Ro5ey – fairly sure a chromebook won’t do itunes.

For the rest of it, the chromebook should be fine though you’d need to move to cloud storage for your photos (well in theory, I suppose you could use a USB hard drive)

A quick praecis of Chromebook can and cant’s:

1) Photos

SSD versions have small local drives, not ideal for local media storage. New chromebooks come with free 100Gb+ storage offers from Google. Cloud storage of media is good for redundancy/backup assuming you can live with the tin foil hat issue of relying on a single hosting co. You can store images in Picasa Web Albums or GDrive. Or any other web based service you desire.

2) Music

Google Play Music is a pretty good system. You can upload up to 20,000 (I think) songs from your existing Hard Drive stored collection, you can also migrate from your iTunes library (there are google how tos available – there is no iTunes webapp for chromeos). You can sync selected music to any device running the google music app. There is a google music app for iphone/ipad. You can also stream play (over data network/wifi) your library as you wish. You can buy new music from google play store. If you buy from an alternative source, you will need to download it to your chromebook and upload it to your Google library.

3) Office suite

You can open ANY microsoft file in google docs/sheets/slides etc
You can convert any google file type into the corresponding MS file type
You can print/export/save any file as a pdf.
You can automatically save files from your gmail inbox to gdrive seamlessly (this is ace, BTW)
Except for <3% of users (Superusers) you will be able to do anything you would in MS on google docs/sheets.

4) Printing

Chromebook can print to network enabled printers, google print deployed through chrome will also link any google device you are logged into to any printer that is attached to another google device you have log in on whether on the same network or not.

5) Peripherals

USB memory sticks, fine. Most Chromebooks have SD card readers too. They often have bluetooth as well. Wireless mice usually fine, I can vouch for Logitech ones.

HOWEVER

Not all USB devices have drivers built for ChromeOS. This applies to Garmin. ANT sticks and Garmin connections mainly dont work. And since you cant download any client software you cant tell the chromebook to talk to them either. The solution is of course network enabled peripherals/gps units, or for Garmin to join the 20th century and build webbased apps to manage data transfer over USB.

I would point out that using MS documents isn’t always easy. We’ve actually found that for anything that’s going to go outside of us, (eg CVs), we do it using Office Online (MS’s official online version of word, excel, powerpoint) which works the same as full MS office.

Using the google apps, we found that importing and exporting lead to formatting issues in many cases. Fine for a simple document, less good for something like a CV, etc. Specifically, we could have something that looked fine on our chromebook but open it on a Windows computer and it’d be wrong. Same for saving to PDF on the chromebook.

FWIW, no problems plugging in my Garmin (605 and 800) to my chromebook but only as USB devices – eg I just open a file explorer to import/export rides.

nemesis – sorry, meant to say that they will often work as dumb data units, but you cant use them with the trainer programme for example.

Yeah, I figured, just wanted to be clear that it works but not with full functionality (eg direct upload).

Stoner … That’s a great post, one that more than just me will be able to use

Thanks very much