Neverware CloudReady: turning old laptops into Chromebooks

Over the past week I've been exploring CloudReady from Neverware. The idea behind it is that it takes an old laptop and effectively converts it into a Chromebook.

I took an old Windows laptop (I'm not sure of the exact age but I think it was about 10 years old). It was running so slowly that it was practically unusable. I replaced it with their operating system, which is based on the Chromium OS, to turn it into a Chromebook. The process was pretty straightforward - it required me to make an installer on a USB stick and then I ran the installation. Overall it took less than an hour but it would be quicker if I were to repeat it. It was a full replacement of the OS, but given that the laptop was destined to be disposed of, this wasn't a problem.

I've now got a fully working Chromebook and I'm really impressed with it. It runs really quickly - the browser is at least as fast as my current Windows laptop and I can watch/stream videos on it clearly. You can see a picture of it below running the GeoGebra app that's available for Chromebooks.



The only issue I had was that it initially wouldn't connect to WiFi. This wasn't a problem with CloudReady - the WiFi was temperamental on the laptop when it was running Windows. I ended up buying a USB WiFi adapter and it now works fine. I found it difficult to find any information online as to which adapters were compatible with Chromebooks - a couple of forums suggested that I needed 802.11n so I bought this one: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00EZOQFHO/ and it worked immediately.

Overall I think this has the potential to be really useful for schools - if they have old laptops that run really slowly then they can convert these to fast Chromebooks. It's free for home users and £10 per device, annually, for schools. You can see more details at: https://www.neverware.com/   

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