Tell me about chrome books.

I want one with a bigger screen than an iPad, that connects with a wire to a printer, can take 50 gb plus of music on iTunes and hopefully I can play Words With Friends on it as well.
If it could cost less than £250 that would be great as well. Possible?
I do have an external hard drive would that connect and give me all the music space I need?

Any particular reason you want a chromebook which is not designed to do any of those things rather than a PC that is? Plenty in budget too.

Everyone was raving about them on the other thread. I need something for my iTunes as my mac book won’t connect and I don’t want to spend a potential fortune getting it fixed.

I have an acer chromebook R11, it’s way better than a £199 laptop deserves to be but I’m not sure it would be the right tool for what you’re looking for. You need to let go of internal storage. I have put my entire music library onto google’s servers and can now access it from phone, tablet and chromebook, as long as I’m on t’internet. Carrying an external hard drive around destroys any advantage the chromebook has over a pc.
Don’t know what words with friends is, but it’s not in the chrome store.
It might be worth waiting a bit, as rumour has it the next generation of chromebooks will be able to run android apps.

Chromebooks aren’t really suited for the itunes stuff. They’re best when dealing with web based stuff like spotify or google music

https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/3217385?hl=en-GB

“iTunes doesn’t work on Chromebooks, but you can listen to your music collection by moving it to Google Play Music”

Isn’t a Chromebook basically a web browser and little else? So you can use anything you can run under Chrome on a PC, and can’t run anything that you can’t? Or have I missed something? (I’ve never used one.)

Pretty much it’s a Web terminal

Cloud storage of all data

Google app suite is best but Microsoft 365 works I guess.

Printing MUST be via a print server, it either a pc or Mac with chrome running, or more sensibly a Google print ready printer (can be got for <£40) where you use Google servers as print servers.

Chrome books will not host any 3rd party software. Nor will it host hardware drivers other than basic HID (mouse, webcam, mic etc) or USB storage.

If your hardware can’t look after itself with its own Web connection (poss via phone Bluetooth for example) and a Web based app it’s not going to work.

Garmin are a bit shit and 20th century but you can just about get their latest hardware to work with a phone as the Web link. The idiots require a client app install to get Garmin to connect to a WiFi AP ffs! Its like the Internet never happened for them.

I have 4x chromebook and a chromebook and run two companies wholly within the chromebook /Google/android environment and it’s fantastic.

I haven’t really touched on all the best bits but there’s plenty of good sites out there covering it

ive always sung the praises of chromebooks as i do little else other than surf the net. however, when i do want to do other things, such as store all my music and pics on the 1Tb of cloud storage ive got, its rubbish. i cant get my head around all the offline, google drive, my drive stuff and nothing ever goes where i want it, its a right faff.

spose thats not what theyre designed for tho, and im probably doing something wrong, but you cant beat the old drag and drop of microsoft, so i may go back to a small laptop 🙂

I love Chromebooks but mine (Acer c240) doesn’t do what I need it to in its original state (ie run some crappy proprietary whiteboard software, GNUcash, and connect to the printer) so I run a flavour of Ubuntu on it.
Installation is dead easy, though voids warranty as you have to open the case to remove the BIOS write-protect screw. As Stoner, I’m effectively running a company on a 180eur laptop! It has done a very good job for the last 2 academic years, and I can just leave it on my desk while my colleagues have to take their (insert expensive brand here) laptops home every night.
Google Drive is the sticking point, as it doesn’t have a linux client like Dropbox does.

Cheap laptop and backup HDD. You can still use Google drive etc to access some music over the network.

Drive can be accessed through the browser @ drive.google.com