Strictly off topic, but too good to not share!
Originally shared by Lars Fosdal
Neverware CloudReady – a Chromium installation that turns your old laptop or PC into a Chromebook! It’s free, it’s easy to install, and wow, it is fast!
Note that it will take over the laptop completely, and you can’t dualboot with another OS.
It has a relatively long list of verified hardware, and Lenovo T500 was on the list, so I thought I would give it a test on my W500 that refuses to work with Windows 10.
Oh joy! It uses the full 1920×1200, the volume buttons on the laptop works, as does the Fn+key combos to control screen brightness and so forth. Very fast, very slick, no fan noise, boots very fast, and almost instant awakening from sleep. Well worth a try if you have an old laptop that feels too sluggish with Windows.
This is great news! Thanks for sharing.
Have you tried this?
Read the post 🙂
I got a couple of even older laptops that I will test it on.
:p silly me…
looks too good to be true…
I will test it on my 7 year old Fujitsu…
The W500 is 5 years old – and it is really fast and nice with this OS.
I don’t get why you should pay $25 per year for using a system as closed as ChromeOS… There are alternative Linux distros which would do much better to revive your old laptop.
A. Bouchez Free for individuals. You can also run it off a bootable flash drive to take it with you in your pocket. Not sure what the thing with the price/year model is – unless it involves backend servers for the educational part.
Also – I suspect that you would be hard pressed to find a Linux distro that requires this little configuration?
Lars Fosdal Even for free, I would like to be able to put my own files locally, and run my own applications. Even running a virtual machine with Windows XP within. It would be perfect, even with a 2GB of RAM.
About little configuration, there are plenty of Linux distros available. You may be amazed by http://lubuntu.net for instance. Even a distro with an amazing UI like Elementary requires only 1 GHz 32-bit or 64-bit processor, 1 GB of system memory (RAM), and 15 GB of disk space.
To be honnest, most of the HW requirements won’t come from OS, but from the browser. Native linux apps would always consume much less resources than HTML5 apps. In practice, a ChromeBook has huge hardware requirements about RAM and CPU – only local storage size is less needed. A plain linux distribution could be pretty small and efficient – just check http://puppylinux.org/
IMO, the beauty of ChromeOS is the lack of local storage and apps. If I drop my Chromebook at sea, drive a iron pole through it – or forget it on the bus – I lose nothing of my data or documents – assuming I was recently online (as you can work with documents offline). It is not a PC anymore, though. It is a cloud access device.
Of course, I would backup my files, and find them on all my devices.
But I love to have them even without any network available.
With Google Drive (and sufficient local disk), you do. Seamlessly.