Between A Chrome Rock And A Windows Hard Place

Lately I’ve been a hockey puck, getting smacked across the ice towards one goal and then another. On one end, a Chromebook. The other end, a Windows PC. Then I was hit with the possibility of Parallels to run Windows 11 on my MacBook — a franken-laptop! Isn’t it good to have options?

This really isn’t new. It’s par for the tech course with me. I tried to stay settled with one platform, one ecosystem to rule them all — Apple’s. It was a good four-year run…

It’s really nice, though, outside that walled-garden. A bit wild, but I guess I was ready for a new adventure. And freedom. Google, Android, Chrome, Microsoft, Windows…I even started looking at Linux! Okay, let’s not go off planet.

As blogged before, I was moving towards a Chromebook. But then PC gaming grabbed me and said, “No, you need a Windows machine.” I said, “Yes!” But then something unusual happened yesterday: I forgot my MacBook at work when I commuted home.

No Apple laptop? No problem. For the evening, I pulled my trusty HP Chromebook out of a drawer and didn’t skip a beat. I blogged on it. I surfed on it. I YouTubed on it. I shopped on it. I did do some gaming in Tiny Glade…on the Windows laptop. But my kids wanted to use that so I stuck with my battery-sippin’ ChromeOS clamshell.

I was struck hard again by the simplicity, capability, and affordability of a Chromebook…

$180 and five years of service so far!

Despite mine being a 2019 model that no longer gets major updates and is kind of slow, it actually ran fast-enough. Most of my tasks are light anyways, which helps. And while it’s not as top-shelf as my M1 MacBook Air, it’s good enough.

…sometimes I would like to manage all my photos as discreet jpegs in my local file system like I used to on Windows. But honestly, Google Photos is enough, isn’t it? Yet there are some inherent limitations to this and ChromeOS overall, due to its simplicity — a great strength can also be a great weakness.

If I were a normal person, I wouldn’t overthink these things. But I’m not normal. I’m a tech geek and enjoy tinkering with the hardware and software that most folks take for granted. I could follow my own advice — just use what works best. But lots of things work to get the job done. I like them all in one way or another.

So now I’m thinking it might be best to add a new gaming PC desktop to the mix, sharing with the whole family like we do the Asus TUF laptop, and get myself a modern Chromebook Plus to handle most of my personal computing.

But a new gaming laptop, like the sleek HP OMEN, sure looks good too.