Rants With Miles - My Chromebook

In terms of what they can do, most people can say that Chromebooks are bad computers - all they can do is surf the internet. Here at the RAUC, the general consensus is that "Chromebooks are good and Thinkpads are bad," and with the limited technology resources here, that holds true. However, outside of school, there are much better computers out there, and none of them are Chromebooks. First, let's go over what's bad about them:

• They can only surf the web; nothing else
• You can get "apps" for them, but most of them are just web links to downloads that don't work on Chrome
• You can't save pictures from an SD card on them! This is very annoying when I'm putting pictures on my blog (Miles on the MBTA), because I have to save them onto my father's Mac, then email them to myself, then go back onto my computer and save them onto that, which takes forever.

These are my main problems with Chromebooks in general - if you have any more, post them in the comments section below.

Now my Chromebook was an entirely different story. It was a piece of junk, and it was much worse than the school computers. First of all, it crashed about once a day, and froze much more often. Watching YouTube videos was a pain, as the buffer (buffering...grr!) would not move no matter what the video was. It was also insanely laggy, freezing for 30 seconds just to right click.

Now you may be wondering why I'm referring to the computer in the past tense. I still have it, but it's had a serious, more permanent crash. This has happened once before, but I was able to create a recovery USB drive to reboot it (losing all my saved pictures and downloads in the process) with the help of Travis the Chrome Ninja. This time, however, the recovery USB drive wouldn't work, and the Chrome Ninjas didn't respond to my email. I had to resort going onto the Acer website (the company that made my particular model of Chromebook) and go onto a live chat with a support guy named John Billo. He was kind of annoying, but I liked him because he thanked me for being such a good customer at the end (presumably he has to chat with very angry people). Unfortunately, I'll have to send my Chromebook to the Acer factory in some remote region of Texas, and this time I'll lose everything.