IT Ideas

We have some ageing Haswell based Chromeboxes from HP, Asus and Acer. These boxes go end of life in terms of ChromeOS updates in less than a years time and while we can keep them going for a while - they will rapidly age after support ends. So our options are as follows: Buy new Chromeboxes - the basic ones are around £200. They have the advantage they run Android apps. However, the base model is only slightly faster than our current models. To get better performance you need to get the i3 model at >£300. Hack Cloudready onto the old Chromeboxes. We have done this to some older Samsung Chromeboxes and it works really well - but its a lot of effort! Buy refurb ultra small form factor PCs and install Cloudready.  So we tried the third option. The device we went for was the HP 8200 Elite Ultra Slim - i5 2400S, 8Gb DDR3 for £90 on eBay. We added a 60Gb SSD (had some spares) and installed Cloudready and enrolled on the domain. The result is a very quiet, fast Chrom...

A few days ago I got to try an Acer Spin 13 Chromebook. This is a high-end device - in the same price bracket as the Pixelbook. The one I looked was going to be priced around the £800. For this you get: 8th Gen i3 8100 processor 16 Gb RAM 64Gb SSD 13" touchscreen 2256x1504 and touch flip format  I ran a quick Octane benchmark and it scored a decent 33000 (my Pixel 2013 does around 21000). To use its similar to the Pixel 2013/15 - same aluminum case and quality finish. The Pixelbook is a much more luggable device if that's what you are after. So it's basically a fast, touchscreen, high-resolution Chromebook with a price to match. It feels well built and the keyboard was responsive - a nice machine. Would I buy one? Probably not. For school, the price is way too high and I manage just fine on a regular 11" Spin. As a private buyer, I currently have an Acer R13 Chromebook that does everything I need (not as fast) and cost less than half the price. I al...