Turning an old laptop into a Chromecast

El_Rey

Apparently it's possible to turn your old Windows laptop into something similar to a Chromecast by installing ChromeOS Flex. Has anyone tried this? Is it worth doing? 

k_man

El_Rey said:

Apparently it's possible to turn your old Windows laptop into something similar to a Chromecast by installing ChromeOS Flex. Has anyone tried this? Is it worth doing? 

To clarify, this would turn the laptop into (almost)  a Chromebook, not a Chromecast

El_Rey

k_man said:

El_Rey said:

Apparently it's possible to turn your old Windows laptop into something similar to a Chromecast by installing ChromeOS Flex. Has anyone tried this? Is it worth doing? 

To clarify, this would turn the laptop into (almost)  a Chromebook, not a Chromecast

Yes, you're right. Have you tried it? 

k_man

Sorry, forgot to add that bit.
I tried a couple of years ago with an old laptop, but it had a low end 32 bit CPU that wasn't supported by Cloudready (as it was at the time).

Shame, as I like ChromeOS, and another device would have been handy.

Newcad

Many people have old laptops that have Windows XP or Vista on them and that don't have the 'Oomph' to run Windows 10.

If you don't want to get into upgrading the RAM etc. then what you can do is simply install a different operating system on it.
Linux is the most popular OS to use for that, I've done it myself and put Linux on an old XP laptop.
I ran it on Linux for a couple of months with no problems. (And then I did add more RAM and fitted a new SSD hard drive, those cost me £55 overall to buy and I fitted them myself, it's now running the latest Windows 10 22H2 quite happily).

Android, or Chrom OS are just other operating system, and so you can install that on a laptop.

There are plenty of articles and Youtube videos showing you how to install either Linux or Android/ChromeOS onto an old Windows laptop to give it a new lease of life without any cost or having to change anything internally..

giraffe69

I converted an old laptop. Haven't yet used it much but it seems fine for things like web browsing.

outtatune

Unless you pretty much exclusively use Google Apps you may be better off installing a flavour of Linux instead. Linux Mint XFCE is a good option as it uses the lightweight xfce environment but also has good support for loads of different types of hardware so there's a very good chance of it having drivers for all your laptop's wifi and bluetooth and stuff like that.

https://linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=304

Neil49

I read an article about this recently (unfortunately I can't find it at the moment) but it also mentioned that you can download Chrome OS onto a USB stick and run it through that without erasing all the data on your hard drive. I think it can be pretty slow doing that way but as a trial run you haven't got anything to lose. 

El_Rey

Neil49 said:

I read an article about this recently (unfortunately I can't find it at the moment) but it also mentioned that you can download Chrome OS onto a USB stick and run it through that without erasing all the data on your hard drive. I think it can be pretty slow doing that way but as a trial run you haven't got anything to lose. 

Was it this article by Which? That's how I heard about it. 

flaneurs_lobster

Running Chrome OS from a USB stick.

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/download-google-chrome-os-and-run-on-a-real-computer/

Similar instructions available for various flavours of Linux.