A New Chromebook

Originally shared by Brian G. Fay

A New Chromebook

I’m bored. My wife’s new Chromebook arrived today and I was psyched to set it up for her. I’m the guy who does that stuff around our house. Her Samsung Chromebook’s screen had gone bad on her, working only when she positioned the hinge just right, and I had ordered the new Toshiba Chromebook 2 with the HD screen and 4GB of RAM. I let her unbox it and reminded her what our wifi password is. She typed in her Gmail address and password, and that was pretty much it. 

“Is that it?” she asked. 

“That’s pretty much it,” I said. 

The only tinkering I got to do was to put it on the Beta channel and switch the screen viewing ration to 1:3 so that the clock and icons on the shelf were more readable. This took all of one minute. 
Now she has a working computer and I’m bored. 

Windows 10 came out today, Microsoft taking the bold step of skipping over the odd-numbered releases despite those being the only ones that have ever worked well and diving into the darkness of the even numbers. I remember getting new Windows machines. With those I knew that I had a good couple hours of removing bloatware, installing software, updating anti-virus, and so on. Microsoft knows how to make for a fun first day with a new computer. 

These Google guys have it all wrong. Five minutes. Hell, not even five, and the machine is up and running, ready to do whatever she wants to do with it. 

“This is great,” she said. 

“Yeah,” I said, my head shaking, my voice falling. “It’s great.” 

I’m bored. There’s just nothing to do. So I pull out my Chromebook Pixel, open the lid, watch it boot automatically, log on, and in a few seconds I’m ready to write a short post about how bored I am with these damn Chromebooks. Almost bored enough to get a Windows machine again. Or a Mac. But no. I’m bored, but I’m not crazy.