Turn Your Old Laptop and PC into a Chromebook

You can turn almost any computer into a Chromebook or Chromebox with CloudReady. This tutorial covers how to install and troubleshoot Chrome OS on most computers.

If you haven’t used a Chromebook in a while, they’ve come a long way. But you don’t need to shell out cash for a new laptop just to run Chrome OS. You can install it on nearly any laptop with an application called CloudReady.
Google’s version of Chrome OS isn’t available for users to install, but its open source base, Chromium OS, is—and CloudReady, from developer Neverware, makes it dead simple to install it on your laptop. No need to fiddle with drivers or find compatible hardware—just click to install.

The same principle can be applied to an old PC, so although it may not be able to run the latest version of Windows, your old computer may still have more than enough power to run the Chrome operating system.

CloudReady (www.neverware.com)

What You’ll Need

Before you can get started installing CloudReady on your laptop, you will need some preparation:

A USB drive with 4GB or more storage
Open Chrome browser, go to Google Chrome Store and install Chromebook Recovery Utility.
Change BIOS settings of your target PC so it can boot from the USB

Neverware offers two images for CloudReady: 32 bit and 64 bit. Download the appropriate OS for your hardware from the download page.

Extract the content of the downloaded zip file, and you will get a chromiumos_image.bin file. Now plug in the USB device and open the Chromebook recovery utility. Click on the gear at the top right corner of the tool and select erase recovery media (Figure 1).

Next, choose the target USB drive and format it. Once formatted, go to the gear again, and this time select the use local image option. Now browse the extracted bin file, select the USB drive, click on continue, and then on the create button (Figure 2). It will start writing the image to the drive.

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Figure 2: Create CloudReady image. [Image:cloudready-create]

Used with permission

Once the drive is ready with bootable CloudReady, plug it into the target PC and boot the system. It may take a while for the system to boot into Chromium OS. Once booted, you will see the screen shown in Figure 3.

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Figure 3: Ready to install CloudReady.

Used with permission

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Figure 4: Single-boot option.

Used with permission

Go to the taskbar and click on Install CloudReady.
You can dual boot your system between Chromium OS and another operating system, but the other OS should already be installed.
To single boot (Figure 4) or dual boot (Figure 5) your system, choose the option in the next window.
Just follow the click-next instructions.

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Figure 5: Dual-boot option.

Used with permission

The entire process will take up to 20 minutes, depending on the storage media and the processing power. Once installed, the PC will shut down and reboot.
After you reboot, you will be greeted with the network settings page (Figure 6). The exciting thing is that, although I had to install wireless drivers for Linux distributions on the same hardware, everything worked out of the box with Chromium OS.
Once you connect to the wireless network, the system will look for updates and also offer to install Adobe Flash. Once the installation is finished, you will see the Chromium OS login screen. Now you can just log into your Gmail account and start using your “Chromebook” right away.

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Turn Your Old Laptop and PC into a Chromebook