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Apps chromebook End User

Samsung Chromebook keeps losing WiFi connection but reboot is very fast

samsung chromebookThe Samsung Chromebook has lost its WiFi connection twice now and I’ve been unable to reconnect it without rebooting. I guess I could have added another connection instead of rebooting but the process of rebooting is very fast.

If I had to do that with the Microsoft laptop I could have gone away and made a cup of tea during the reboot.

I think the device is 95% of the way there. Still need to nail the photo transfer issue. The other test is going to be mobility. I’m travelling to London on Monday and will see how I get on with it on the go. The issue won’t be portability etc because the Chromebook is delightfully light. It’s how the connectivity goes plus in tandem with that how well it works offline which I haven’t really looked at yet.

Ciao…

Read other posts on Chromebook – there are loads:
Just bought an Acer Chromebook Ash – review to follow.
Samsung Chromebook crash fix and print drivers – who needs em?
Footnote to Samsung Chromebook Free Galaxy Phone offer
Samsung Chromebook offer not very customer friendly
or search chromebook for lots of useful articles

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Apps broadband chromebook End User mobile apps

Photo xfer from Samsung Galaxy S4 to NAS backup via Chromebook

Backup to NAS better than cloud when using slow broadband.

Photos get backed up from my Samsung Galaxy S4 to Google+ and via my Microsoft powered laptop to a separate local NAS box. This doesn’t work for the Samsung Chromebook as the laptop doesn’t recognise the presence of the phone when I plug it in. Also in any one month the photo storage requirement can easily exceed the storage available on the Chromebook – it’s a machine for the cloud.

As it happens when I got my S4 I also got 50GB of Dropbox space free for two years and the photos from the phone have been happily backing up to Dropbox. Why not if it is free? Of course this means that the internet bandwidth I use for backing up the pics has effectively doubled (ish – Google+ doesn’t upload the full size I don’t think).

Last night I downloaded September’s photos from Dropbox to my Chromebook. Dropbox zips the files so it isn’t ideal but it did mean that they were available on the Chromebook for me to drag into the upload box of the NAS box (Netgear ReadyNAS 2TB). Looks as if it has worked though the zipped file on the NAS is only 640MB compared with 1.6GB on Drive so will have to check the contents are all there. I don’t really want to zip the pics anyway. I want them easily accessible. I have plenty of storage space.

This is a bit of a long winded way of backing up locally. There has to be a simpler way of doing it. Also like I said before it also assumes you have enough free storage space on the Chromebook.

The one thing I’ve noticed during this phase of tyre kicking is that you really know when you’re connection is offline, even if it is only for a few seconds. Either my WiFi is not rock solid, which is believable or the FTTC connection is not rock solid, which is also believable.  I don’t think I’ll be totally happy until I get FTTP.

I just had to reboot the Chromebook because it totally lost the WiFi hookup and there appeared to be no way of reconnecting it via the settings page.

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chromebook End User

Samsung Chromebook power consumption and battery life

I’ve been using the Samsung Chromebook just on the battery pretty much non stop since 9am, give or take a cup of tea, and I still have 53% or 3 hours 59 minutes left. It is now 12.56. That’s pretty impressive. It suggests knocking on 8 hours of battery life which is more than the 6 1/2 hours spec.

Could just be because it is new or maybe down to the WiFi signal strength in our house. Anyway it is good.

I’ll give y’all an update at the end of the day.

Read other posts on Chromebook – there are loads:
Just bought an Acer Chromebook Ash – review to follow.
Samsung Chromebook crash fix and print drivers – who needs em?
Footnote to Samsung Chromebook Free Galaxy Phone offer
Samsung Chromebook offer not very customer friendly
or search chromebook for lots of useful articles

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chromebook End User

Samsung XE303 Chromebook, E5250, 2GB, 16GB, 11″, Silver first impressions

samsung chromebookMy new Samsung XE303 Chromebook, has arrived and is up and running. It’s the first time I’ve had such a slimline laptop and in my own small way am very excited. This is also my first solid state hard drive which I presume contributes towards the light weight.

First thing I did was to read the manual (RTFM) but it was hardly worth the effort. You intuitively knew what to do. In fact all I had to do was tell the machine which country I was in, which language I wanted to use, bung in my gmail credentials and hey presto, my uncle’s name is Bob1.

This is a bit of an adventure. I’ve dabbled with Windows 8 but I’ve ditched it. My office laptop is a Dell and the hard drive just crashed. The old hard drive had Windows 8. The new one is getting Windows 7 back. I never got the hang of Windows 8, couldn’t find things and screens kept disappearing because I’d accidentally drag them.

I’ve also stopped using Windows Phone 8 on the Nokia Lumia 920. The User Interface just wasn’t intuitive enough. It would take a lot longer to find things than with either iOS or Android. Google Apps is (are?) gaining real traction in businesses so I figured it was about time I gave it a go.

“Giving it a go” entails using google applications that replace the workhorse of business, Microsoft Office. Having used these tools for pretty much all my working life one gets used to certain ways of working. I’ve only dabbled with Google Docs before now and my first impressions were that it wasn’t as easy to create a doc with Google than with say Microsoft Word. However now that I am forced to live and breathe Google (I probably won’t be able to pick up my laptop again until Wednesday next week) I’m quickly getting to grips with it.

Although Google seems to do some things differently to Microsoft as I get used to Google Docs some of the differences seem obviously better. For example I’m composing this blog post in Google Docs. I was looking around for a mechanism to save the doc but I didn’t need to. Google saves it in real time. That then made me wonder how to name the doc. All you do is type over the “Untitled Document” text and you’re there.

Because I am a gmail user everything on the Chromebook is already familiar.

Back to the Chromebook itself I was struck by the clarity of the screen at startup. Might just be because it is new with no smudge marks:)  It did seem to take more than the seven seconds or so it is meant to for bootup but that could be because this was the first time.

chromebookThe touchpad is taking a bit of time to get used to but  I think that is likely to be sorted out in time – I imagine that most manufacturers will have a different feel to their touchpads.

I’m now fully up and running with the Chromebook. Claiming my free 100GB of Drive storage was very simple. I Googled it and found a link straight away. I think this online storage is pretty expensive though. 100GB is $4.99 a month. My views may change with time as I get more into the ecosystem. Maybe as our worlds edge inexorably towards the cloud we will all become conditioned to paying significant chunks of cash for online storage.

Connecting the Chromebook to my WiFi network was a piece of cake. I don’t have the version with cellular connectivity. I also got straight in to my NAS box so all the docs I have backed up from my Windows machine together with all my photos and music are easily accessible.

I’ve also noticed that having sat here for an hour or so playing with the machine it hasn’t got hot. That is good. Bodes well for battery life. Might see how long it lasts just using the battery tomorrow.

One of the things I’ve been worried about is how I’m going to do photo editing on the Chromebook. On my Microsoft laptop I use irfanview but I don’t think there is a web based version of this. I needn’t have worried. There is a brilliant free online photo editing site called pixlr.com. It’s far more functional than irfanview and extremely user friendly. Makes me wonder why I’ve never used it before!

I bought the Chromebook from Tesco. It was only £229 and there was an offer of a free Samsung Galaxy phone bundled in if we ordered by 30th September – it didn’t say which Galaxy but you can bet it isn’t an S4 🙂 When the Chromebook arrived today there was no sign of the phone and no instructions on what to do to get hold of it.

I called Tesco and when I eventually made it through to a person that person had no idea of the offer. As far as he was concerned it wasn’t a Tesco offer but a Samsung offer that I had to source directly from Samsung. Not good enough in my mind but together we managed to find a link to a Samsung web page that supposedly allowed me to register to get the phone.

The annoying thing is that Samsung won’t let you register for the phone until 14 days after you’ve bought the Chromebook. That is rubbish. I imagine it is to stop people buying the Chromebook just to get the phone and then returning the laptop and getting their money back. However it didn’t leave me with a good taste in my mouth – you just got the impression that Samsung were making it difficult for you to claim the phone so that you would give up.

That’s all I’ve got for now. I’ll provide another update when I’ve spent more time kicking tyres but so far so good.

This post was brought to you courtesy of the Chrome OS 🙂

Read other posts on Chromebook – there are loads:
Just bought an Acer Chromebook Ash – review to follow.
Samsung Chromebook crash fix and print drivers – who needs em?
Footnote to Samsung Chromebook Free Galaxy Phone offer
Samsung Chromebook offer not very customer friendly
or search chromebook for lots of useful articles

1 He isn’t really. I’ve never had an Uncle Bob. I do have an Uncle Mick though I don’t get to see him that often. Should make a bit more of an effort.

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chromebook Cloud End User

Samsung Chromebook

Just ordered a Samsung XE303 Chromebook from Tesco. £229 inc VAT. At Timico we run a Microsoft environment so this will just have to be the platform for my Google account which is fair enough.

A few things have struck me during the process of making the buying decision. My work laptop died this morning, or at least the hard drive did. Most of my stuff is backed up so that isn’t a major worry. Had I been using a Chromebook all along, aside from the cost of the online storage,  I wouldn’t have even had to give the backup issue a second thought.

The second thing that struck me is anti virus. We have 6 laptops in our house, all protected by a variety of anti virus solutions.  Keeping track of what is up to date and what isn’t is a bit of an effort. If the family were all using Chromebooks then that problem would go away.

Only problem is that whilst the Chromebook would be fine for most things there are some games and programmes used by the kids that are currently only available for Apple and Microsoft platforms. This will change in time.

One bemusing thing about buying the Chromebook from Tesco was that when I’d finished the website suggested that I might be interested in buying Microsoft Office or Office 365. Suspect the Tesco product managers don’t really know what a Chromebook is.

PS I bought the WiFi only one. I think the day of an additional SIM for your laptop are numbered.

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chromebook Cloud End User

ChromeOS – quick play

I realise that this is of little interest to most of you but I’m having a play with ChromeOS. I have it running on a virtual machine on my Dell laptop. It’s a bit slow but that is going to be because of the VM rather than the OS itself and certainly not due to the lack of bandwidth. Also every now and again it crashes, notionally due to lack of memory.

Initial impressions are good though it’s not perfect. For example in order to try out the online music app it asks you for your credit card info even though the app is free. Apple does this which I hate. I have subsequently found that you can bypass the Apple credit card capture page by not filling any of the fields and clicking “next”. Google won’t let you get away with this which I don’t like.

I have to fill out this form in order for Google to tell me whether the music streaming is “available in my country”. A simple “googling” tells me it is only available in the good ole US of A so it is a bit of a waste of my time and certainly irritating that a global organisation such as Google would have a product that was restricted to that country.

Next I tried the image editor and was a little disappointed to see it had pretty limited editing tools – crop, autofix, contrast and brightness. I need to be able to resize for the web as well as crop. Still it was easy to find a photo to edit. I just stuck one in Google Drive and hey presto it was there online. I use IRFanview on the laptop which doesn’t seem to be available for ChromeOS.  There do seem to be lots of photo editing apps in the chrome Web Store though so that is probably ok.

I have a good feeling about ChromeOS. At £229 a Chromebook is not expensive to try out though I do have an issue with having too many gadgets at any one time. I want to play with ChromeOS, Windows8 and Windows8 running on a Nokia Lumia 920 over 4G. It isn’t manageable though to have so many gadgets, especially as you have to sign up for a 24 month 4G contract with EE to lay your hands on the Lumia. My friend Kory raves about the Samsung Chromebook though doesn’t recommend it as a primary system yet.

The general Google ecosystem really is heading in the right direction. I’m building up to a bit of a post about the Google versus Microsoft battle for the desktop with a specific slant on Unified Communications. It will have to wait for another day though. It needs more time.

So long…

Categories
Apps chromebook Cloud End User

An Everyday Story of a Family, its Clunky Old Computer, and Cloud Based Services

My wife’s PC has nearly ended it’s useful life. It was bought for our oldest son at the age of 10. He is now about to start his second year at university and is already on his second laptop.

During the intervening ten or so years the PC has been flattened and rebuilt a couple of times. For a few years it was the “family” computer and thus had every kind of game added and removed and goodness knows what other software.

Now it is clunky, takes ages to boot up and a source of frustration for the love of my life. To make things worse last weekend my daughter did something to it and now Microsoft Office does not work. The original CD was lost some time ago. Doesn’t sound good.

Last night I went all cloud based services on the dodgy old thing.

I set Mrs Davies up with a

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chromebook End User

New laptop

You may or may not have noticed but there was a short gap of 3 days between the last two blog entries. This is partly because my laptop was shot. It’s funny to realise how dependant you become on the computer.

I’m sure that I am not alone in saying that my handwriting skills have deteriorated over the last few years. My handwriting was never particularly good – people used to tell me that I should have been a doctor. Not having to use a pen other than to sign cheques in the office means that when I try writing anything substantial my hand really hurts.

It has been years since I have taken handwritten notes at meetings. I enter them straight into my PC. They then get routinely backed up and the record is always there and easily retrievable. Every time I get a new PC my old data moves onto the new one which means that I probably have stuff on the laptop dating back 10 years.  10 years ago what I have now would not have fitted on to my hard drive.

It is taking me time to adjust to the new keyboard. It is smaller thatn the old one and hte keys arent inthe same place so I keep jitthing the worjnr ones – see what I mean.