96 PCWorld OCTOBER 2020HERE’S HOW TURN AN OLD LAPTOP INTO A CHROMEBOOK
drive—when working within Windows
8.1, I could feel delays in response
during mundane use.
But our X240’s Intel Core i5-4300U
processor, 8GB RAM, and 500GB drive
absolutely crushes today’s budget
Chromebooks. It hangs pretty well with
midrange models, too, despite its
1366x768 resolution display. When we
tried CloudReady off the flash drive, the
touchscreen worked immediately and
the system ran buttery smooth; even
when installed on the hard-disk drive,
CloudReady had a much faster
response time than Windows 8.1.
Normally I’d swap in an SSD on a semi-older
laptop to prolong its life, but I found I could
use CloudReady on the X240’s existing
hardware without yearning for that upgrade.
Standby battery life also improved,
allowing us to go from a day of use between
charges in Win 8.1 to a couple of days in
CloudReady.IF YOU DON’T HAVE AN
OLD LAPTOP
Try hunting for gently used notebooks among
reliable friends or family. Local universities
sometimes also have surplus departments,
which offload older computer equipment by
selling it to the public. On occasion, you can
find good refurbished computers through
Amazon Warehouse (go.pcworld.com/amwh)
or Woot (go.pcworld.com/woot), too.FINAL TIPS
If your older laptop has low-end hardware (or
very old hardware) paired with a hard-disk
drive, you’ll get better performance by
swapping in an SSD (go.pcworld.com/swsd).
Make sure to find out the height of your
existing hard drive before buying, so that it’ll
fit the space.
Though CloudReady functions all but the
same as Chrome OS, one small difference is
that the keyboard layouts don’t match exactly.
Most keyboard commands (go.pcworld.
com/kcmd) carry over, but a few are a little
different. Our Lenovo ThinkPad X240 didn’t
even match Neverware’s suggestion of Ctrl +
F5 for taking a screenshot (go.pcworld.com/
tscr); for some reason, Ctrl + F11 worked
instead. You may also need to experiment to
find the right key combos.As a Windows PC, our Lenovo ThinkPad X240 was starting
to get long in the tooth. As a Chromebook, its hardware
automatically made for a smooth, pleasant experience.