Life with Chrome OS, One Week On!

So its been a week since I made the switch to my chromebook being my primary device, and I can honestly say I still love it. Its fast, practical and once you make the adjustment to living in the cloud, almost just as functional for most peoples needs as a windows machine. Today I thought I would write a bit about the offline abilities of the Chrome OS and how functional it really is.

Due to my household being a relatively heavy Internet user we have use our aloud downloads for the month and our speed is capped. When I first realised this a little bit of panic did cross my mind as the practicality of Chrome OS is almost 100% online, so I thought that I may have shot myself in the foot. I decided the best method would be to transfer my current Uni assignments I was working on to the built in hard drive in my HP Pavilion 14-c001tu Chromebook. I then changed some settings in Google Doc's and disconnected from my network to see exactly what it could do offline. Much to my relief Google Docs works perfectly offline. I was still able to edit and save my documents (on my hard drive rather than in google drive) and able to view .docx and .pdf files not a problem. this functionality I think is a vital feature for the future success of cloud dominated computing and has confirmed to me that a chromebook will be more then sufficient for 95% of my needs. whilst playing around I also enabled offline use for my Google Calender and Gmail, both of which work exactly as you would expect with any changes saved locally to auto update in the cloud on re-connection.

The other first experience I had in the last few days was printing with my chromebook, although you cant go installing the drivers for a printer and connecting it via USB to the chromebook like a traditional PC, Google Print is available. I was fortunate that my current printer was google print capable and all I had to do was set up my google print account. this involved putting in the IP address of a google print ready printer to your browser changing some very basic setting and logging in. one this is done you can print anything from anywhere just as you normally would. The one gripe i have with the print capabilities of Chrome OS is that I have a wifi network attached printer. unlike windows I cant view the other items attached to my network and i think this feature given a large number of printers are network attached would be a huge plus to enable offline use.