Time To Retire or Another Lease On Life
You remember it as it was yesterday. Waiting in your house or office for that FedEx or UPS delivery. You can still smell that crisp clean box with the iconic Dell symbol on the front.
That was five years ago. What served you well with 4 GB or 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB hard drive just doesn’t cut it anymore for you. That last Windows update made you feel you had one of those computers you vaguely remember from the time that 2 digit years were still being written. Who would believe you would need to write a four digit year to prevent confusion between centuries?
Now you have a computer that sounds like a plane taking off when you are browsing https://google.com. When you open a cloud-based productivity tool like Google Docs or Office 365, you feel like you could go and enjoy a nice home cooked meal in the time it takes the browser to finish loading the application and is ready for typing.
Back in the 1990’s (not 1890’s or even 2090’s), computers were designed with the idea upgrading. When I refer to upgrade, I do not mean, toss the old computer in the trash or recycle bin and buy a new one. Small computer repair stores existed to upgrade the parts or inner workings of the computer to essentially provide you with a new computer. Computer repair technicians, depending on skill and knowledge, could actually replace everything from memory to processor chip to even the motherboard. Retail outlets, like Fry’s Electronics and Radio Shack, existed for the benefit of the professional and hobbyist. I, myself, was one of these hobbyists. Unfortunately, lacked the skill and knowledge, and produced, as a result, the equivalence of Frankenstein’s monster before the lightning strike that brought it to life.
Now, over 20 years later, computers are designed to dispose and replace. The parts that make up computers can be proprietary and the inner workings of computers may be impossible to replace and upgrade. What happens to these computers that no longer can be upgraded? They are disposed of in landfills, causing a tremendous negative impact on the environment.
To get back to this five year old laptop you have, what do you do? The simple answer is a term that I coined as chromatize.
What is chromatizing?
Chrom-a-tize: To convert an desktop or laptop personal computer into a Google Chromebook, using the operating system, Chrome OS Flex.
How did I come to discover this interesting way of breathing new life into an personal computer? This has been my multiyear journey of about 18 years in search of a Linux desktop distribution that was easy to work with, lightweight, low cost, and did not feel like I was settling by not using either Microsoft Windows or Mac OSX. I felt like I was Captain Ahab in search for his White Whale.
Most Linux distributions failed at least one of my criteria: I just felt like I was settling and I had to modify my personal process and software choices too much to warrant not being on either a Mac or Windows computer.
Enter Ubuntu
For anyone who truly wants to get into Linux, and wants the backing of a major company, such as Microsoft and Apple, then Ubuntu is the optimal choice. Ubuntu, produced by Canonical, is the distribution that companies use the most. I actually was an avid user of Ubuntu desktop edition for many years. Why did I switch back to Windows or Mac? Simply put, it failed the one criteria of feeling like I’m just settling. I was making too many changes to my work process and was not compatible with my team members at work, who used mostly Mac computers, and some Windows based computers. The other issue with Ubuntu is that it is definitely not lightweight. I tried running it on an older desktop computer and received less than desirable results. I felt like I was on a i386 machine running Windows 10.
Enter The Chromebook – the computer we’ve been waiting for since the 1996.
It was the late 1990’s. The Internet was in its infancy, mobile phones were phones that were hardwired inside your car with an antenna on the roof, and Larry Ellison, founder and CEO of Oracle, spoke religiously about the Network Computer.
“Ellison said the use of network computers, where applications and information are stored on network servers instead of on a PC, would save corporations huge amounts of time and money.
He said current corporate networks based on client-server computing are too costly and inefficient.”
Ellison was effectively predicting cloud computing and the usage of tablets, mobile phones, and the Google Chromebook, at least five years before the first iPad was announced by Apple and the advancement for what we refer to today as Cloud Computing. The Google Chromebook was not invented until 2011.
Like all new inventions, the Chromebook was not very practical at first. Over the years since 2011, with more enhancements to Chrome OS and the shift to cloud technology trends like software as a service applications (SaaS), the Chromebook has become a staple item for the mobile workforce and students in the classroom.
The Promise Continues
With the advent of Chrome OS Flex, individuals and companies now have a formidable solution to their outmoded laptop and desktop computers. Traditional ways of disposing of computers, by either landfills or recycling, can have a negative impact on our environment. Chromatizing these older computers and finding new use is the most logical step to fix this tremendous problem.
In my opinion, Google Chrome OS Flex is the best solution thus far to properly Chromatize an older computer and therefore converting it to a Network Computer or Appliance. Will it always be the best? What happens if individuals do want to tied to the Google cloud infrastructure? One thing that I know is that technology does not exist in a vacuum. More operating systems like Chrome OS Flex will surely be developed that will allow people to choose the cloud infrastructure that they want to be connected to, or no cloud infrastructure at all, as in the case of distributed computing. But, alas, that is a discussion for another day.
For now, we can all do our best and promote a greener environment and lifestyle by not just disposing our old outmoded computers. Let’s Chromatize them.