Ted, We bought a 11" Acer chromebook 2 years ago to use to watch tv after getting rid of cable TV. I spilled a whole glass of milk in it, dried it out overnight over a dehumidifier, and it's worked fine ever since.
We then bought a 15" Acer chromebook from Groupon for $80 refurbished, and that has worked flawlessly too. The only issue I have with Chrome is that it locks up quite a bit if you have more than 3 or 4 tabs open and a few apps running. I wish they could get the virtual memory working better. The 15" has at least an 8 hour battery life, which is awesome. I also use it for to remote desktop and teamviewer into client's computers. Mike From: Ted Roche tedroche@gmail.com To: "profox@leafe.com" profox@leafe.com Sent: Thursday, April 6, 2017 9:33 AM Subject: [NF] Chromebook OOBE
Not Fox, Not even Windows, but interesting tech I thought I'd share.
As Family Area Network SysAdmin, I set up and support machines for a couple of relatives.
One was interested in browsing and broadcasting free movies from archive.org and slideshows and personal files to his TV. I set up a Google Chromecast and picked up an inexpensive refurbed ASUS Chromebook 15 from NewEgg ($130).
Essentially, the laptop is a 16Gb SSD running Chrome OS and Chome browser. No Windows to infect and update and "have you turned it off and back on" tech support. Decent screen 13x7 and 15" decent audio, HDMI and 2 USB3 ports. Supposed 12 hour battery, and 802.11ac wifi. ChromeOS has some decent accessiblity features that display extra-large cursors and graphics and some zoom and magnify features for those with limited vision.
Yes, everything you do is transmitted to Google who use it to target you with ads.
Added EFF's Privacy Badger and HTTPS Everywhere to the browser.
Can't run Windows apps locally, but there are some RDP solutions as well as web-based, of course. Could run Linux if you really wanted to, but for this use case, this seems like a pretty sweet consumer machine at a very reasonable price.
Bonus Google Hangouts means video phone calls and screen sharing (also in Chrome Remote Desktop) for tech support.
Anyone else using Chromebooks? Good or bad experiences to share? Warnings on things to avoid?