Chromebooks vs Windows

Granted, a Chromebook isn't a full-scale Windows or OS X-based machine -- far from it -- but given just how often our work is shifting to the web, Chrome OS is becoming dangerously close to "good enough" for most. Chalk it up to serendipity if you must, but Chrome OS is becoming more and more relevant with each passing day, as we're dealt far fewer offline-only apps and far more cloud-reliant ones.

You've heard it before, and you'll hear it again: Chrome OS isn't "a real operating system." There's no question that it's different; it's the first major OS to launch without the ability to install local, desktop-based applications. Particularly for businesses, this could be a major deal-breaker. To solve that issue, Google has partnered with Citrix to create a new build of Citrix Receiver, a piece of software that should leave its existing beta trials and hit the public universe this summer.

We saw a brief demo of the software used on a CR-48, and while the setup was obviously optimized, it worked shockingly well. A backend Windows server had a copy of Photoshop CS5 onboard, and the CR-48 was able to load it within a matter of seconds through Receiver. Not a light model -- we're talking about the full, bona fide version of Photoshop.

Editorial: Google clarifies Chromebook subscriptions, might have just changed the industry

The competition is really heating up across the board. In other discussions about Microsoft limiting the ability to install other OSes, it could further provide impetus for some to consider other choices.

 

[whs]

Patrik, this is not a good comparison

1. Home and Student has also One Note, Clip Organizer and Picture Manager

2. For the $139, you get a 3 user license: Newegg.com - Microsoft Office 2010 Home & Student 3-User

 

[pparks1]

Well, I did link to the Amazon page for the 1 user Office 2013 Home and Student and it was $139.99.

In the past, I thought that the Office Home and Student was a 1 user, but 3 PC install. So, technically if you have 4 users in the home, you are really supposed to get 4 user licenses. That was my understanding

Usually the advertisements are stated as 1 user/3PC's as shown below;
Amazon.com: Microsoft Office Home & Student 2010 - 3PC/1User (Disc Version): Software

Either way, if you need Outlook, Publisher, or Acccess...you are looking at Office Pro and that is $400 per 1 license.

 

[whs]

I guess it depends on your particular needs and how far you can 'stretch' the Eula. I work with Office Home and Student 2007 since 2007 and never felt the need to have anything more.

 

[pparks1]

I guess it depends on your particular needs and how far you can 'stretch' the Eula. I work with Office Home and Student 2007 since 2007 and never felt the need to have anything more.

Agreed, I don't even have office installed at home. It's on my work laptop and that is good enough for me. I saw no reason to spend any money on MS Office. I can also use the freebie web apps to if push came to shove.

 

[R0bR]

Now its getting ridiculous, Google releases a Chromebook with touch and it's not your $300-$450 laptop...nope, this one packs a nice price of about $1300. What's worse is that tech bloggers are praising this thing and even saying it is better than a MacBook Air or Surface Pro both of which run real applications. Yup, $1300 for a laptop that runs a browser.

Google takes on Apple with Chromebook Pixel, touchscreen and all | News | TechRadar

This comment isn't really directed at the product itself, it's just another example of how tech bloggers continue to praise Google and Apple but blast Microsoft. Windows RT can't run legacy apps and that's a no no making RT Tablets too expensive, Chromebooks can't run legacy apps and they are great regardless of cost. So much for these tech bloggers reporting on technology without being totally biased.

 

[Coke Robot]

Now its getting ridiculous, Google releases a Chromebook with touch and it's not your $300-$450 laptop...nope, this one packs a nice price of about $1300. What's worse is that tech bloggers are praising this thing and even saying it is better than a MacBook Air or Surface Pro both of which run real applications. Yup, $1300 for a laptop that runs a browser.

Google takes on Apple with Chromebook Pixel, touchscreen and all | News | TechRadar

This comment isn't really directed at the product itself, it's just another example of how tech bloggers continue to praise Google and Apple but blast Microsoft. Windows RT can't run legacy apps and that's a no no making RT Tablets too expensive, Chromebooks can't run legacy apps and they are great regardless of cost. So much for these tech bloggers reporting on technology without being totally biased.

The day internet appliances cost more than every other internet appliance (many other of those devices are of ACTUAL use however) is the day I say no deal. No deal.

I'm still trying to figure out if you can even connect an external hard drive to it, or even at least an android smartphone. Why the bullocks would you spend that kind of money to run a free web browser and web apps? Can it even be used to manage an android smartphone?!

 

[pparks1]

Well, to be fair, the story said that the Chromebook was trying to take on a MacBook air. It didn't flat out say it was better.

A screen resolution of 2560x1700 is pretty outstanding. And although I am personally not a fan of touch, tons of people are...so it has that going for it.

It does look pretty nice, and compelling for those of us who still prefer a laptop form factor.

And for those who are interested in the cloud, having 1TB of storage space for free for 3 years is not a bad deal either. Of course, those of us with limited bandwidth would struggle to push that much data...it would probably take 3 years.

All in all, I have a chromebook that I am using for this very post. It was $250 and for that price I absolutely love the device. I don't yet see the value in this for $1299 though. It's got some things going for it, but I'm not going to buy one.

 

[Coke Robot]

Well, to be fair, the story said that the Chromebook was trying to take on a MacBook air. It didn't flat out say it was better.

A screen resolution of 2560x1700 is pretty outstanding. And although I am personally not a fan of touch, tons of people are...so it has that going for it.

It does look pretty nice, and compelling for those of us who still prefer a laptop form factor.

And for those who are interested in the cloud, having 1TB of storage space for free for 3 years is not a bad deal either. Of course, those of us with limited bandwidth would struggle to push that much data...it would probably take 3 years.

All in all, I have a chromebook that I am using for this very post. It was $250 and for that price I absolutely love the device. I don't yet see the value in this for $1299 though. It's got some things going for it, but I'm not going to buy one.

A better value is a 64 gig Surface RT and buying an external hard drive of 3+ TBs of local storage, or even a NAS setup as you will still have plenty money left over for that. Maybe even a 64 gig Surface Pro with touch/type cover keyboard, and again, external hard drive, possibly NAS setup. Three years of a TB of storage?....ehhhh.... That's iffy.

 

[pparks1]

A better value is a 64 gig Surface RT and buying an external hard drive of 3+ TBs of local storage, or even a NAS setup as you will still have plenty money left over for that. Maybe even a 64 gig Surface Pro with touch/type cover keyboard, and again, external hard drive, possibly NAS setup. Three years of a TB of storage?....ehhhh.... That's iffy.

That's assuming that you want tons of local storage space!. I'm transitioning from stuff stored local to having it available more online and available from any device and from anywhere. With things like Skydrive, and Google Drive, and DropBox you end up with your critical data in 2 locations. It's an automatic backup you don't have to think about. So, if one day your house burns to the ground, you haven't lost your precious pictures and home movies that are truly irreplaceable. People are starting to see the value in this.

 

[Coke Robot]

A better value is a 64 gig Surface RT and buying an external hard drive of 3+ TBs of local storage, or even a NAS setup as you will still have plenty money left over for that. Maybe even a 64 gig Surface Pro with touch/type cover keyboard, and again, external hard drive, possibly NAS setup. Three years of a TB of storage?....ehhhh.... That's iffy.

That's assuming that you want tons of local storage space!. I'm transitioning from stuff stored local to having it available more online and available from any device and from anywhere. With things like Skydrive, and Google Drive, and DropBox you end up with your critical data in 2 locations. It's an automatic backup you don't have to think about. So, if one day your house burns to the ground, you haven't lost your precious pictures and home movies that are truly irreplaceable. People are starting to see the value in this.

I'd prefer tons of local storage for things like video files, Cloud storage for sensitive data like documents, pictures, and MAYBE music depending on how large the Cloud drive is. Digital films can be replaced, but years and years old digital images and documents can't be too easily.

I'm actually transitioning off my old Windows Live account to a new Outlook.com domain. I'm going to be buying like 20 gigs or so of SkyDrive storage to move what I currently have from the Live account over. And then later, add more onto it to save my music, as losing a large music library has left me in a musical drought.

Backup, backup, backup, backup!!!

 

[pparks1]

I'd prefer tons of local storage for things like video files,

For many of us, it's the only practical location anyway. I only have 2Mbps for my upload at home, I cannot efficiently upload hundreds of GB's of data.

However, I don't think many are consuming that much storage space any more these days. People use their cell phones for video anymore. And many don't even use a real camera, just the one built into the cell phone.

Cloud storage for sensitive data like documents, pictures, and MAYBE music depending on how large the Cloud drive is.

All of my digital music for the past year has been purchased from Amazon MP3. They store whatever I buy from them for free. I honestly haven't ripped 95% of my music collection, as I don't spend much time listening to the old stuff anyway. It just sits collecting dust in my basement.

Backup, backup, backup, backup!!!

Absolutely. I image my desktop regularly. I have my video files on my secondary internal hard drive of my desktop and it's replicated to an external eSATA dock and kept offsite. My server has a secondary physical drive for backups. I run a robocopy sync job daily at 1:00am which replicates my data directory from the 1st drive to the 2nd drive and it keeps 7 days worth of backups. In addition, I have a pair of external hard drives that I bring home about once per month and replicate my data onto and then store offsite. And now I am starting to utilize the nearly 100GB of free storage space i have with dropbox, skydrive, google drive, Amazon cloud drive, and SugarSync to ensure my pictures and documents are in more than 1 location. And every now and I again, I fire up Acronis True Image and just make a copy of my servers data directory somewhere else for good measure.

 

[Coke Robot]

I'd prefer tons of local storage for things like video files,

For many of us, it's the only practical location anyway. I only have 2Mbps for my upload at home, I cannot efficiently upload hundreds of GB's of data.

However, I don't think many are consuming that much storage space any more these days. People use their cell phones for video anymore. And many don't even use a real camera, just the one built into the cell phone.

Cloud storage for sensitive data like documents, pictures, and MAYBE music depending on how large the Cloud drive is.

All of my digital music for the past year has been purchased from Amazon MP3. They store whatever I buy from them for free. I honestly haven't ripped 95% of my music collection, as I don't spend much time listening to the old stuff anyway. It just sits collecting dust in my basement.

Backup, backup, backup, backup!!!

Absolutely. I image my desktop regularly. I have my video files on my secondary internal hard drive of my desktop and it's replicated to an external eSATA dock and kept offsite. My server has a secondary physical drive for backups. I run a robocopy sync job daily at 1:00am which replicates my data directory from the 1st drive to the 2nd drive and it keeps 7 days worth of backups. In addition, I have a pair of external hard drives that I bring home about once per month and replicate my data onto and then store offsite. And now I am starting to utilize the nearly 100GB of free storage space i have with dropbox, skydrive, google drive, Amazon cloud drive, and SugarSync to ensure my pictures and documents are in more than 1 location. And every now and I again, I fire up Acronis True Image and just make a copy of my servers data directory somewhere else for good measure.

Uploading takes forever for me as well, it's generally a few nights worth of uploading for about 12 or so gigs of data. But on Windows Phone, I have SkyDrive uploading set for every picture I take, literally EVERY picture. I have to go through my SkyDrive uploads and delete the crap shots. The most I think I'll ever have uploaded is maybe 90 gigs, possibly 120 over a span of a year or so.

I think it's very strange how computing usage has become. Back in the days of the PC up to around mid-2000, faster processors, better speeds, better resolutions, and larger hard drives were ALL the rage. Just wow! It used to be that people used PCs with 10 inch screens at 640x480 and maybe five gigs of hard drive space. Nowadays, people use 10 inch touchscreens with 16 gigs of flash storage along with some cloud storage. Very odd. Most people I come across that ask me to find them a laptop with a large hard drive capacity seem to do so in vain as when I work on those exact PCs, the hard drives aren't even close to being used. Maybe 50 gigs at the most out of a 320 or 500 gig hard drive. I usually will use most of that space for a system image and backup on a partition.

Music is something I roll around in and if I don't have that and have good quality sounds, I will quite literally die! I'll listen to mostly anything except death metal, speed metal, reggae (sometimes), and the latest autotuned crap that gets pumped out every few months. So basically, I can go from Frank Sinatra to Deadmau5 to Depeche Mode to Ozzy Osbourne to Oomph! to Rammstein and then to all my worldly artists. It's intense. Ever since I lost most of my music in my recent hard drive death, I've had to rely on what was on my Windows Phone and that ain't enough. If I had all that saved to SkyDrive, I'd be fine.

Part of my desktop rebuild is going to be used for Storage Spaces, as that seems to be the best route to take (as you once really well explained it in a different thread) over the other options. Lots and lots of hard drives are in the future.... Speaking of such, those prices need to come down some more! It's a tad annoying to see two terabyte external drives that cost less than internal drives. I'm tempted to buy the external drives and rip out the hard drives for internal use...

 

[R0bR]

A screen resolution of 2560x1700 is pretty outstanding. And although I am personally not a fan of touch, tons of people are...so it has that going for it.

This high of a resolution is a waste on this type of device. This device is browser based, the web is optimized for speed which means that overall it is low resolution graphics that you are working with. Also for media the most you would need is 1080P, so really what's purpose does this display provide? It doesn't run any actual applications like Photoshop that would take advantage of such a display.

As far as the article, it may not say it's better but the fact they are even comparing it to actual laptops is a joke. People criticize that Mac products are expensive and here comes this "dumb terminal" that costs more and they are giving it a positive review. It's not only this article, there plenty of others giving it a thumbs up.

 

[Techwavy]

It may not have a very high resolution or anything but its built for web unless it has struggles with watching HD video then there's no problem. It looked pretty decent on a camera recording. But I don't really know if you can download to a flash drive. The key performance of this laptop is the web. So like I would use it for web time an etc. I would use it for forums,youtube,etc. But if it can run photoshop cs5. Then thats impressive for something so cheap. The closest i've heard about it was using unbunto on it. They ran minecraft on max fps on it and it was just smooth. Its a nice buy for the price Im a mainly web person so I would open up the browser and let it rip.

 

[Ray8]

Chromebook Pixel allows for custom bootloaders, is Linux-friendly

Not only have kernel patches been submitted for the hardware, but Google's Bill Richardson has now laid out exactly how to load up the devices with Linux Mint.

Chromebook Pixel allows for custom bootloaders, is Linux-friendly

Maybe there is some method to their madness.

 

[Coke Robot]

I'd just install Windows 8 as it'd be senseless to install a non-touch optimized system on a touch screen.