In less than a week I'll be making a trek across the country. I'm moving ahead of my partner and will only be bringing a relatively small amount of stuff. That means the essentials like clothing, toiletries, important paperwork, and mostly portable electronic items. My cat, of course, is coming along as well. The only non-portable electronic item I'm bringing is a rather bulky but quite functional all-in-one printer. I am choosing to leave behind my also bulky but quite functional desktop PC, however.
For a lot of people that'd be no big deal since they have a reasonably modern laptop running Windows or Mac OS X. My only Windows laptop is an Acer Aspire One netbook. It was slow and had limited functionality when I bought it new over 3 years ago and I've only found use for it nowadays to play vintage games. I do also have an iPad 4 which in many ways is more useful than the netbook but is certainly not a fully-functional computer.
The device I plan to use in lieu of having a desktop is a Chromebook. I got an Acer C7 Chromebook this past December and it changed the way I do a lot of things. It forced me to simplify how I do a lot of common tasks and really give the "cloud computing" thing a chance. I started really using Google Music as a replacement for managing a large library on my desktop and syncing it to devices. I gave another shot to using Google Drive for file storage and for word processing and spreadsheets. Picasaweb (now Google+ Photos) is being used in addition to Google Drive for organizing my photos.
I've tried those things before and quickly went back to using full-featured desktop applications. Google Music I tried multiple times, even. The Chromebook made me realize that I could not depend as much on desktop applications if I wanted to get full use out of it. It also made me realize that I don't really need the features of a desktop application for things like music listening and photo organizing. I also was already using cloud services like Netflix and Spotify and very much enjoyed them.
There have been some major benefits to moving to cloud services in addition to making the Chromebook more usable. It has made my computing environment considerably more portable, and I don't just mean in the mobile device sense. Google Drive has iOS and Android apps that work quite well and even allow me to do basic document editing. Google Music does the job on Android and the gMusic app on iOS brings it to my iPad. Google has done a great job with their Google+ app on both Android and iOS and the automatic full-resolution camera backup on Android allows me to skip the uploading step when I want to put together a photo album. Of course I can also access these things on any computer with a web browser.
The main thing I use my desktop computer for is web browsing and gaming. The former is covered quite well by the Chromebook and adequately by the netbook and iPad. The latter is what I'm mainly going to be missing out on. There is no Chrome OS versions of World of Warcraft or SimCity 4, for example. There are browser-based games as well as many games available for Android and iOS. With the exception of Minecraft, whose "pocket edition" I actually prefer to the desktop version, most don't compare to the types of games available for a full-featured PC. I did install a lot of older games like Serious Sam: The First Encounter and SimCity 3000 on my Acer Aspire One AOD150 netbook so I'm not completely missing out on the PC gaming experience.
Printing from Chrome OS devices is an issue since they will only print to Google Cloud Print printers, whether that be a printer that has it built in or one hooked up to another computer that is turned on and running the Chrome browser. My old Brother HL-2070N simply was not going to work so I picked up an Epson WorkForce WF-3540. It's big and bulky but it has a lot of features, like double-sided printing and scanning, and most importantly it is fully functional without a PC. Despite some quibbles with the Cloud Print and Epson Connect services it has already been a nice upgrade from the Brother. Using an inkjet will take some getting used to for me since I've been spoiled by inexpensive laser printers' sharp text. The numerous other features (and color!) more than make up for that.
A big reason I'm leaving the desktop PC behind for a few months is for simplicity's sake. A Chromebook looks like a regular laptop and if you're only using the browser you may not know it's radically different from other laptops. It requires zero maintenance beyond a very quick reboot when Google pushes an update to it. Unlike Windows, Mac OS X, or a Linux distribution, those updates almost always improve functionality in some manner and incredibly quick to install. There are no viruses or other malware. It reboots in less than 30 seconds and resumes from sleep mode almost instantly. Yes, the marketing lines from Google are true. Except they don't market Chromebooks as PC replacements even for the short term. A few people have tried it and I'm going to add my name to that list in a week.
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