Turn your old and sluggish Windows run laptop into blitzing fast ChromebookWhat you’ll needHow to turn your old laptop into a ChromebookRun CloudReady on VirtualBoxMaster CloudReadyChange the backgroundInstall some apps
CloudReady (www.neverware.com) brings ?the Chromebook experience to your PC, and can either replace your existing Windows installation or run alongside it. The OS is aimed commercially at schools but is being given away free to home users.
What you’ll need
For starters you will require a CloudReady image file, which is a 600MB download and can be got from www.neverware.com. You will also need the Chromebook Recovery Utility. This is an official Google tool that lets you create recovery drives for Chromebooks but it can also be used to install Chrome OS (via CloudReady) on your PC. It requires the Chrome browser to work. You also need an empty USB flash drive (or SD card) to write the installer to. This should have a capacity of at least 8GB, though 16GB would be better.
How to turn your old laptop into a Chromebook
Run CloudReady on VirtualBox
You can also run CloudReady on your laptop without actually installing it. The process is long but if your prefer to run CloudReady temporarily, you can do so using VirtualBox ?(www.virtualbox.org). This isn’t as straightforward as setting up other operating systems, such as the different versions of Linux, because the download comes as a BIN image file and you’ll need to convert this into a format that VirtualBox can work. Unzip the chromiumos_image.bin file, click Start, type cmd and launch the Command Prompt. Inside the window, type: “c:\program files\oracle\virtualbox\VBoxManage.exe” convertfromraw “C:\Users[username]\Downloads\chromiumos_image.bin” cloudready.vdi You’ll need to add your username and the name of the location you saved the BIN file to. If for any reason you can’t ?find the saved file, search your hard drive for cloudready.vdi and copy it to the Desktop. Launch VirtualBox and click New. In the Name box, enter cloudready. Set the type as ‘Other’ and the version as ‘Other/Unknown’, then click Next. Assign a minimum of 2GB RAM to the OS, click Next and, in the Hard Disk box, select ‘Use an existing virtual hard disk file’. Click the folder icon and browse to the cloudready.vdi file. Click Open, then click Create. Make sure the CloudReady entry is selected on the left and click Settings. Go to System, Motherboard and tick ‘Enable I/O APIC’ and ‘Enable EFI’. Next, select the Processor tab (still under Settings) and tick ‘Enable PAE/NX’ next to Extended Features. Increase the number of processors from one to two or more. Finally, click Display on the left, change video memory to 128MB and tick ‘Enable 3D Acceleration’. Click OK and the changes will be applied. With CloudReady selected in VirtualBox, click the Start button at the top. The virtual machine will start and the memory will be tested. Once that’s complete, CloudReady will load and you’re ready to set it up.
Master CloudReady
Navigating CloudReady is fairly simple. You access your apps through the launcher and browse the web through Chromium. The system tray icon lets you switch Google accounts, manage your internet connection, adjust the volume and access Settings. You can also shutdown the OS or lock it. The Settings screen lets you manage your internet connection and install and update media plug-ins such as Flash. You can also set the wallpaper, get themes, and adjust settings for the mouse, keyboard and display. The Advanced Settings screen lets you manage the date and time (you’ll probably need to change this because we found CloudReady couldn’t identify our location correctly, ?so it was displaying the wrong time), as well as privacy settings, languages and downloads. Right-click a blank area of the Desktop to bring up a context menu that lets you autohide the shelf (the Chrome OS equivalent of the Windows taskbar) and change its position. By default, it sits at the bottom of the screen but it can be positioned on the left- or right-hand sides, which is useful for widescreen monitors.
Change the background
The dull, grey default background is one of the first things you’ll want to change in Chrome OS. Browse the web until you find an image you’d like to use as Desktop wallpaper. You can also use a photo of your own if it’s stored in Google Drive (you’ll need to download the Google Drive app from the Web Store). To change the background, right-click the Desktop and select Set Wallpaper. Click the plus symbol under Custom, then Choose File and select the wallpaper to use from either Google Drive or Downloads. You can adjust the position of the image, which can ?be centred, cropped or stretched.
Install some apps
Google has released hundreds of Apps for Chromebook so you should have no difficulty in finding them. While there lots of apps to choose from, the ones given below are must have.
Google Drive: Store and access all your files through Google’s cloud-storage service VLC for Chrome OS: An excellent media player that can handle any audio or video file JSTorrent: A BitTorrent client that works very well on Chromebooks (or PCs pretending to be Chromebooks) Evernote: The popular note-taking app Kindle Cloud Reader: Read ebooks directly in the Chromium web browser.
