Chromebooks vs. Laptops

Chromebooks are often mistaken for everyday, common laptops, and in many ways, the Chromebook is just an ordinary laptop. However, there are some features which distinguish a Chromebook from the typical laptop, the most remarkable of these are:

• It runs ChromeOS

This is a Linux-based operating system, which almost completely revolves around the Google Chrome web-browser.  You might initially think that this will drastically limit the potential capabilities of a modern-day sophisticated laptop. However, you will be quite amazed to see the countless amount of your every-day tasks the Chrome web-browser can simply take over. ChromeOS has been created and developed to show the people the amount of day-to-day tasks that are able to be performed online nowadays. The Google development team has constantly been adding new features and support to their web-browser ever since it was first released, to enable them to create an operating system such as ChromeOS. Due to their advanced HTML5 compatibility, video streaming works without a problem, and documents & spreadsheets can be easily read and edited by their free online Google Docs platform.

• It is lightweight, in almost every way

ChromeOS allows the laptop to be lightweight in every single way; the operating system does not take up a lot of drive space and also does not require a lot of processing power to function properly. Therefore Chromebooks usually are equipped with lightweight ARM or Intel Celeron processors and still have the similar browsing experience of a high-end Windows laptops or a Macbook. Due to this, Chromebooks are often equipped with smaller sized screens to make the laptop lighter and more portable. So in short, everything from the OS to the design of the Chromebook is lightweight.

• It stimulates online use and the use of Google products

Google has a wide range of different famous online products which are free to use; (such as Google Maps, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar etc. ) Google Chrome is especially optimized to be able to work seamlessly with these particular Google services. Just like for Android smartphones, it is recommended to synchronize your laptop with your Google account as this will improve your general browsing experience, however this is not required; ChromeOS also allows you to login as a guest and browse normally. A Chromebook usually comes with only a small amount of local storage (usually 16-32 GB), this is due to the fact that Google wants to stimulate you to have most of your files stored in online cloud storage. Chromebooks usually come with 100 GB of free cloud storage for 2 years. The main advantage and reason to promote cloud storage is the fact that you can access your files from anyplace at anytime without having to access a particular PC everytime.

• It does not boot up like your usual Windows laptop

You turn it on and…. wait what? Has it already started? You click on the Chrome icon, Google Chrome loads instantaneously… the boot-time of your Chromebook is usually just a few seconds. Why? Because most Chromebooks are equipped with a SSD (Solid State Drive), which has a much higher reading (and writing) speed than the regular optical hard drives in most Windows laptops. If you are used to the regular windows boot-times you will be amazed the first time you get your hands on a Chromebook. If you happen to have a Macbook however, you will be used to these boot-times and will not see this as anything particularly special.