Some number of years ago — I forget how long, exactly — I bought a Windows 10 laptop on the cheap. The specs didn’t look too bad, but shame on me, I didn’t look at the hard drive size. The name alone should have give it away: it was an Acer CloudBook.
Any laptop with “cloud” in the name is a clear indication that its primary use is derived from “the Cloud,” i.e., the Internet. Consequently, it won’t have a very large hard drive on which to store files.
The Acer CloudBook is true to its name, and only has 32GB of hard drive space. Its hard drive is also soldered into place, thus making it unremovable. That tiny hard drive size, by the way, is so small — and Windows 10 requires so much space — that I couldn’t even perform system updates on it.
My daughter uses a Chromebook for school. She and my wife like it well enough, so I wondered if I could replace Windows with Chrome OS. The answer, it turned out, was complicated.
The version of Chrome OS that Google includes with its Chromebook is proprietary, and not available for public download. There are third party solutions available, one of which is CloudReady. There are a few tiers available, one of which is free to anyone who cares to download it.
I downloaded a copy to a USB drive and test-drove it on my laptop for a few days. Even running off an external drive — which was bound to be slower than off the internal drive — the laptop already behaved itself better than when I booted from Windows. I decided to take the final plunge.
I wiped the hard drive of Windows and installed CloudReady. This was a few weeks ago, and I’ve been using the laptop solely as a ChromeOS machine since.
Leave a Reply