**Welcome to Chrome OS Flex**

We're going to get started and try it out first. This is all going to run from the USB drive, so don't worry, it's not going to wipe anything on your PC. You can make sure that everything works before you decide to install it permanently. We're going to have to set up our Wi-Fi, which I've already done. Now we're going to browse as a guest right now, we're not going to sign in. We just want to make sure that everything works like brightness control, sound, Wi-Fi, and USB ports.

**Testing the Setup**

We're going to run this from the USB drive so we don't wipe anything on the PC. From the very bottom, we're going to browse as a guest now. We're in guest mode, and we can make sure everything works. First thing I usually do is just test the browser. I know we were able to connect to Wi-Fi, but we want to make sure that we really are connected to the internet. So, I'm going to do a little bit of browsing and... yep, we are connected online.

From the menu bar down here, we can adjust the brightness. This is if you're on a laptop; if you're on a desktop, this might not work and it might not even be listed here. Also, test sound just to make sure your speakers are working. For this, I'll just head over to YouTube, I've got my sound all the way up, just test a quick video here, and... sound is working. With this laptop, everything I want to work does work.

**Installing Chrome OS Flex**

We're running from the USB drive, but I want to turn this into a full Chromebook. So, I'm going to install this to the internal storage. Keep in mind when installing this to your internal hard drive or your M.2 SSD, it is going to wipe everything off of that drive. So, I'm going to reboot the unit. We're going to get back into the boot menu and boot from the USB drive.

Once we're back at the initial setup window, we'll go through our Wi-Fi setup one more time. It actually might have saved; it did save with this even though I was running it from USB. Yeah, it automatically connected and now it's time to install Chrome OS Flex. We're going to choose "You" or a child, depending on how you want to set this up.

At the very bottom, instead of browsing as a guest, we're going to install Chrome OS Flex. Install is going to give us a warning: remember, this is going to wipe the internal drive. So, if you have anything on that drive that you need to back up, go ahead and do it before you do this because nothing will be saved on that drive. We're only going to be running Chrome OS Flex from the internal drive from now on.

But if you're ready to install, choose Install, and this is going to take care of everything. It's automatically going to partition and wipe that drive for us and install Chrome OS Flex. This could take a little while depending on how fast your USB drive is but just give it some time to finish up. It'll let you know when it's done.

**Final Steps**

My installation is complete, I'm going to go down to the left-hand side here and choose Shutdown. Once we've shut the unit down, we'll go ahead and remove our USB drive and boot the unit back up. Since we've installed everything to the internal drive, it's going to boot directly into Chrome OS Flex.

We'll have to do our initial setup; it'll give us the Chrome OS walk-through. We'll have to set up our Wi-Fi, enter our account details unless you want to run this in guest mode but once you have it all set up, you're good to go. Chrome OS Flex is installed on your PC.

I would highly recommend checking out the Explore tab or the Explore app; it's going to give us some information, some new stuff that's come to Chrome OS. It's got a search function, it's got a help function, and there's a lot of great resources in here. We've got all of our settings down here, and like we tested in USB mode, everything should work if it doesn't, I would highly suggest not even installing it.

But for the most part, I think they've got a lot of drivers covered here. But in the end, it's really up to you if you've got an old laptop or an old PC laying around and you want to install Chrome OS on it; we can do it now officially with Chrome OS Flex.

And overall, it's been working really well. I've tested it on three different devices, and AMD and two Intel devices, and haven't run into any issues but that's gonna wrap it up for this one. Really appreciate you watching all the links for everything I mentioned here today.

**Conclusion**

We went through setting up Chrome OS Flex from a USB drive, testing the setup, installing it permanently, and finalizing the process. We also discussed the importance of backing up data before wiping the internal drive. If you're interested in trying out Chrome OS Flex, we recommend checking out the Explore tab or app for more information and resources.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's going on everybody it's eta prime back here again today i'm going to show you how to install chrome os on an old laptop or an old desktop pc this has been made really easy from google itself this is an official operating system that we're going to be running known as chrome os flags this was just officially released by google to the public and it's been in beta and alpha for a little while but i've tested it on three different devices it works out really well and if you've been wanting to turn one of your old laptops or an old desktop into a chromebook or a chrome box it really couldn't be much easier than this what i've got here is a cheaper lenovo laptop that i picked up from walmart about a year and a half ago it's got a dual core intel cpu with four gigabytes of ram it did pretty decent with windows but we are limited on the ram side of things so i figured i'd go ahead and turn it into a chrome bug and it actually worked out pretty well everything works here we've got brightness control we've got wi-fi the front camera's working trackpad everything functions perfectly fine like it would if it did come with chrome os right out of the box and i've also tested it on a couple of office pcs like the small form factor hp with a ryzen 2400 but one of my favorite things to run different operating systems on are these older optiplex small form factor units this is a 30 20. you can pick these up for around 50 sometimes you can get them for free from your local college or even just check out craigslist somebody might be selling a pallet of these for super cheap but the optiplex has a third generation i3 cpu with four gigs of ram and chrome os flex runs absolutely amazing on it so if you're interested in getting this up and running on one of your old pcs let's go ahead and jump right into it there are a few things you're gonna need obviously you'll need a pc to install this on but uh you'll also need a usb drive eight gigabyte or larger and i would recommend a usb 3.0 drive i've got a usb 3.0 8 gigabyte drive right here and we'll also need another pc to get our usb drive set up this will work with windows mac or linux you'll need the chrome os browser and it's actually really simple to do but i'm going to walk you through the process so if you're interested in getting chrome os flex up and running on one of your older laptops or desktop pcs let's go ahead and get started okay so let's go ahead and get our usb drive ready they really couldn't have made this any easier i'm on a windows 10 machine but it works with mac linux or windows 11. uh you do need chrome installed so go ahead and get this installed and i'll leave a link to the chrome os flex help page this is going to give us the minimum device requirements so we need an intel or amd cpu four gigs of ram at least 16 gigabytes of storage we'll need that usb drive and if you take a look here note that the intel gma 500 600 3600 and 3650 are not supported but these are very old if you've got the hd 2000 and up you should be good to go on your intel cpu so the first thing we're going to do here is plug in our usb drive mine's already inserted into my pc it's an eight gigabyte drive we just need to leave it like this but remember we're going to be writing to this drive and in turn it's going to format that drive so if you have anything important on that usb drive go ahead and back it up we're going to head over to the chrome web store link for this is in the description and we're going to get the chromebook recovery utility we're going to add to chrome add extension once it's added we're going to go ahead and launch it i'll minimize the browser and what this allows us to do is create a recovery media for our chromebook but we have flex os built into this also so we're going to choose get started select a model from the list select a manufacturer and from here we're going to find google chrome os flex right here select a product flex we're going to choose continue and from here we need to select that usb drive so we can flash the operating system to it so from the drop down i've got my eight gigabyte drive here we'll choose continue create now and let it do its thing this may take a little while depending on how fast your internet connection is and how fast your usb drive is but for the setup i'm working with right now i haven't had it take over 10 minutes so just be patient with it it's going to verify the download it's going to unpack the download and now it's going to write it to the usb drive once it's finished we can go ahead and click done now we're going to remove our usb drive and move over to the pc we want to run this on okay so now we're going to take that usb and plug it into the pc now this is going to be a bit different for different pc manufacturers but what we need to do is get into the boot menu otherwise known as boot manager so on this lenovo while it's booting up i'm going to press f12 but on dell and hp pcs it will be a different hotkey it could be f12 it could be f9 f10 best bet is to check your manufacturer's website for your boot menu hotkey so while this is booting up i'm going to tap f12 a few times and we're now in the boot manager you can see we've got a few to choose from but what we're looking for is the usb drive from the selection menu we're going to use our arrow keys go down to usb press enter it's going to boot into chrome os flex now there's a couple ways to go about this but i would highly recommend trying it out first from the usb and we will get that option once we boot into the operating system and on the initial boot once you get to the welcome to chrome os flex we're going to choose get started try it first this is all going to run from the usb drive it's not going to wipe anything on your pc and you can make sure that everything works we're going to have to set up our wi-fi i've already done that we're actually going to browse as guest right now we're not going to sign in we just want to make sure that everything works like brightness control sound wi-fi usb ports you can go ahead and run this from the usb so we don't wipe anything on the pc because you don't want to get this installed and then find out let's say your usb ports don't work or it doesn't connect to the internet so from the very bottom we're going to browse as guest now we're in guest mode and we can make sure everything works first thing i usually do is just test the browser i know we were able to connect to wi-fi but we want to make sure that we really are connected to the internet so i do a little bit of browsing and yep we are connected online from the menu bar down here we can adjust the brightness now this is if you're on a laptop if you're on a desktop this might not work and it might not even be listed here also test sound just to make sure your speakers are working so for this i'll just head over to youtube i've got my sound all the way up just test a quick video here and sound is working with this laptop so everything i want to work does work with this unit right now so i can actually install this to the internal storage right now we're running from the usb drive but i want to turn this into a full chromebook so i'm going to install this to the internal storage and keep in mind when installing this to your internal hard drive or your m.2 ssd it is going to wipe everything off of that drive so i'm going to reboot the unit we're going to get back into the boot menu and boot from the usb drive and once we're back at the initial setup window we'll go through our wi-fi setup one more time it actually might have saved i think it did save with this even though i was running it from usb yeah it automatically connected and now it's time to install chrome os flex so we're just going to choose you or a child depending on how you want to set this up and at the very bottom instead of browsing as a guest we're going to install chrome os flex install it's going to give us a warning remember this is going to wipe the internal drive so if you have anything on that drive that you need to back up go ahead and do it before you do this because nothing will be saved on that drive we're only going to be running chrome os flex from the internal drive from now on but if you're ready to install choose install and this is going to take care of everything it's automatically going to partition and wipe that drive for us and install chrome os flex this could take a little while depending on how fast your usb drive is but just give it some time to finish up it'll let you know when it's done my installation is complete i'm going to go down to the left hand side here choose shutdown and once we've shut the unit down we'll go ahead and remove our usb drive and boot the unit back up and since we've installed everything to the internal drive it's going to boot directly into chrome os flex we'll have to do our initial setup it'll give us the chrome os walk through we'll have to set up our wi-fi enter our account details unless you want to run this in guest mode but once you have it all set up you're good to go chrome os flex is installed on your pc i would highly recommend checking out the explore tab or the explore app it's going to give us some information some new stuff that's come to chrome os it's got a search function it's got a help function and there's a lot of great resources in here we've got all of our settings down here and like we tested in usb mode everything should work if it doesn't i would highly suggest not even installing it but for the most part i think they've got a lot of drivers covered here but in the end it's really up to you if you've got an old laptop or an old pc laying around and you want to install chrome os on it we can do it now officially with chrome os flex and overall it's been working really well i've tested it on three different devices amd and two intel devices and haven't run into any issues but that's gonna wrap it up for this one really appreciate you watching all links for everything i mentioned are in the description if you have any questions let me know in the comments below like always thanks for watching youhey what's going on everybody it's eta prime back here again today i'm going to show you how to install chrome os on an old laptop or an old desktop pc this has been made really easy from google itself this is an official operating system that we're going to be running known as chrome os flags this was just officially released by google to the public and it's been in beta and alpha for a little while but i've tested it on three different devices it works out really well and if you've been wanting to turn one of your old laptops or an old desktop into a chromebook or a chrome box it really couldn't be much easier than this what i've got here is a cheaper lenovo laptop that i picked up from walmart about a year and a half ago it's got a dual core intel cpu with four gigabytes of ram it did pretty decent with windows but we are limited on the ram side of things so i figured i'd go ahead and turn it into a chrome bug and it actually worked out pretty well everything works here we've got brightness control we've got wi-fi the front camera's working trackpad everything functions perfectly fine like it would if it did come with chrome os right out of the box and i've also tested it on a couple of office pcs like the small form factor hp with a ryzen 2400 but one of my favorite things to run different operating systems on are these older optiplex small form factor units this is a 30 20. you can pick these up for around 50 sometimes you can get them for free from your local college or even just check out craigslist somebody might be selling a pallet of these for super cheap but the optiplex has a third generation i3 cpu with four gigs of ram and chrome os flex runs absolutely amazing on it so if you're interested in getting this up and running on one of your old pcs let's go ahead and jump right into it there are a few things you're gonna need obviously you'll need a pc to install this on but uh you'll also need a usb drive eight gigabyte or larger and i would recommend a usb 3.0 drive i've got a usb 3.0 8 gigabyte drive right here and we'll also need another pc to get our usb drive set up this will work with windows mac or linux you'll need the chrome os browser and it's actually really simple to do but i'm going to walk you through the process so if you're interested in getting chrome os flex up and running on one of your older laptops or desktop pcs let's go ahead and get started okay so let's go ahead and get our usb drive ready they really couldn't have made this any easier i'm on a windows 10 machine but it works with mac linux or windows 11. uh you do need chrome installed so go ahead and get this installed and i'll leave a link to the chrome os flex help page this is going to give us the minimum device requirements so we need an intel or amd cpu four gigs of ram at least 16 gigabytes of storage we'll need that usb drive and if you take a look here note that the intel gma 500 600 3600 and 3650 are not supported but these are very old if you've got the hd 2000 and up you should be good to go on your intel cpu so the first thing we're going to do here is plug in our usb drive mine's already inserted into my pc it's an eight gigabyte drive we just need to leave it like this but remember we're going to be writing to this drive and in turn it's going to format that drive so if you have anything important on that usb drive go ahead and back it up we're going to head over to the chrome web store link for this is in the description and we're going to get the chromebook recovery utility we're going to add to chrome add extension once it's added we're going to go ahead and launch it i'll minimize the browser and what this allows us to do is create a recovery media for our chromebook but we have flex os built into this also so we're going to choose get started select a model from the list select a manufacturer and from here we're going to find google chrome os flex right here select a product flex we're going to choose continue and from here we need to select that usb drive so we can flash the operating system to it so from the drop down i've got my eight gigabyte drive here we'll choose continue create now and let it do its thing this may take a little while depending on how fast your internet connection is and how fast your usb drive is but for the setup i'm working with right now i haven't had it take over 10 minutes so just be patient with it it's going to verify the download it's going to unpack the download and now it's going to write it to the usb drive once it's finished we can go ahead and click done now we're going to remove our usb drive and move over to the pc we want to run this on okay so now we're going to take that usb and plug it into the pc now this is going to be a bit different for different pc manufacturers but what we need to do is get into the boot menu otherwise known as boot manager so on this lenovo while it's booting up i'm going to press f12 but on dell and hp pcs it will be a different hotkey it could be f12 it could be f9 f10 best bet is to check your manufacturer's website for your boot menu hotkey so while this is booting up i'm going to tap f12 a few times and we're now in the boot manager you can see we've got a few to choose from but what we're looking for is the usb drive from the selection menu we're going to use our arrow keys go down to usb press enter it's going to boot into chrome os flex now there's a couple ways to go about this but i would highly recommend trying it out first from the usb and we will get that option once we boot into the operating system and on the initial boot once you get to the welcome to chrome os flex we're going to choose get started try it first this is all going to run from the usb drive it's not going to wipe anything on your pc and you can make sure that everything works we're going to have to set up our wi-fi i've already done that we're actually going to browse as guest right now we're not going to sign in we just want to make sure that everything works like brightness control sound wi-fi usb ports you can go ahead and run this from the usb so we don't wipe anything on the pc because you don't want to get this installed and then find out let's say your usb ports don't work or it doesn't connect to the internet so from the very bottom we're going to browse as guest now we're in guest mode and we can make sure everything works first thing i usually do is just test the browser i know we were able to connect to wi-fi but we want to make sure that we really are connected to the internet so i do a little bit of browsing and yep we are connected online from the menu bar down here we can adjust the brightness now this is if you're on a laptop if you're on a desktop this might not work and it might not even be listed here also test sound just to make sure your speakers are working so for this i'll just head over to youtube i've got my sound all the way up just test a quick video here and sound is working with this laptop so everything i want to work does work with this unit right now so i can actually install this to the internal storage right now we're running from the usb drive but i want to turn this into a full chromebook so i'm going to install this to the internal storage and keep in mind when installing this to your internal hard drive or your m.2 ssd it is going to wipe everything off of that drive so i'm going to reboot the unit we're going to get back into the boot menu and boot from the usb drive and once we're back at the initial setup window we'll go through our wi-fi setup one more time it actually might have saved i think it did save with this even though i was running it from usb yeah it automatically connected and now it's time to install chrome os flex so we're just going to choose you or a child depending on how you want to set this up and at the very bottom instead of browsing as a guest we're going to install chrome os flex install it's going to give us a warning remember this is going to wipe the internal drive so if you have anything on that drive that you need to back up go ahead and do it before you do this because nothing will be saved on that drive we're only going to be running chrome os flex from the internal drive from now on but if you're ready to install choose install and this is going to take care of everything it's automatically going to partition and wipe that drive for us and install chrome os flex this could take a little while depending on how fast your usb drive is but just give it some time to finish up it'll let you know when it's done my installation is complete i'm going to go down to the left hand side here choose shutdown and once we've shut the unit down we'll go ahead and remove our usb drive and boot the unit back up and since we've installed everything to the internal drive it's going to boot directly into chrome os flex we'll have to do our initial setup it'll give us the chrome os walk through we'll have to set up our wi-fi enter our account details unless you want to run this in guest mode but once you have it all set up you're good to go chrome os flex is installed on your pc i would highly recommend checking out the explore tab or the explore app it's going to give us some information some new stuff that's come to chrome os it's got a search function it's got a help function and there's a lot of great resources in here we've got all of our settings down here and like we tested in usb mode everything should work if it doesn't i would highly suggest not even installing it but for the most part i think they've got a lot of drivers covered here but in the end it's really up to you if you've got an old laptop or an old pc laying around and you want to install chrome os on it we can do it now officially with chrome os flex and overall it's been working really well i've tested it on three different devices amd and two intel devices and haven't run into any issues but that's gonna wrap it up for this one really appreciate you watching all links for everything i mentioned are in the description if you have any questions let me know in the comments below like always thanks for watching you\n"