I have installed Neverware’s ChromeOS on two old netbooks this week. The short review: it’s great! The longer review, with some helpful tips to get Netflix and Amazon/Hulu working, below.
First of all, it’s free for personal use. It’s based on Chromium, the open-source Chrome, and functions identically to a commercial Chromebook in most respects. Secondly, it installed in a few minutes on two old Acer Aspire One netbooks, and it runs so fast! I have no regrets.
You need a ChromeOS, Windows or MacOS computer to make the installation USB drive. It won’t work on Linux. It was a seamless process. The files are about 650MB and you can look over the installation instructions here and see the tested compatible computers here.
These are the tweaks I performed to get Amazon, Hulu and Netflix to work.
I followed these easy instructions: Enable Netflix and other protected content on v45 and above.
On one netbook that was it, I was done. But the other one played Amazon fine, yet stubbornly refused to play Netflix. So, I also cleared all my Netflix cookies by going to http://netflix.com/clearcookies and that did it.
So now I have renewed two derelict computers that were sitting on the shelf in the utility room. They will keep themselves up to date and function beautifully for quite some time. I’m very happy!
Thanks, Neverware!
