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Built-in software ‘death dates’ are sending thousands of schools’ Chromebooks to the recycling bin (www.mercurynews.com)

submitted 11 months ago by UngodlyAudrey@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

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There are few things quite as emblematic of late stage capitalism than the concept of "planned obsolescence".

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[-] FirstMajesticComet@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 11 months ago

Yep I did that to my school Chromebook, they never asked for it back when I graduated and being a broke college student I decided to UEFI flash it and use it as a cheap Linux Computer, still using it now. It's not the fastest laptop but it's certainly good enough. It's really dumb that they enforce software expiration dates on these PCs when they're probably fully capable of running the next version perfectly fine.

[-] reric88@beehaw.org 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Not Chromebook related, but I have an Asus G72GX laptop from around 2010 I bought refurbished, it was meant to be used for gaming, but it's performance wasn't very good. Got married, life happened and finally dug it out of storage this year. Replaced battery, installed windows 10 (had 7) and started using it for work as a developer. It handles it remarkably well considering it's age.

I had to force windows 10 to install by jumping through all kinds of hoops, but I haven't noticed a difference in it's performance.

However, if I reboot, I often get stuck in a boot loop with a different error each time it reboots, but I somehow magically get it to the login screen by doing some kind of computer version of the Konami code, except I don't know what the code is.

That being said, I am curious if It would be more beneficial to install Linux. I have no experience with it. All I use it for is VSCode mainly.

[-] FirstMajesticComet@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 11 months ago

I never tried using WIndows on my Chromebook before, heard that it really performs badly on Chromebook hardware. You might have better luck with Linux if the error is happening in Windows so it might be worth giving it a shot.