Acer C720 Chromebook Upgrade

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During the first Covid-19 lock down, I bought my son a new Acer Chromebook for home learning, but he decided he preferred the 10-year old Linux Mint laptop he'd been using (and still is, teenagers eh?), so the new computer went to his mum meaning that her 2014 Acer C720 Chromebook was now surplus.

I played about with it for a bit, but as Google stopped supporting it with security updates in late 2019 I reckoned it would be worth investigating putting a proper Linux OS onto it. A bit of research led me to the Fascinating Captain's blog

http://www.fascinatingcaptain.com/projects/dual-boot-chrome-os-and-linux/

and trial running using live flash drive versions of a couple of Linux distros and I was convinced the laptop was worth upgrading. I bought a 128Gb M.2 SDD for £25 (eBay) to replace the 16Gb one in the C720 and removed the write-protect screw while I had the case apart so that the BIOS could be fully flashed with the excellent update scripts courtesy of MrChromebox.

https://mrchromebox.tech/

You can see Gallium OS running on the Acer C720 in the photo above. I'm actually typing this blog post on the computer and it is very slick as Gallium is a lightweight version of Linux designed specifically for ex-Chromebooks and using the Chromium browser. The laptop runs Zoom like a charm (including backgrounds) and can handle a second HDMI screen without any issues. Finally I installed Google Drive desktop integration so basically this is a better Chromebook with on-going support via the open-source Gallium project.

https://galliumos.org/

Definitely worth the effort to get at least another 3 years out of this great little computer.


Above is a low-profile USB 3.0 64Gb flash drive added for even more storage. 

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