Setting Up Chrome OS on an Old Desktop or Laptop

In this tutorial, we will guide you through the process of setting up Chrome OS on an old desktop or laptop. We'll be using a 32-gigabyte USB stick as our primary drive, with additional peripherals such as a keyboard and mouse dongle, and a Wi-Fi dongle for internet connectivity.

First, we need to plug all the necessary components into the machine. Our setup includes a 32-gigabyte USB stick, a keyboard, a mouse dongle, and a Wi-Fi dongle. We'll also be using an Ethernet connection if needed. To power up our machine, we simply plug everything in and press the power button.

As our machine boots up, we're presented with a boot menu screen. This may vary depending on your specific PC model. For this tutorial, at the top of the boot menu, it says "USB device". We'll select that option to boot from our USB drive, which is our only installed operating system. The first boot will be the longest as the machine does some behind-the-scenes work.

Once booted, we're greeted with a cloud-ready screen. Since we have a Wi-Fi dongle installed, it asks us to connect to our network. If you're using an Ethernet connection, it won't even prompt you from here. We'll select our network and proceed with the setup process. The next step is to agree to some terms and conditions. You can read through these if you want, but for most users, that's enough.

We'll then be asked to sign in with a Google account or create a new one. If we're signing in with an existing account, our settings will carry over, including downloaded apps like Google Docs and Gmail. We'll also set up our location services to always be disabled, as is standard practice when installing any operating system.

After signing in, we have the option to sign in with a guest account if we prefer not to use our main account for this setup. We'll proceed with signing in using our preferred account. As we continue through the initial setup process, we can change our Wi-Fi settings and toggle Bluetooth on and off, among other options.

The bottom right-hand corner of the screen allows us to take a guided tour of Chrome OS, which is highly recommended for new users. This will get us familiar with navigating the interface. We'll also have access to various settings, including installing proprietary media components, which is required for streaming services like Netflix and Hulu.

To install these necessary components, we'll open up Chrome in the top right-hand corner of the screen, where three dots are present. Clicking on these will bring us to the settings menu. From there, we can enable Adobe Flash and proprietary media components, both of which are required for accessing streaming services.

After enabling these components, we'll need to restart our machine to access Netflix and Hulu. Once restarted, we can find Chrome OS in the app drawer at the bottom left-hand corner of our desktop. Here, we can install additional apps from the Chrome store, like Google Docs or Gmail.

Finally, we can customize our desktop wallpaper and shelf position. Right-clicking on our desktop will allow us to change the shelf position, which we prefer on the bottom for its convenience. We'll also have access to various wallpapers to choose from in this section.

That's it! With these steps, you should now have Chrome OS up and running on your old desktop or laptop. This setup can be applied to new devices as well, giving users a flexible alternative to traditional operating systems.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's going on guys the CTA Prime back here again today I'm gonna show you how to turn an old desktop or a laptop into a Chromebook or a chrome box whatever you want to call it we're gonna be running Chrome OS on this all from a USB Drive well this is an offshoot of Chrome OS and chromium from a company named Neverwhere and this is called cloud ready we pretty much have Chrome OS running on these old desktops or laptops unfortunately with cloud ready we can't run Android apps like we can on some of the newer Chromebooks but overall this is a great operating system for repurposing an old machine like this we do have access to YouTube Netflix Hulu pretty much everything we can in the Chrome browser or the chromium browser will work on cloud ready and you can even go to Google Docs and use those so in my opinion this is a great operating system to throw on an old machine like this for your kids or your parents people who just kind of surf the web you know always on YouTube always on Netflix you can access thousands of google chrome store apps on this machine so basically this is a nice lightweight operating system for people who are just always online and it'll run from a USB stick so if you get a machine like this you don't have to worry about buying a hard drive or an SSD you can just throw a USB stick in here put cloud-ready on it and you're good to go if you really wanted to you could install this to the hard drive it's very easy to do but in this video I'm gonna show you how to install it to a USB Drive and get it up and running on your old machine before we get into the setup process I'm gonna give you a quick rundown on the machine I'm using this on this is an old Optiplex 30 60 has a Core 2 Duo at 3 gigahertz in it with onboard GMA 3100 graphics and 2 gigabytes of ddr2 RAM from this small USB Drive I also have a USB Wi-Fi dongle that I got from Amazon link for that is in the description I'm running video over VGA to this monitor here it does have a built-in speaker and it's working from there but you can also use the 3.5 millimeter audio out 2 speakers or the monitor all right so let's go ahead and get this installed to a USB Drive yes this can be installed to a hard drive after we install it here but I prefer running it all from a USB I can swap systems if I want to and I don't have to spend any money on an extra hard drive or SSD for this old machine first thing we want to do is insert our USB Drive into the PC we're going to be flashing with I'm using Windows 10 here there are instructions on their website and how to do this on Mac also but I prefer using a Windows machine I have my USB drive here it's a SanDisk Ultra fit 32 gigabyte USB 3.0 Drive USB 2.0 will also work and you could use an 8 gig if you wanted to if you don't have any drives I'll leave links to Amazon in the description the software is brought to us by Neverwhere comm it's really easy to install they have a full installation guide here or you can just follow along with this video if you want to we're gonna go do cloud-ready additions and choose home we're gonna scroll down like I mentioned we're gonna be using a Windows machine to make this USB Drive but they do have instructions for mac or chrome bug we're just gonna download the USB maker here it's going to download fairly quickly it's only about 50 megabytes when it's finished I'm gonna place it right on my desktop for easy access we're gonna start up the cloud ready USB maker welcome to the cloud ready creation utility you're gonna need an 8 gigabyte or a 16 gigabyte USB stick I'm using a 32 and 20 minutes for the USB install creation we're gonna click Next the PC I'm going to be using this on is an old dell optiplex 360 with a Core 2 Duo this was made after 2007 I'm gonna use the 64-bit version if you have an old PC you might want to try 32 of 64 doesn't work but I recommend trying this first click Next now for some reason it's saying that SanDisk devices are not recommended but the one I have here this tiny ultra-fit 32 works perfect for this I'm gonna go ahead and click Next SanDisk Ultra fit that's the USB Drive we're going to be flashing this to click Next so it's going to download the image and flash it to our USB Drive when this is finished it's gonna let us know it's finished then we're gonna remove the USB Drive from this system place it in the PC we want to run this on and we'll have to enter the boot menu to boot from the USB Drive just give it a little while to finish up it did say it could take up to 20 minutes this really depends on how fast your USB Drive is and your internet connection so our USB Drive is finished flashing all we need to do now is remove the drive from this PC and move over to the older one we want to run cloud-ready on so in order to do this we're gonna have to enter the boot menu on the other PC all manufacturers have different hotkeys to get into the boot menu and you can also get into the BIOS and set it to boot from the USB every time you start the computer up for instance the Dell I'm going to be running this on the hot key to enter the boot menu is f12 so when the computer is starting up for the first time we're gonna press f12 rapidly on our keyboard it's gonna bring us to the boot menu and from there I can select a boot from this USB Drive like I mentioned all manufacturers are different so you're gonna have to find your boot menu hotkey you can just do a quick google search to do that and if you want to set it up in the BIOS it's going to be a little different for each computer but basically what I did on this Dell was disable all other drives except for USB so I have three things I'm gonna be plugging into this machine my 32 gigabyte USB stick my keyboard and mouse dongle and this Wi-Fi dongle I need to get online Ethernet will also work if you don't want to use Wi-Fi so I'm just gonna plug everything in here got that Wi-Fi dongle plugged into the back and I'm gonna power the unit up I'm just gonna press the power button while it's booting up this is a dowel so I'm gonna press f12 this is gonna bring me into the boot menu your PC may be different do a quick google search to find out how at the very top of my boot menu it says USB device I'm gonna go ahead and boot from that that's the only drive I have installed on this machine the first boots gonna be the longest boot it has to do some stuff behind the scenes on the USB Drive but you should be welcomed with this cloud-ready screen here setup is super easy since I have that Wi-Fi dongle installed it's gonna ask me to connect a Wi-Fi if you're using Ethernet it probably won't even prompt you from here I'm just gonna click Next it's gonna ask me to connect to my network I'm gonna go ahead and do that real quick you'll need to agree to some terms here you can go ahead and read through this if you want to and I usually turn location services off anything that's asking for my location is always disabled with any operating system I install like I said you can sign in with a guest account if you want to I'm gonna go ahead and sign in with the account I've been using on here all of my settings are saved so when I sign back into here I'm gonna have some apps that I've already downloaded and my wallpaper I'm going to go ahead and plug this into my game capture device so it's a little easier to see so here it is you're now running cloud-ready on an old desktop or laptop otherwise known as Chrome OS or chromium OS there's a few settings we need to change in order to get Netflix and Hulu working on here I'm going to go over those real quick but on your initial boot up on the initial setup it's gonna ask you if you want to take a guided tour I do recommend taking the guided tour it's just gonna get you used to navigating through here but I'm gonna give you a quick rundown in the bottom right hand corner we can change our Wi-Fi we can turn bluetooth on and off notifications nightlight cast our volume we can install the OS to a selected hard desk now this is gonna erase that disk whether it's a hard drive or an SSD but if we run it just like this it's gonna be running from the USB Drive we also have our power button lock and more settings here if we go to the bottom left hand corner this is gonna bring up our little app dock I've already installed a few things like I said this is gonna carry everything over if you sign in with a Google account there's a couple things we want to enable in here so we're gonna go down and open up Chrome in the top right hand corner the three little dots we're gonna click this and go to settings from here we want to install Adobe Flash you really don't need it anymore but I always install it anyway and we're also going to install proprietary media components this is going to allow us to watch Netflix and Hulu after they're installed we're gonna have to do a restart so go ahead and restart your system that way we can access Netflix and watch movies from there so that's pretty much it I mean you can go to the chrome store if you want to download a bunch of apps from there like I mentioned Google Docs works you can go to Gmail so everything you do in this operating system will carry over if you want to plug this into another PC and boot it up you'll have the same background and everything like that speaking of the background there's a few things we can change here right-click on your desktop shelf position we can set it over to the left right or bottom I prefer my on the bottom here we can also change the wallpaper so there's a bunch to choose from here if you want to change it you can go ahead and do that from here so that's pretty much it for this video guys I really appreciate you watching you now have Chrome OS up and running on an old desktop or laptop this will also work on new devices if this is something you want to do with a new device it's really up to you if you guys have any questions just let me know in the comments below and there's also tons of information over on the website we downloaded this from links are in the description really appreciate it if you could hit that like button maybe subscribe to the channel and like always thanks for watching youwhat's going on guys the CTA Prime back here again today I'm gonna show you how to turn an old desktop or a laptop into a Chromebook or a chrome box whatever you want to call it we're gonna be running Chrome OS on this all from a USB Drive well this is an offshoot of Chrome OS and chromium from a company named Neverwhere and this is called cloud ready we pretty much have Chrome OS running on these old desktops or laptops unfortunately with cloud ready we can't run Android apps like we can on some of the newer Chromebooks but overall this is a great operating system for repurposing an old machine like this we do have access to YouTube Netflix Hulu pretty much everything we can in the Chrome browser or the chromium browser will work on cloud ready and you can even go to Google Docs and use those so in my opinion this is a great operating system to throw on an old machine like this for your kids or your parents people who just kind of surf the web you know always on YouTube always on Netflix you can access thousands of google chrome store apps on this machine so basically this is a nice lightweight operating system for people who are just always online and it'll run from a USB stick so if you get a machine like this you don't have to worry about buying a hard drive or an SSD you can just throw a USB stick in here put cloud-ready on it and you're good to go if you really wanted to you could install this to the hard drive it's very easy to do but in this video I'm gonna show you how to install it to a USB Drive and get it up and running on your old machine before we get into the setup process I'm gonna give you a quick rundown on the machine I'm using this on this is an old Optiplex 30 60 has a Core 2 Duo at 3 gigahertz in it with onboard GMA 3100 graphics and 2 gigabytes of ddr2 RAM from this small USB Drive I also have a USB Wi-Fi dongle that I got from Amazon link for that is in the description I'm running video over VGA to this monitor here it does have a built-in speaker and it's working from there but you can also use the 3.5 millimeter audio out 2 speakers or the monitor all right so let's go ahead and get this installed to a USB Drive yes this can be installed to a hard drive after we install it here but I prefer running it all from a USB I can swap systems if I want to and I don't have to spend any money on an extra hard drive or SSD for this old machine first thing we want to do is insert our USB Drive into the PC we're going to be flashing with I'm using Windows 10 here there are instructions on their website and how to do this on Mac also but I prefer using a Windows machine I have my USB drive here it's a SanDisk Ultra fit 32 gigabyte USB 3.0 Drive USB 2.0 will also work and you could use an 8 gig if you wanted to if you don't have any drives I'll leave links to Amazon in the description the software is brought to us by Neverwhere comm it's really easy to install they have a full installation guide here or you can just follow along with this video if you want to we're gonna go do cloud-ready additions and choose home we're gonna scroll down like I mentioned we're gonna be using a Windows machine to make this USB Drive but they do have instructions for mac or chrome bug we're just gonna download the USB maker here it's going to download fairly quickly it's only about 50 megabytes when it's finished I'm gonna place it right on my desktop for easy access we're gonna start up the cloud ready USB maker welcome to the cloud ready creation utility you're gonna need an 8 gigabyte or a 16 gigabyte USB stick I'm using a 32 and 20 minutes for the USB install creation we're gonna click Next the PC I'm going to be using this on is an old dell optiplex 360 with a Core 2 Duo this was made after 2007 I'm gonna use the 64-bit version if you have an old PC you might want to try 32 of 64 doesn't work but I recommend trying this first click Next now for some reason it's saying that SanDisk devices are not recommended but the one I have here this tiny ultra-fit 32 works perfect for this I'm gonna go ahead and click Next SanDisk Ultra fit that's the USB Drive we're going to be flashing this to click Next so it's going to download the image and flash it to our USB Drive when this is finished it's gonna let us know it's finished then we're gonna remove the USB Drive from this system place it in the PC we want to run this on and we'll have to enter the boot menu to boot from the USB Drive just give it a little while to finish up it did say it could take up to 20 minutes this really depends on how fast your USB Drive is and your internet connection so our USB Drive is finished flashing all we need to do now is remove the drive from this PC and move over to the older one we want to run cloud-ready on so in order to do this we're gonna have to enter the boot menu on the other PC all manufacturers have different hotkeys to get into the boot menu and you can also get into the BIOS and set it to boot from the USB every time you start the computer up for instance the Dell I'm going to be running this on the hot key to enter the boot menu is f12 so when the computer is starting up for the first time we're gonna press f12 rapidly on our keyboard it's gonna bring us to the boot menu and from there I can select a boot from this USB Drive like I mentioned all manufacturers are different so you're gonna have to find your boot menu hotkey you can just do a quick google search to do that and if you want to set it up in the BIOS it's going to be a little different for each computer but basically what I did on this Dell was disable all other drives except for USB so I have three things I'm gonna be plugging into this machine my 32 gigabyte USB stick my keyboard and mouse dongle and this Wi-Fi dongle I need to get online Ethernet will also work if you don't want to use Wi-Fi so I'm just gonna plug everything in here got that Wi-Fi dongle plugged into the back and I'm gonna power the unit up I'm just gonna press the power button while it's booting up this is a dowel so I'm gonna press f12 this is gonna bring me into the boot menu your PC may be different do a quick google search to find out how at the very top of my boot menu it says USB device I'm gonna go ahead and boot from that that's the only drive I have installed on this machine the first boots gonna be the longest boot it has to do some stuff behind the scenes on the USB Drive but you should be welcomed with this cloud-ready screen here setup is super easy since I have that Wi-Fi dongle installed it's gonna ask me to connect a Wi-Fi if you're using Ethernet it probably won't even prompt you from here I'm just gonna click Next it's gonna ask me to connect to my network I'm gonna go ahead and do that real quick you'll need to agree to some terms here you can go ahead and read through this if you want to and I usually turn location services off anything that's asking for my location is always disabled with any operating system I install like I said you can sign in with a guest account if you want to I'm gonna go ahead and sign in with the account I've been using on here all of my settings are saved so when I sign back into here I'm gonna have some apps that I've already downloaded and my wallpaper I'm going to go ahead and plug this into my game capture device so it's a little easier to see so here it is you're now running cloud-ready on an old desktop or laptop otherwise known as Chrome OS or chromium OS there's a few settings we need to change in order to get Netflix and Hulu working on here I'm going to go over those real quick but on your initial boot up on the initial setup it's gonna ask you if you want to take a guided tour I do recommend taking the guided tour it's just gonna get you used to navigating through here but I'm gonna give you a quick rundown in the bottom right hand corner we can change our Wi-Fi we can turn bluetooth on and off notifications nightlight cast our volume we can install the OS to a selected hard desk now this is gonna erase that disk whether it's a hard drive or an SSD but if we run it just like this it's gonna be running from the USB Drive we also have our power button lock and more settings here if we go to the bottom left hand corner this is gonna bring up our little app dock I've already installed a few things like I said this is gonna carry everything over if you sign in with a Google account there's a couple things we want to enable in here so we're gonna go down and open up Chrome in the top right hand corner the three little dots we're gonna click this and go to settings from here we want to install Adobe Flash you really don't need it anymore but I always install it anyway and we're also going to install proprietary media components this is going to allow us to watch Netflix and Hulu after they're installed we're gonna have to do a restart so go ahead and restart your system that way we can access Netflix and watch movies from there so that's pretty much it I mean you can go to the chrome store if you want to download a bunch of apps from there like I mentioned Google Docs works you can go to Gmail so everything you do in this operating system will carry over if you want to plug this into another PC and boot it up you'll have the same background and everything like that speaking of the background there's a few things we can change here right-click on your desktop shelf position we can set it over to the left right or bottom I prefer my on the bottom here we can also change the wallpaper so there's a bunch to choose from here if you want to change it you can go ahead and do that from here so that's pretty much it for this video guys I really appreciate you watching you now have Chrome OS up and running on an old desktop or laptop this will also work on new devices if this is something you want to do with a new device it's really up to you if you guys have any questions just let me know in the comments below and there's also tons of information over on the website we downloaded this from links are in the description really appreciate it if you could hit that like button maybe subscribe to the channel and like always thanks for watching you\n"