Plus, it’s a pretty fun and low-risk beginner’s hardware project. When you’ve got CloudReady installed, your device will keep getting security and feature updates, just a little behind the official Chromebook channels. But it also works well on Chromebooks, since it has many of the hardware drivers baked into it.

CloudReady is intended to turn old Windows and Mac computers into snappy Chromebooks for schools and businesses. When you’re done, though, your Chromebook will be running CloudReady, a virtual clone of Chrome OS. You’ll do some weird stuff with a USB drive, and you’ll have to type a couple things into a command prompt. It usually involves only a screwdriver, sometimes with some odd bits, and rarely a bit of electrical tape. Luckily, there is a solution for many Chromebooks. If you’re browsing the web, security updates are a good idea. You can keep using them beyond their official expiration, but doing so means getting regular warnings that “This device is no longer supported,” and they won’t get security or feature updates. That’s fine and good, and for the Chromebook’s first owners, that might be all they need.īut many Chromebooks work perfectly fine long beyond their official end-of-life date, especially if they were packed with relatively strong hardware when they debuted. The Brunch project, while more complicated to install and set up, may yield better results installing a generic Chrome OS on Intel or AMD-based Chromebooks.Īlso, starting with the 2018 Pixelbook, Chromebooks offer a “closed case” means of disabling writing protection, eliminating the need to open the device and physically disable write protection.įor older, pre-2018 Chrome devices, this guide may still be useful.Ĭhromebooks, the lightweight laptops focused on web browsing, receive updates to their OS for up to 6.5 years, depending on when they were built. CloudReady may not support the devices’ audio, Bluetooth, trackpad, or Wi-Fi.

2021): Since this post was first published (July 2019), we’ve learned that CloudReady (now owned by Google) can be difficult to get working on newer (2018 and later) Chrome devices.

Google chrome book support