Turn Your Old Netbook Into a Chromebook

A couple of months ago I shared some news about Kevin Jarrett's Project Chromebook blog on which he's sharing his experiences with Chromebooks in his elementary school. In Kevin's school they leased Chromebooks for a sixty day trial. Over the weekend I realized that there is another way that you can try the Chrome OS, install it on an old netbook. So that is exactly what I'm going to do.

I'm installing the Chrome OS on an Acer Netbook that I bought in 2009. I haven't used that netbook much over the last year so it's the perfect candidate for an OS facelift. To install the Chrome OS I'm following the directions that I found on Lifehacker.

Applications for Education
If your school is considering acquiring Chromebooks and you have some older netbooks kicking around, install the Chrome OS on them as a trial. Give them out to the tech savvy and the not so tech savvy people in your school and get some feedback. Bear in mind that depending upon the netbooks you have, the Chrome OS may not function exactly as designed, but it should give you a good sense of the experience.

Another way to test out the Chrome OS is to run it in a virtual machine. Chris Pirillo has a video about this. The video is embedded below.

Learn more about this on Chris.Pirillo.com