Your slow laptop can turn into a sleek Chromebook

You don’t have to buy a new PC when you just want to browse the web faster

Chromebooks are known for their resourcefulness as Chrome OS often runs smooth as butter on the weakest possible configurations. While Google officially supports only a handful of devices that are custom-built to fit the OS, you’ll be delighted to learn that it’s possible to turn many old, slow laptops into fast Chrome OS machines. That’s thanks to Neverware’s CloudReady fork of Chromium OS, the open-source base of Google’s commercial product. The company focuses on businesses and schools that want to refresh their old hardware, but it also offers a free version of CloudReady to private users.

CloudReady officially certifies only a handful of models that you can find on Neverware’s website. Still, the company says that it should work on most laptops, though “uncertified models may have unstable behavior, and our support team cannot assist you with troubleshooting.” It’s still worth a try since you can give the OS a test run from a USB drive before installing.

I chose a 2008 HP EliteBook 2530p to test this myself. It’s a 12-inch Core 2 Duo laptop with 2GB of RAM and a 250GB HDD, so you can imagine that Windows is unusable on it these days. It’s one of the certified Neverware models, so the company tells us exactly what works and what doesn’t on the hardware. It warns me that I need to enable UEFI in my BIOS settings before attempting the installation and that the laptop’s dedicated Wi-Fi and mute buttons won’t work, so it encourages me to use the on-screen alternatives for that. Considering this computer is more than 12 years old and was never meant to run Chrome OS, that’s a pretty small list of problems.

Read more: https://www.androidpolice.com