Bringing a knackered laptop back to life with CloudReady

As part of the fun and games that is homeschooling, my daughter started off begging and borrowing computer time from me and her mum. It wasn’t ideal so I casted around for a better solution, so she could have her own bit of kit.

I had a fairly ancient, tiny Windows 10 laptop – the sort of thing that might have been called a netbook 10 years ago – which I hadn’t used in ages because it needed to install an update to the operating system. I couldn’t perform the upgrade though because there wasn’t the space to download it on the tiny amount of storage on the laptop! I tried fiddling with SD cards and things, but no joy.

But I came across a thing called CloudReady, which is a product of a company called Neverware. Put simply, it turns pretty much any laptop into a Chromebook – a very simple computer than runs a web browser, and pretty much nothing else.

Getting it set up involved downloading an installer and putting it on a blank USB memory stick, which slightly – but only slightly – fiddly. Installing it on the laptop went like a dream, took about 20 minutes max and there weren’t any problems.

The end result isn’t exactly the same as an official Chromebook, but it’s pretty close. It runs the open source project Chromium rather than ‘Google Chrome’ – but that doesn’t seem to matter too much. She has been able to do the usual things to personalise it, with her own choice of desktop wallpaper and so on, and loves always having a machine available for her work, that belongs to her.

So, if you’re struggling with old tech at home, and if everything you need is accessible on the web, then take a look at CloudReady. Likewise, if you are organising the reuse of old laptops for people that really need them, then CloudReady provides a great, free way, to turn them into usable, easy to maintain computers.

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash