Chromebooks On Campus

Chromebooks are one of the most important utilities here at McLean. They’re used to do online work, find information on specific topics for projects and even let you fill out a pass to use the bathroom. These little laptops are necessary for almost every single class here and you need to have it every single day, fully charged and ready to go.

However, there are some noticeable flaws with them, such as how easily they break; requiring you to get a new one and sometimes even pay a price for it.

With them being so frequently dropped, drenched and sometimes stop working for no apparent reason, they’re very hard to keep in good condition or even functional at all. Some of these things could happen to anyone by mistake, causing them to spend a lot of time trying to get a new one. People should make sure that when they’re done drinking water they check to see if they put the cap on it or closed it so they don’t accidentally spill it over. When carrying around your Chromebook hold the BASE of it and make sure you have a good grip on it with two hands. many people like to hold it by the lid or with one hand, etc. This is not very safe and you have a good chance of dropping it.

The time it takes to login to Chromebooks is unnecessarily long and difficult. If you make a typo in the password then you have to retype it again before logging in, wasting a good 30 seconds of time. However there is an alternative. If you pressed the keys “Shift” + “Search” + “L” then it will put your laptop into sleep mode, after waiting about 40 seconds it will be fully asleep and after shutting and opening the lid you only have to type your password, skipping the long login. This saves battery while also saving your precious time.

Chromebooks don’t have too much battery power and it drains fairly quickly. This causes people to come home with their Chromebook dead requiring them to charge it, often time forgetting to bring it. Throughout the day they’d need to share with someone, use a different computer or just full on not be able to do the assignment, making them lost most of the time. If you come home with it dead remember to charge it during the night while you’re sleeping and to put it back in your bag before heading off to school. If you forget easily make sure to write a reminder so you don’t forget it at home. Just in case though, bring your charger with you to school in case it does end up dying while there.

However, there is in fact an upside to these Chromebooks. These laptops are pretty fast because they don’t have so much stuff running in the background eating up space; if you close tabs then you aren’t using and don’t open extra programs then it will run perfectly fine. Since the OS is based off Google, all the essential websites and apps for school are there and you don’t have to have a hassle finding them. It isn’t overly complex and you should be able to manage around it pretty easily.