(chants) Is your laptop old and crappy?
Download chrome and make it snappy.
Are you trying to be frugal?
Bye, bye windows.
O
K,
Google!
- Why do I have to pick one?
- What?
- No, I'm tired of it.
For years now, consumers have been stuck asking,
do I go for a Windows laptop or a Chromebook?
Knowing that niether of them can fully match the features
of the other, and that once they pick a path
they're completely locked in
until they replace the whole machine.
And, it's so frustrating, because the actual hardware
in these computers, is especially in some cases,
darn near identical!
At least, that's how it has been.
This summer, Google reversed course and released their cloud
centric OS to the general public
for free.
Which means that you,
yes, you James Smith,
can install Chrome OS anywhere you want.
That disgusting laptop
used for cooking videos in the kitchen?
Chromebook.
Your great Aunt's anemic Windows PC
she somehow manages to break every month?
Boom. Now it's a Chromebook.
But is Chrome OS the solution for an aging computer?
To find out, we voluntold our team to bring
in any old laptops they could find, to see
if Google could breathe new life into their aging hardware.
And, I gotta say it is looking pretty good.
It can even play this segue to our sponsor.
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- [Adam] So you brought in this
laptop for us to test out.
Here's your laptop.
Tell us about it, what is it?
- It? It's an HP G56.
It's a ThinkPad X230.
I bought this, oh geez, when did I buy it?
2012?
- Oh, it must be like 2014 or something like that.
- Oh, I have no idea. Probably I got it in 2001?
- [Adam] 2001?
- Yeah. No?
- (Adam) You mean 2011.
- 11 oh, yes. 2011. 11.
Yes. 2011.
- I bought this laptop at the Best Buy
that I used to work at back in like 2014.
My wife and I were doing long distance at that time,
and she had a real piece of (beep),
(laughs)
so, she needed a new one,
and so I surprised her with this.
Now this is a bit of a piece of (beep) too
'cause it's been so long.
- I'm a distracted person
and I was trying to do some writing and I, it was very hard.
So my dad's like, I'm buying you a computer that
won't be connected to the internet.
But, it's so cumbersome and slow that it didn't help.
- I bought it anticipating
that I would do a lot more traveling
than I've ended up doing.
- This is like, my school computer.
I got it because is like, it just so gigantic.
- [Adam] So what we're gonna do
is that we're gonna install Chrome OS on it.
- I'm very curious if it's gonna help.
- (Adam) Thank you sir.
Appreciate it.
- To quantify any gains that we might get from Chrome OS,
we need to do some baseline testing
before we install Google's operating system.
And, that's gonna be a little trickier than usual
because Chrome OS does not have the same robust suite
of benchmarking tools, that PC enthusiasts have
come to expect on Windows machines.
But, we did find a few browser based benchmarks,
and we were able to create some
of our own real world benchmarks to fill in the gaps.
First up, we measured how long it took to boot the device,
open a browser, and start watching a YouTube video.
You know the basics.
We also timed waking up from sleep,
tested the number of chrome tabs each could handle.
We're calling 36 tabs a pass.
And, counted how many concurrent 1080p streams
we could get running without any stutters.
We then followed this up a battery test, to see
if Chrome OS can not only make your system faster,
but also run longer.
And, just how slow are these computers?
(laughs)
Pretty bad.
Lloyd's old MacBook took
almost 30 seconds to wake from sleep.
Sleep? More like mostly dead.
And, Horts's HP G56?
That took over five minutes to reach YouTube thanks to
its ungodly slow 3,200 RPM hard drive.
Making matters worse,
it only managed a single 720p stream
before giving up the ghost.
As for performance in a browser, in our tabs test,
the HP and ASUS units almost got a pass crashing out right
near the finish line, with Lloyd's pretty much
blowing its engine right out of the starting gate.
Failing at a truly pathetic four tabs.
Then in our 1080p playback test,
Jamie and Adam P's machines
both managed four 1080p YouTube streams
with no drop frames while Horst's
and Lloyd's devices failed
to play even a single stream at full HD.
In the battery test,
every machine sucked, frankly, but that's kind
of expected given the age of the cells in these devices.
The MacBook does take its first W here
though at nearly three hours of time away from the wall.
We also ran our canned benchmarks, but we're gonna talk
about those a little bit later since it's already clear
that some of these computers are struggling hard.
Maybe Chrome OS is the medicine they need.
So, let's get started.
The Chrome OS Flex install process is less than elegant,
but if you're chrome curious and halfway tech savvy,
you should be able to grab a USB stick
and follow along at home.
When you Google Chrome OS Flex,
you get taken to a Google Enterprise site
you then click try Chrome OS flex and,
it asks you to sign up and fill in your company's details?
You can safely ignore that.
What you actually want is this little link right here.
Then, it takes you to an installation guide.
Great. But, you need to download a Chrome extension
to create the installation media.
Seems kind of random, but there is a reason for it.
It's because this is actually a Chrome recovery
tool that's designed to repair
your existing Chrome OS install on your Chromebook.
They've just repurposed it.
At this point,
it confusingly asks you to choose from a selection
of Chromebooks, and it's here
that you select Chrome OS Flex,
and then target your preferred USB drive.
Note that this will wipe out any other data on that drive.
Once you've created your installation media,
you can plug her into your device and non-destructively boot
from the USB drive to try out the OS.
And, at this point
I could see you thinking,
this is super cool, maybe I'll dual boot it.
Hold it right there!
If you decide that you want to install Chrome OS
to your SSD or your hard drive,
rather than running it off of a USB stick,
you need to know that for some, probably stupid reason,
Google's Chrome OS Flex installer does not
allow you to choose where to install it.
So, even if you've set up one partition
for Windows and one for Chrome OS,
it will wipe out both of them.
Eliminating all of your data, making matters even worse,
if you have two completely separate physical drives,
it might target the empty one,
or it might target your main drive
and completely wipe out its data.
You've been warned.
So, make sure you've iether backed up everything important,
or as an alternative, you can whip
out your handy dandy LTT screw driver, available
in four colorways, and remove your main drive,
so you can keep your data safe
while you install Chrome OS on the spare one.
That is not okay, ya bunch of Googlers.
What is okay is our test results.
Sorry, spoiler, but it's the truth.
They're not great.
Just, okay.
Let's start with the canned benchmarks
that we mentioned earlier.
WebGL Aquarium, it's a bit of a mixed bag,
with both our ThinkPad and our ASUS machine
recording drops in performance.
While Horst's HP took a huge leap forward.
Then, in Whirple HTML 5, the story is the same,
with only the HP improving in any meaningful way.
In Speedometer 2.1, our story gets even less compelling,
and we see a consistent drop in performance
across all devices.
Chrome OS isn't looking so hot.
But, maybe this reigned in performance is one
of the ways that Chrome OS manages better battery life?
Well, if our testing is anything to go by, sorry Chief.
Not really.
The three laptops that we could measure,
all performed similarly to Windows, but slightly worse.
And, this was probably the biggest surprise for us,
because anecdotes from around the web have suggested
that Chrome OS Flex should have a huge, positive impact
on battery life.
With some people reporting 25 to 50% gains.
Maybe on these models, Chrome OS
didn't automatically kick on power saving mode?
Or, maybe their battery life tests were run
under different conditions.
I can't say, all I know is that at the moment,
Chrome OS Flex is feeling
a little more like Chrome OS flacid.
Fortunately, these lower scores that we've seen so
far do not tell the whole story.
The experience of using these devices
improved massively across the board.
And, you can see that in our real world tests.
Look at these boot times.
To be clear, a minute, it's still pretty slow,
but it's a lot faster than five minutes and 45 seconds.
We also saw more 1080p streams on every single device.
Faster wake from sleep, more tabs,
and just subjectively, less chugging
while navigating the operating system.
But don't listen to me, listen to our volunteers.
- Whoa.
Wow. It's like a different laptop.
- Woo. Oh my goodness, that is fast.
(laughs)
- Oh, that's pretty fast.
- The Q key has stopped working.
That's fine.
- [Adam] Yeah, there's something wrong with the keyboard.
- Yeah, if you could fix the keyboard, then this would be
a solid, like write your novel
at Starbucks sort of computer.
- Does the track pad work, too?
Oh, so it does, cool.
And, the nub works?
Sorry, the track point works perfectly fine.
- [Adam] Hey, look at that. It's running Chrome OS now.
- It's the click work.
- [Adam] I have unfortunate news for you.
- What?
- [Adam] Chrome OS does not work.
- Oh (laughs) okay.
- Ah, that. The keen item on you might have noticed
that Lloyd's MacBook was conspicuously absent
from our test results.
And, this seems like as good a time as any to
mention the minimum requirements for running Chrome OS Flex.
You will need an X 86 64 bit compatible device,
four gigs of RAM, and 16 gigs of internal storage.
With the final caveat being, that components made
before 2010 may result in a poor experience.
But, all of that is well
below the specs of Lloyd's old MacBook.
So, what's the deal here?
Well, the thing is, you might also have a poor experience
if you install Chrome OS Flex on a non-certified device.
Jamie's ThinkPad here, was actually our only device
that happened to be on Google's list, and it worked so well
that it might as well have been a Chromebook
in the first place. Almost.
We'll talk about that in a second.
As for the others, we saw issues that ranged
from mildly annoying, like mislabeled function keys
or nonfunctioning volume controls, all the way to
completely game breaking.
Like, not handing off rendering
to the dedicated GPU on Lloyd's MacBook,
even though, we could tell that Chrome OS was totally
still running behind that blank screen.
- Do you want to activate Chrome Box
the built in screen reader for Chrome OS?
If so, press the space bar.
- It's important to note, that even
if you install Chrome OS Flex on a certified device,
it doesn't quite have all the features of regular Chrome OS.
And, the big one here is no support for Android apps.
That reduces your options
for non-web apps to basically zilch,
and is a huge hit to the versatility of these things.
Your zombie Chromebook also won't get features
that are exclusive to Google certified devices
like access to their Linux Shell.
Of course, you tinkery types can remedy this
by using something called the Brunch Framework.
It's a community project that uses an official
recovery image to install Chrome OS
on any X 64 device,
but without any of the limitations
that Google imposes on Chrome OS Flex.
So, at the very least, you get your Android apps back,
which is a big plus, since it's honestly kind of confusing
that Google locked it off in the first place.
We didn't have a chance to give
Brunch Framework a shot though.
So, those of you who have, let us know what your experience
was like in the comments down below.
Bottom line, would we recommend Chrome OS Flex?
Well, even with the installation caveats, actually, yeah.
It really can breathe new life into an old device,
and is great if you just need something that's easy to lock
down to give to a child, or you want a device
for light computing tasks around the house.
If nothing else, it takes about 15 minutes to
get the installer onto a USB to try out.
So, it's at least worth giving it a shot.
And, if Chrome OS isn't your thing,
hey, there's lots of other options.
You could go with a lightweight Linux distro like Lubuntu
or antiX, or if you wanna stick with Windows,
the single best upgrade for older devices is an SSD.
Jamie's 10 year old ThinkPad felt like a totally
different machine with a solid state drive in it.
And, we're gonna throw a couple of super affordable options
in the link down below where
you will also find a link to our sponsor.
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- If you guys enjoyed this video
check out our Steam on Chromebooks video.
That's right, gaming on Chromebooks.
It's a thing.