Kevin Wilson - Exploring Chromebook: The Illustrated, Practical Guide to using Chromebook

Thanks to all the staff at Luminescent Media & Elluminet Press for their passion, dedication and hard work in the preparation and production of this book.

To all my friends and family for their continued support and encouragement in all my writing projects.

To all my colleagues, students and testers who took the time to test procedures and offer feedback on the book

Finally thanks to you the reader for choosing this book. I hope it helps you to use your Chromebook with greater understanding.

Have fun!

A ChromeBook is a laptop or tablet that runs an operating system called Chrome OS and uses Googles Chrome Web Browser to run web apps. On later ChromeBook devices, you can also run Android apps.

ChromeBooks are designed to be used online, meaning you must be connected to the internet all the time whether you are at home, the office, in school, college, the library, or generally out and about. Without an internet connection, your ChromeBook can still function but will be limited at best.

Its worth noting what a ChromeBook can do and what it cant do. ChromeBooks are great for online collaboration - creating and sharing documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Using the web, checking your email/social media, posting photographs and videos. Video chatting with friends as well as streaming music, TV programmes and films directly to your ChromeBook.

A ChromeBook on the other hand would be a bad choice if you needed a laptop/device to edit video, make music, manipulate photographs, or anything that requires a lot of data storage and processing speed. ChromeBooks are not designed for this.

As you can see from the photograph below, ChromeBooks look very similar to traditional style windows or mac laptops. The main difference is ChromeBooks are a lot more light weight, usually smaller, have less built in storage space and have no DVD/CD drives.

Lets take a closer look. Some models are slightly different but most include the following

• Your power port is usually either along the side or the rear
• Along the side youll find your USB ports. How many you have will depend on the model but youll usually find at least two.
• Youll also find an HDMI port either on the rear or along the side.
• 1/8th inch (3.5mm) headphone jack will usually be located along the side.
• Also you might find a card reader for SD cards usually used in most digital cameras.

New style ChromeBooks also feature touch screens, with some being hybrid devices that you can use in the form of a laptop or a tablet.

With these types of devices, you can fold the screen all the way back tucking the keyboard behind the device turning it into a tablet.

Other ChromeBooks come in tablet form, called ChromeBook Tablets such as the Google Pixel Slate.

With these devices, you can use a touchscreen, a pen on some models, and add detachable keyboards.

ChromeBooks run Chrome OS which is a fast, stripped down operating system meaning many of the non-web features have been removed, such as bulk storage for software applications, users data, and various device drivers youd find on traditional operating systems such as Windows 10 and MacOS.

Because of this, Chrome OS will run on a more modest hardware specification, eg: 2GB of RAM, 1.6 GHz processor, and a 32GB solid state drive to store Chrome OS itself plus any locally stored files or apps for offline use. This makes ChromeBooks more light weight, and cheaper to buy.

At its core, Chome OS is a linux based operating system and will run on hardware with either intel/amd x86/64 or ARM processors.