Chromebook

Thanks for the input folks. Was at Sam's Club today and bought an Acer 4G Chromebook for $199. Walmart online had a like unit for $178 but it was refurbished. Decided to spend the extra $21 to get new. Time will tell how well she does with it. Thanks to strollin for the links. I saved them for future use.

Redsky wrote:

The majority of companies IT people are buying iPads for their tablet users and not the much cheaper Android tablets and the reason is the much better security provided by the more modern Apple operating systems.

I for one would call "much better security" as somewhat of an exaggeration? Apple mobile iOS has had it's share of security vulnerabilities, much more so than Mac OS X. Including plugins, such a PDF security exploit in iOS which wasn't apparently corrected for years. Among which resulted in Germany banning government use of all mobile iOS devices.

On another note, a major U.S. national museum I work with does not want staff to upgrade to the latest iOS releases, until central IT has thoroughly tested and approved its use. That as a result of multiple instances of enterprise wide issues, some involving excessive server usage. And apparently, not able to be fixed until Apple issued a patch. No such issues or advisories with Android or Windows mobile OS upgrades.

Redsky wrote:
I would not use the Chromebook for any transactions that I wanted to be 100% secure. I would trust an iPad.

100%? wow, that's asking a lot.

Chromebook's low entry price is due to a subsidized business model. They're designed to track one's net use for marketing purposes, so can feed appropriate ads in ways not always obvious.

Redsky wrote:
It depends on how she will use it. I have used Google Chrome on a Windows computer and quickly found that I picked up a lot of malware that was not able to load from using Firefox or Internet Explorer. I spent a week and nearly $100 to get the malware completely removed from the computer and now avoid using Chrome completely.

I would not use the Chromebook for any transactions that I wanted to be 100% secure. I would trust an iPad.

The majority of companies IT people are buying iPads for their tablet users and not the much cheaper Android tablets and the reason is the much better security provided by the more modern Apple operating systems.

ChromeOS is not Windows, so it doesn't pick up Viruses written for Windows.

Redsky wrote:


The majority of companies IT people are buying iPads for their tablet users and not the much cheaper Android tablets and the reason is the much better security provided by the more modern Apple operating systems.

Where did you find that info? Please provide a link.

It depends on how she will use it. I have used Google Chrome on a Windows computer and quickly found that I picked up a lot of malware that was not able to load from using Firefox or Internet Explorer. I spent a week and nearly $100 to get the malware completely removed from the computer and now avoid using Chrome completely.

I would not use the Chromebook for any transactions that I wanted to be 100% secure. I would trust an iPad.

The majority of companies IT people are buying iPads for their tablet users and not the much cheaper Android tablets and the reason is the much better security provided by the more modern Apple operating systems.

There are apps for Chromebook that don't necessarily need internet access. Here are a couple of links regarding using a Chromebook while offline:

Useless As A Brick?

Use Chromebook offline

i think a net book
with contained hard drive is a better idea
and about the same price
best buy has an Asus netbook for $250

Not totally familiar with the Chromebooks but what can you do (that she will want to do) with it when wifi is not available?