If you go to Costa Mesa High, you’ve used a Chromebook. Even if you don’t go here you might have used one in the past, and we can all agree that there are better laptops available.
Even though Chromebooks aren’t the best, they certainly aren’t useless. Surprisingly, there are some pros to using a Chromebook as a student.
Chromebooks are incredibly compact and light.
It is so light that the Chromebook the school personally gave me only weighs 2.85 lbs. This makes it perfect for schools or businesses, since it is easily transportable
Aside from being compact, Chromebooks are quite cheap as well. Most cost less than a Windows PC or a Mac.
That makes it affordable for schools, allowing them to buy the needed thousands of them for students.
The Chromebooks the school gave most of their students are the Dell Chromebook 3100. These chromebooks are only $249, which is much cheaper than most laptops. But, their parts are pretty slow.
If you don't know much about computers, you wouldn't know if Chromebooks are fast or slow.
They have a dual-core processors which means the Center Processing Unit (CPU) only has 2 cores, so it can only process 2 things at once.
They also usually only have around 4 GB of Memory, and 64 GB of storage, which really limits the computer.
One of the defining characteristics of Chromebooks is that they use the Chrome Operating System (OS).
This is a big deal, because the OS is what runs all the applications and files.
So, there are a handful of apps you can download onto Chrome OS. However, if you wanted to do any type of gaming, you wouldn’t be able to run most games on it.
If you are into anything that requires you to download software of any kind, it most likely won't work.
Despite student’s arguments, this is a big reason schools like Chrome OS.
It is so limited they don't have to worry about blocking as many things on a Chromebook, because you aren’t able to access them anyways.
Even though the Chrome OS doesn’t work with a lot of things, it is still good.
The OS is advertised as being fast, especially in the startup.
If you have ever had a Windows PC, you know it takes a while to start, especially after a full reboot, but with the Chrome OS, it boots up almost immediately.
After all of that, we’re still left wondering, are Chromebooks actually worth it? Regardless of what students may believe, Chromebooks are a great tool to have in a school environment, both for the cost and the simplicity of the system.
