I mentioned a few days back that my daughter was having me auction off her Samsung Chromebook on eBay. As much as she liked it, the Google Docs word processor was not quite compatible enough with Microsoft Word to be useful for her job, so she bought a more traditional laptop.
I have it at my house at the moment, waiting for the winning bidder to actually send the money, so I took it out of the box and spent some time playing with it. If you need something for checking your email, surfing the web, and doing some word processing on the road, this is a very cute and compact alternative to a laptop, with the full keyboard that many tablets do not have. The temptation to buy it from her if the winning bidder does not respond is very strong.
I seem to remember you having PC upgrade problems recently.
ReplyDeleteWell, with a Chromebook, you no longer have that problem at all.
No upgrade Tuesday. No waiting for the machine to update before you can turn it off.
Nor any required security updates that you missed that enabled your machine to become a bot in some Hax0rs malicious network.
Etc. Etc.
These can be major advantages if your point in using a computer is to get some work done on some documents, or watch videos, or whatever, and not become a slave to the machine.
These are the principal reasons my wife has used a Chromebook exclusively for the past 3 years (various Samsung models).
The problems were pretty transitory. I will say that you describe well a lot of very nice aspects of the Chromebook. But the need to be able to interact with student papers in Microsoft Word is pretty severe. That's part of why this house hasn't gone entirely Linux.
ReplyDeleteOpenOffice/LibreOffice run on alternative platforms and are supposed to be compatible with Word.
ReplyDeleteThey're supposed to be, Mauser, but a number of people have found that certain features they don't need aren't quite compatible.
ReplyDeleteThere's a LOT in Office to emulate, and there's a LOT of stuff that's only used by a small portion of the total Office user base, so there's lots of nooks and crannies that might never have 100% compatibility.
If one of those features affects you, then you have to decide if you want to spend the effort working around the incompatibility, if it's even possible.
I don't have specifics but I've seen several people say that a feature they need doesn't quite work right.
Rick C.: Yes, OpenOffice is about 98% compatible. But there are little formatting quirks that do not work exactly the same. Worse: the last thing I want to do is return a marked-up paper to a student in a format that they can't read.
ReplyDelete