Trying to Save a Lost Cause.

A few years back as a Christmas gift for my wife I attempted to replace her water-damaged Windows Vista era laptop and failed miserably. I purchased a terribly underpowered laptop from Walmart because the price was right and it featured an optical drive. At this time optical drives were going away but my wife still felt she needed one. This computer never really worked for her, It ran Windows 8 which was a non-starter and even with the upgrade to Windows 10 which did improve the user experience the computer was rarely used. Eventually, we upgraded my wife to a MacBook Air and this computer had no use.

I tried a multitude of things including a clean install of Windows 10 and using it as a PLEX Server (this failed miserably). Nothing seemed to give this waste of money new life. I had read before that it was possible to install ChromiumOS, the open source version of ChromeOS found on Google's Chromebooks onto ageing Windows hardware, so I decided to give it a try.

The first thing I did was create a USB backup of the original Windows 8 partition in case things went horribly wrong. Next, I headed over to the Neverware website. Neverware provides the ability for corporations and schools to convert their old hardware into Chromebooks or Chromeboxes with an easy to use distro. The main difference between the paid and home versions is the home version has no access to the Google Admin Console.

What you download is a tool which allows you to make a bootable USB drive to install a ChromiumOS distro that Neverware calls Cloudready.

After booting from the USB the installation took about twenty minutes. It was very straightforward. After the restart you connect to a network, sign in to your Google Account and voila!

My results were less than stellar, however. While the startup times were ok and I enjoyed the ChromeOS experience itself this terrible hardware could not handle simple browsing. After adding the Chrome App Cog I saw that a simple page refresh of the Google homepage maxed out my CPU. The 4GB of ram seemed to be sufficient but the processor is horrendous.

While one day I may try this again with other hardware or just buy a ready to go Chromebook this is a failed experiment and this laptop remains one of the worst purchases I have ever made.