Missing menus

One thing that is conspicuously missing from the Chromebook is the absence of the Windows task bar and the menus that are normally hovering around as you work.  In this case, there is only the search bar from Google Chrome at the top of the page and even that appears to be wonderfully minimalistic to me.  This might bother other people because you can't use your normal thought processes to find things.

This absence of things to find may be a blessing or a curse depending on the user.  Some techy kinds of people are gonna freak because you can't reach under the hood and mess with lots of settings like in Windows.  I have fooled with lots of Windows XP and Windows 7 stuff already and find most of those types of settings an annoyance to even need to bother about and it always seems that as soon as I change one thing, something else starts to act funny or break.

In the case of this wonderfully sleek Chromebook, there are a few settings that you can personalize and if you really feel the need to look "under the hood" you can find some of the technical information relating to memory use etc,  but for the most part, this machine is lean, clean, and simply fast.  You could see a lot of what is happening by downloading a copy of the Google Chrome browser to your PC or Mac and simply run that as your only method of operating applications and you'll be able to experience the primary functionality of this Chromebook.  You'll have to discipline yourself to resist using your normal desktop applications and get started using the Google cloud complete with all those applications.  That way you'll be able to get the full experience of Google Chrome.

I've been running this Chromebook almost non-stop since I unplugged it this morning and checking the power gauge shows that the current battery charge is at 60%.  Not too bad for running full out for six hours including a spreadsheet, multiple posts to this blog, and my  normal email activity as well as reading some other forums and blog sites.

I'm tethered to my Nexus One cell phone right now for Internet access and it is still running very quickly.  So far, I'm very pleased with the experience.  Thanks for stopping by.  I'll keep posting here to let you know how things are going.