used for creating your boot-up drive: http://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/
  2. * Download the Chromium OS build from: http://chromeos.hexxeh.net/and extract the file from the zip file.
  3. * Use one USB drive that you don’t need. Keep in mind that everything on this USB drive will be formatted so make sure you save its data somewhere before using it.
  4. * Use the Win32 Disk Imager: Create a boot-up USB drive using the Chromium OS build image file by selecting it within the Disk Imager tool.
  5. * After the Disk Imager is done creating a boot-up drive, you can leave the USB drive connected and reboot your computer and the boot-up time, you need to make sure that the boot-up is done from the USB drive instead of your hard-drive. Depending on the type of your PC, you press different function keys to get the boot-up menu. For example, on my Acer laptop I pressed F2 while the computer was being rebooted and it presented me with a menu where I was able to select the order of drives used during boot-up.
  6. * After you let it boot up from the USB drive, you will get the Chromium screens that will walk you through initial setup with your Gmail address.
If my instructions are not clear, you can watch these two videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRHeQBRl7vE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTMhElMqgx4
If you want to fully/permanently convert your PC into a ChromiumBook/Chromebook without needing to use the USB drive, you can do that by following the instructions below, but you need to be very careful; you will NOT have access to your Windows OS anymore and you will first need to back up files from your computer if you plan to do so. Here are the instructions:
Almir M


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Brand New programming language and one solution OR …

Brand New programming language and one solution OR Two existing programming languages, one solution for EACH? I understand that there is no right or wrong. It all depends on your software architecture, team structure, team skills and other factors, but I still want to explain the scenario as it may look familiar to some. Let me explain. Let’s assume that you have microservices and common libraries in two major programming languages. You have some teams who are experts in one and some teams experts in the other programming language. Now you need to come up with a solution for a scenario that all teams will need to leverage. Let’s assume that your cloud platform has an off-the-shelf approach for this but it is supported by a 3rd programming language that your teams do not have much experience in. What is the right thing for your organization and not just from the technical point of view? A) Do you embrace what your cloud platform gives you off the shelf and implement thi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Programming / Software Engineering  — Think Paper, Paper, then Code

Most of the software engineering problems are solved in what I call the high-level brainstorming sessions. We basically walk into a meeting room and white-board our thoughts and come up with solutions. When things start falling apart, you better believe this happens in the last stretch of projects and it does work.  Now the issue is that we as programmers do NOT do the similar type of exercise before a line of code is written ? I typically see developers get requirements in the form of a document or a user story or in the form of walk-by requirements. The next thing I see on developers’ screens is code editors or IDEs. Is that the right thing to do? You may say that you are advanced enough and that you like to dive into coding right away, but this happens even to the best of us. We fall into this trap and rarely step back and review our habits. We have to go back to fundamentals. What did we do in school?  Professors taught us to write down our thoughts and to show what...
Post a Comment
Read more

Prototype — Turning it into Final Product quickly in order to see innovation in action !

I have a saying “There is nothing more final than a POC/Prototype”. Sadly a lot of times an unpolished prototype just becomes your production version of software. On the other hand, we have cases where prototypes fully become a throw-away work.  How do we take a prototype into a final product quickly to see the fruits of your innovations with minimal effort and at the same time not have a drastic difference between the design of a prototype and the design of the final product? In other words, how do we introduce agility and flexibility? What’s on the table. You have the following in the picture regardless of the type of architecture: * Product owners and innovative ideas * Front-End development * Web-tier (server-side) development * Business logic development in some forms of web services or APIs. When you develop prototypes, you can take the Business-Logic component out of the equation most of the time and for the purposes of this article, I will not focus on that p...
Post a Comment
Read more