Difference between Chromebook and Laptop – With the high prices charged for notebooks in the country, Chromebooks start to gain traction among the most connected public. These devices have many similarities but also many differences from a common notebook with Windows system. Let us list here some of the major differences between the two types of devices.
The Chromebook does not have Windows system. It runs an expanded version of the Google Chrome browser, which is called Chrome OS. In other words, this product primarily used to surf the internet.
There’s a file manager system, such as Windows Explorer, but with few resources. There are, for example, folders for organizing your documents and media. You can copy, paste, cut and share files by clicking the trackpad with the Alt key on the file with which to interact.
Difference between Chromebook and Laptop
Applications
Because the system is the Chrome OS, applications created for Windows will not work. Therefore, you need to adopt the extensions from the Chrome Web Store browser, famous for those who use a lot of Chrome on Windows or Mac OS X. There are a number of useful little programs for the day to day, just enter the home from the store and give a look at what has to cool there.
However, you can forget using professional image editing programs on a Chromebook. As its hardware configuration is modest in order to reduce the price, it does not have the computing power to deal with the size of an Adobe Photoshop or Premier software.
Office suite of programs to be run on the web, nothing offline. You need to have an account in Office 365 or use the free versions of Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. However, what Google really wants is that you adopt the Docs as your productivity suite for the day to day, one of the reasons why the company created Chromebooks, to begin with.
One last important point: Playback of songs and videos from files in the system root happens when you drag them to a Chrome browser tab, which is not very interesting. On the other hand, you can take advantage of this to transmit content to the Chromecast connected to a TV.
Battery
Most Windows system with notebooks can stand for less than five hours away from the outlet. Therefore, you must always have the charger on hand, as well as having easy access to the power grid. Chromebooks are different at this point. They value the energy efficiency.
The Samsung Chromebook 3, one of only sold in Brazil, for example, has 10 hours of battery life. Working with this product in a coffee shop or leave it in your backpack when you go to work or to college is a good thing since you should not run out of battery easily.
Configuration
Here is the point where the manufacturers save: the hardware. The Chromebook is a notebook designed for the cloud. The Chromebook 3 comes with 100 GB free for two years to Google Drive, the Google folder in the cloud. This computing history in the cloud is nothing more than the computer from a company that keeps your data and you access them at any time, provided you have an internet connection. Google Drive had no problems with data leaks in útimos years and proved to be a reliable service to this writing.
The Chrome 3, which is the most potent currently have Intel Celeron processor fifth generation, 2GB of RAM and 16GB SSD storage. Ie save files in this device to access them offline is possible, but you’ll have about as much space as in a smartphone or tablet. If you want, you can expand this memory with a microSD card.
The hardware configuration of this Chromebook is good enough to surf the web, but many tabs open at once is not a good idea. Incidentally, this is not recommended in any computer seen how much RAM that Chrome uses too. This probably caught your computer ever, is not it?
Design
Here is an important point. The Chromebook stands out for its lightness. It weighs about 1 kg, whereas most Windows notebooks weigh 1.7 to 2.2 kg. The screen size is usually not big on Chromebooks, which also favors portability. They usually have screens from 11 to 13 inches with HD resolution.
The keyboard is a little different in the products with Chrome OS. They do not have the Windows key and the Caps Lock key does not exist. In place of the latter, we see a magnifying glass button, which leads to a quick Google search. Also, there is the F1, F2, F3 … nor useful shortcuts home, end, page up and page down. The keyboard has keys of the traditional Brazilian notebooks, outside of the aforementioned differences. There is a keyboard for the letter “Ç” and arrangement of accents is seen in an ABNT2 standard. As with most small laptops, keys / and? are divided with respect to Q and W. letters To switch between the options, you must press the Alt Gr key.
Otherwise, the keyboard is comfortable for typing and is shaped popularly called gum, in which the keys are very low, almost glued to the body of the notebook.
Price
Chromebooks cost about thousand reais, while products with the same Windows design goes out much more expensive, around 4000 reais.
Worth it?
Yes, buying a Chromebook is a good idea if you use Google solutions such as Gmail, Docs, YouTube and the like. Of course, everything depends on how you will use the product. You can see videos on Netflix almost all day, work on documents or just surf the Web, on pages on Wikipedia or news sites.
