Gadgetory

like me you probably have an old laptop gathering dust somewhere or a PC so slow and loud you're afraid to turn it on today we're going to show you a few simple steps for breathing new life into that machine turning it into a Chromebook for free I'm gonna be using software from a New York City startup called Neverwhere it's helping schools turn their old outdated hardware into Chromebooks step 1 check to make sure your machine is among the several thousand units that are compatible with never wears collaborative system step 2 get an 8 or 16 gigabyte USB thumb drive and download the cloud ready software from never wears web site onto your USB stick step 3 plug that USB stick into your computer turn it on you'll need to hold down a couple keys to have the device boot into the thumb drive it varies by device you can check never wears website for details step 4 install the cloud writing software onto your old device this will wipe out your old operating system and everything on your hard drive if you prefer you can choose the dual boot option that allows you to pick between cloud ready and your old operating system every time you power on it also preserves whatever was stored in your computer there are a few restrictions so check Neverwhere site to ensure your device is compatible step 5 install flash it's optional but a good idea then login with your Google credentials and you're ready to go step 6 you've now got a brand new Chrome device what next you can head on over to the Chrome Web Store and download some applications Spotify Netflix even a virtual reality viewer step 7 if you want to get really fancy you can actually boot into cloud ready right from the USB stick without installing anything on your old machine so you can plug this into a compatible machine wherever you are it's like carrying the world's smallest Chromebook around in your pocket it's pretty fun to bring an old machine out of retirement and in our experience you can get great performance running Chrome on an old machine that's one of the really delightful ironies of the cloud computing age you have more Hardware packed into a five to ten year old machine than you do with a brand new Chromebook just coming to market mm-hmm