Turning a crappy old Windows PC into a full-fledged Chromebook with CloudReady

Back in my IT days, one of the things I liked doing the most was repurposing old equipment. It was pretty easy to image, customize, and deliver new computers to people once every three or four years, but it was more fun to fix up the three- or four-year-old PCs you’d get back and then use them to replace stuff around campus that was even older. There was always plenty to do.

Which is why I was intrigued when a pitch for Neverware’s CloudReady showed up in my inbox. CloudReady is a fork, of sorts, of Chromium OS, the open source code that Chrome OS is based on, and it promises to turn old PC hardware into nearly fully functional Chromebooks, complete with the features of Chrome OS’ management console. It’s not the first distribution of Chromium OS aimed at regular old PC hardware, but it certainly appears to be the best supported, and it’s actually being tested against hardware that real schools and businesses buy.

Cloudready is primarily aimed at those schools and businesses, but, as of earlier this month, individuals can take it for a spin for free. We installed it on an old Dell Latitude E6410 to see what it was like and to talk about what a real Chromebook gives you that CloudReady doesn’t.

Installation

Once you have hardware and an 8GB or 16GB USB drive to use for installation, grab CloudReady’s instructions (PDF) and the Chromebook Recovery Utility extension for Chrome. Download the CloudReady zip file and fire up the recovery utility.

Now, click the gear icon, select “use local image,” and select the CloudReady zip file you downloaded. Select the drive you want to use and hit Continue, and the tool will automatically unpack the zip file, format the USB drive, and write the OS files to it.

At this point you can boot your old PC from USB and use CloudReady straight from the USB stick, the same kind of “live CD” mode that Linux distributions have supported for years. It won’t be as fast and you won’t want to use it forever, but it’s a good way to check that all your hardware is working properly before you actually install anything.

Installing CloudReady to the internal drive is recommended for performance reasons—just make sure you’ve backed up any important data from the drive, since it will be entirely wiped, and, as of this writing, there’s no officially supported dual-boot option. To install, sign out of your user account, click the system tray in the lower-right corner, and click Install CloudReady to fire up the (very basic) wizard. It warns you that everything on your drive will be erased and is otherwise pretty barebones. It doesn’t even have a progress meter. The computer will shut down when installation is complete.

Using our pseudo-Chromebook

CloudReady booted up like a charm on the E6410, immediately recognizing the Intel Wi-Fi card, connecting to a network, and running through the standard first-time setup wizard you’ll see on any Chromebook (a CloudReady splash screen and branding is the only real difference between this wizard and Google’s).

Generally it seems like your experience is going to be pretty good if you're using the models on Neverware’s support list, which primarily contains business-class PCs from the last six or seven years. If your laptop sticks mostly to simple Intel-only hardware, there’s a good chance CloudReady will work just fine on it, too, but Neverware performs extensive testing on those specific models to make sure that everything from graphics to Wi-Fi to the webcam and microphone works as intended right out of the box.

"We probably have one of the East Coast's most impressive collections of really terrible old laptop and desktop hardware,” Neverware’s Peter Freudenberger told Ars.

We signed into our test Google account, and our ersatz Chromebook synced our normal Chrome OS wallpaper and extensions. The trackpad, Bluetooth, sound, sleep mode, and GPU acceleration all seemed to be working properly, though we noticed a bit of screen tearing that the CloudReady team is looking into. We suspect things might go better for laptops with integrated Intel GPUs, which are much more common in actual Chromebooks (our E6410 has an Nvidia Quadro GPU, though many models did ship with integrated graphics).

From there, for the most part, everything in CloudReady's version of Chrome OS works just as it does on an actual Chromebook, from the settings to the Chrome Web Store. If you install Flash, most pages render exactly as they would in Chrome OS with no issues—just be aware that Flash is an optional component and that, as of this writing, it’s not updated automatically along with the rest of the OS, though it’s something that Neverware tells us it’s working on.

Using the operating system isn’t very exciting, which for IT shops and individuals is a great thing. I’ve played with a few of the independent “put Chromium OS on your PC” distributions before, and discovering one that just installs and runs without issue is pretty astounding. It’s something we’ve also run into while playing with Dell’s Linux-powered Developer Edition laptops: Linux’s reputation for flaky hardware support isn’t a problem if you can get good support from a team of developers.

Finally, if you want the Chrome OS command line, just hit Ctrl+Alt+F2. Because Chrome OS’ standard boot and OS restrictions aren’t available on standard PC hardware, there’s no need to enter into a special developer mode to get root access or mess with the filesystem.