ordered this chromebook last time it was up, am Wooting from it right now. Streams media very well, Output to HDMI is great and easy to use, the changeover from a windows box to this is very easy. The one thing it doesn’t do that isn’t really a deal breaker for me is play DVD’s from an external drive. Other than that, I am quite pleased with it.
Does your Toshiba have the full-HD screen? (To me that would be the bigger issue). I have a 2GB Acer and the ram works fine for me…what I am increasingly NOT liking is the low-res screen. Now that I have higher resolution on my phone and tablet, the low res screen on my Chromebook is less acceptable.
We have this same one. My research said it’s one of the best due to the extra ram and the screen. I’m not sure I’d step back to 2GB at this point, based on the fluid experience I’ve seen with the Toshiba.
Thinking of also upgrading from an old Windows XP laptop. Wondering what Chromebook users use for word processing and spreadsheets? Google docs or are there other word processing programs like Word you can use??
The Google office suite pretty much replaces MS Office in every way. I’ve used Docs to write extremely lengthy term papers (with footnotes and references), and have used Slides for power point presentations that are every bit as good as MS Office. Long story short, Google office can do everything MS Office can with cloud backup built right in. Enjoy!
Can someone comment on battery life? Prod Desc says “long lasting” but with 3 cell battery. No offense marketing folks, but we normally differ on what “long lasting” battery means.
What thepurrfessor said. The Google Suite has a lot of things going for it. It automagically saves to the cloud every few seconds, so you never lose a paragraph, page, or entire document because you forgot to save it. It tracks revisions, so you can revert to ‘how it was before I hosed it up’. It’s cloud based so your document is available on all your devices without dinking around with uploading and downloading.
Collaborative editing is dead easy to do and remarkably useful. Share the document with your workgroup, spouse, kids whatever. Everyone can edit the document at the same time (If the owner grants that permission.) and you can watch the document take form very quickly. You can even open a chat window in the document to discuss things with your co-authors while you are all working on it.
The only downside I can think of is the other side of it being in the cloud. If you are planning to overthrow Woot, the NSA sez: “All your docs are belong to us!”
Glen
For a basic user it is fine. If you do a lot of excel with formula’s and VBA then the spreadsheets in google are not on par with excel. The basic functions are there but it’s just not ready to replace at this time. Live.com will get access to the web apps but I haven’t used them so I can’t attest to their quality
Got this for my wife last time Woot had it. She loves it. Sets her phone to be a mobile hot-spot when we travel and uses it in the car. I recommend adding a wireless mouse but she likes the trackpad.
It appears that this deal excludes the free Internet for life (200MB a month) via TMobile that was included last year with these. I guess that’s why it’s $30 cheaper than last year.
I was just comparing the specs, as I bought one of those as well. This one does lack the ‘free internet for life’ but has a NVIDIA 4-Plus-1 Quad-Core ARM Cortex-A15 (2.3GHz)“r3” processor vs last years Intel Celeron 2955U (1.4GHz) 2MB L3 Cache My version of last years model had 4GB onboard memory vs this models 2GB.
My family of 4 all use ours, and have no complaints. We plug the TV into the HDMI out and use it as our Netflix platform. The only problem I can think we had was when the charger was plugged into the Chromebook, but not into the wall (looks away, whistling) after being used all day and streaming 2/3 of a movie, Netflix started buffering. Plugging in both ends of the charger fixed this (amazing)!
I did add a wireless mouse and keyboard for ease of use, but the trackpad and built in keyboard work fine for 95% of our use.
Glen
It’s been a real go-to unit for me for my other-than-heavy-work stuff.
News, email, “social” networking, Netflix.
Good screen, OK keyboard. I do use it to invoice one client, but with a very simple program.
I’m not a big spreadsheet guy, but I do a lot of writing that ends up being dropped into magazines and books via InDesign.
The folks I deal with do NOT want Word docs or any others with embedded characters, as they can mess up the flow of layout. So, the Chromebook is good for plain text, but I still prefer a bigger keyboard with full travel keys. I guess you can create full-formatted docs for printing (letters, reports, etc.) with Google Docs, but that is not my area of expertise.
I have no experience creating web pages wit it, but would be curious to see some created via Chromebook.
In summary, this is the “people’s laptop” or the Volkslapper. Sure, enthusiasts may scoff, but the success of the Chromebook for a lot, lot of people is undeniable.
And yes, some will convert it to some other Linux system, etc., but those again are enthusiasts.
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