IT Ideas

Fancy a new Chromebook? There were lots on offer at BETT this year. If you are after touch-flip devices, the main manufacturers were all sporting new Gemini Lake Celeron based devices. All based on the N4000 chip - this gives them all an Octane score of around 16000. Much better than we have seen from entry-level  devices before. The first one - the Dell 3100 2-in-1 I liked this one - seemed pretty rugged. However, Dells support has been pretty poor in the past.... The next - HP X360 G2   Other than being blue - it looks much like the current X360. This model had 8Gb of RAM. My favorite of the 4 new 11" flip devices.  And from Acer - an updated Spin 511 Pretty similar to the current Spin - just faster with the N4000 chip. Acer was making a big thing about their new reliability pledge. If it fails in warranty - they fix it and refund you the cost of the device. They have some ground to make up on the reliability ...

I had a chance to have a brief spin with one of the first AMD based Chromebooks the other day (thanks to Ian Nairm and C-Learning) at BETT, the HP 11A G6 EE. This device uses the AMD A4-9120C APU and the quick benchmarks I managed run set this Chromebook a bit above the current G5 and G6 EE's from HP and perform better than the HP 360 G1 and Acer Spin.  In terms of physical appearance and connectivity - it much the same as current gen HP 11's and similar "clam-shell" Chromebooks. The model I looked at was touch screen and the screen folded 180 degrees. It's not as good a performer as the new Gemini Lake Celeron based Intel devices. They seem to be hitting around 16000 on a quick Octane Benchmark (all I had time to run). However, they are more expensive. However, the graphics performance did seem good - webcam was responsive and high-resolution video was smooth - the Radeon R4 Graphics clearly helping here. It's good to see lower-end Chromebook ...

This is a brief demo of how to make a sign in system using Chrome Sign Builder, Google Forms and a Kiosk mode Chromebook.