Getting Started with a Chromebook - Day One

Day One, and so it begins…

The following is a documentation of my Day One experience with a new touchscreen Chromebook. 

Below is a picture of my new Acer C720P Chromebook with Touchscreen!

Chromebooks are receiving a great deal of attention, especially in the education market. This is the first time that I have used a Chromebook, however, I am very familiar with Google Docs, Drive, and the Chrome browser. My biggest curiosity and question going into this endeavor is finding out what a real Chromebook offers that cannot be already done on a PC or Mac using the Chrome browser.

One of the first things I do when I get a new device (especially one that is not familiar to me) is to fully charge the battery. This prevents a low-battery interfering with the out-of-box setup experience. Because devices are produced in mass at factories by the millions it is not uncommon for devices to arrive at your doorstep with either no charge or minimal charge available.

After fully charging the Acer C720P I began the unboxing. It is always exciting getting a new device and setting it up for the first time. I received this Chromebook back in December but I am documenting my Day One experience to share as I know many other educators are interested in learning more about Chromebooks. The following is the timeline for the first day unboxing.

8:10pm Turned on the Chromebook for first time (fully charged).

The Chromebook booted up in under 10 seconds as advertised! I went through the initial setup and connected to my home network. An Internet connection  is required to setup a Chromebook the first time.

Fast boot-up times are one of the greatest benefits to schools as older PCs and Macs can take much longer (minutes) to boot-up, +1 for the Chromebook.

The Acer C720P turns on when you lift the lid so there is no need to even press the power button. I have gotten several comments from friends about how nice the under 10 second boot time is for Chromebooks but I have to say that I am already used to this short boot time. Both my Surface Pro Windows 8 tablet and Dell XPS laptop boot in about 10 seconds. This fast boot-up time is not unique to the Chromebook but is rather a function of having a newer high-performance CPU along with Solid State Disk Drive (SSD). I should also mention my iPad and Surface RT, now over a year old, take approximately 30 seconds to boot so this fast boot time is appreciated.

8:11pm Started downloading updates – What?

The next step caught me a bit by surprise as I was not expecting the Chromebook to update out of the box.  Chromebooks are advertised as low maintenance devices with automatic updates that do not require user intervention, yet I was greeted with an update dialog box as soon as I turned the device on for the first time. The update download took approximately 8 minutes on my home network.

8:19pm Finished downloading updates and the screen says I need to restart the machine. I rebooted and the screen goes blank with another 10 second re-boot time after the update.

8:20pm Signed in with Goggle account for the first time. You must use a Google account to sign-in to a Chromebook and this REQUIRES an Internet connection the first time you login with your account. The first account to login is the Administrator of the machine. After initial setup you do not have to have Internet access as you can log in with the “cached” password but you will be very limited with what you can do without an Internet connection.

Chromebooks run the Chrome OS operating system and are designed to be a pure Google experience as much as possible. I explored the Chrome OS interface for about five minutes becoming familiar with the operating system.

Chrome OS is Spartan, there is not really much to it as everything is meant to be done in the browser or by using special Chrome extension plug-ins/apps. 

The biggest surprise with my initial impression using the Chromebook is that the Chrome OS Desktop looks VERY similar to the Windows 7/8 Desktop. There is a taskbar at the bottom of the screen with the Google Apps symbol in the lower-left corner where the Start button is located on the Windows 7 Desktop. From there the taskbar has icons for Gmail, Google Docs, Google Chrome Browser, Google Sheets, Google Slides, and Google Play Music. I will have another post comparing the Chrome OS User Interface to Windows 7 but I was surprised at how similar the two user interfaces are to each other.

 8:26pm Signed out.

8:27pm Signed back in but did not show my username back at the logon screen - just the picture I chose for my profile – if you do a mouse-over on the image it will show the name of the account associated with the picture.

8:37pm logged out

So, the first experience with setting up a new Chromebook went very well.

Other PC manufacturers are beginning to also offer Chromebooks; HP, Dell, Toshiba, Acer, and others. 

Dell is entering the Chromebook arena this month and I found this excellent YouTube video from Dell that goes over the initial setup of a Chromebook.

The biggest thing is to already have a Google account before you setup a Chromebook and make sure you have wireless Internet access available. A Google Account is REQUIRED.

In upcoming posts I will explore educational applications as I explore more about Chromebooks in Education and see first-hand what can and cannot be done with a Chromebook.  I look forward to learning more.

Keep on Learning,

Tom Grissom, Ph.D.