A product warning!

A few weeks ago I was researching cheaper laptops that would charge off USB or 12v. Well, I found a Chromebook. It ticked all the right boxes. It charged off a 120v USB 3 charger that could likely be replaced by a 12v to USB 3 charger. It was $140 from Best Buy and even better there were instructions online how to delete the God-Awful ChromeOS and install Linux.

So, I bought the Chromebook and it arrived. That was where the problems started...

The instructions for installing Linux and running it never worked. Somehow on the initial startup I did get Linux to run but only from USB and it never ran again.

Since that I have been scouring every website and every set of instructions available to get the blessed thing to work with Linux. Everything has been a miserable failure. At this point I should just quietly have returned it but I found a YouTube video where a guy took the back off and unscrewed one screw that was apparently a physical firmware lock. Then he could run Linux.

I duly undid the screws and pried up the edges of the plastic insert. There was something holding it fast in the center that was clearly not a screw. Looking further, it did not look remotely like the circuit-board shown on YouTube. I quietly clipped it all back together and checked whether it all still worked. 

As I don't really want to spend weeks trying this twiddle and that twiddle in order to try to make it work with Linux, I'll just have to throw it in the closet. I suspect in about 6 months I'll pull it out of the closet, find it's still not possible to get Linux to run on it and end up throwing it on the back of the pickup for a one-way trip to the dump with the rest of the household refuse.

Do yourselves a favor - don't buy a Chromebook aka Junkbook. It's just a prison that keeps you locked into a Google system and restricts what you can do. Judging from the fact the only apps available are Android, there's be no working software for it either. It really is a totally unusable piece of junk and to cap that off, it can't even be used offline.

My aims are...

• A laptop.
• Runs off USB/12v
• Takes Linux
• Can be used offline

Well, the HP Chromebook, according to online data checks all of those boxes. The reality is though that it does not take Linux and hence cannot be used offline.

As I have now got pry marks around the insert, I can't return it. It appears I was gravely misled by the lying buffoons online. Sometimes online information is good, sometimes it is bad. There's no knowing until something is tried.

As for the cost, it just annoys me that I have to write off a $140 mistake. There's nobody to blame but myself for believing online technical information. My existing laptop is an Asus that came with Windows 10 but which now runs Linux. The new laptop was intended for a specific project and something cheap I could leave in the car while I am at work. Something I could have all the non-personal information - something that I would never use for email, web browsing etc, where no passwords would ever be stored.