Samsung 3 Chromebook, speed up your chromebook | Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash | Abundant Content

A few years ago, I attempted a bluetooth keyboard and tablet for travel purposes.

Heading to Vancouver for nearly a month, I needed to keep up with client work and thought I had it dialed.

Not so much.

Typing on a keyboard made for Lilliputians is not a pleasurable experience for a speed-typer like me. I drive a keyboard.

I looked into a lot of tiny laptops but considering that my on-the-go needs when I bought this were minimal and mostly involved writing, I didn’t need anything fancy or expensive, so my then-wife and I walked out of a random trip to Best Buy with a $175 Samsung 3 Chromebook. Conspiratorial thoughts about Google aside, it was a handy, basic machine for practical stuff, and I’ve never really been too worried whether Google is secretly skimming my works in progress, college papers, topic lists or blog drafts for clients anyway.

No, it did not feel classy. The basic Chromebook is no MacBook Air. What it is, however, is nearly weightless, very small, and easily replaceable without breaking your heart or your bank account in the event that it grows legs. As a keyboard jockey, I also appreciated a keyboard that feels practically normal. The Chromebook became the gadget I carted off to school during the early mornings spent in the study lounge before class. It’s the one I brought out to the living room when I wanted to join the family after hours of being holed up in my office. It’s the thing we watched Netflix in bed with, the thing I took to coffee shops, the thing I did an awful lot of writing, research and fact-checking on.

And sometimes it got very, very slow. Because it was the cheapie model, it didn’t have a whole lot of memory or hard drive space (Chromebooks aren’t made for that anyway). I had to keep my open tabs under control (relax though, I’ve got 11 open right now). It hated Facebook. Storage capacity wasn’t massive, either, but I made the moves and got it back to just-out-of-the-box speed.

Things I did to speed up my Chromebook (and some additional tips):

I did everything on this list and this one, and noticed an increase in speed immediately.

I dropped a micro-SD card in it and stored local files there. Amazon had a Sandisk Ultra 200gb on sale for $28 recently. Worth its weight in gold. Plus Google Drive. 100gb for $1.99/month.

You can also turn off syncing, but that terrifies me – coordinated efforts between my gadgets are important to me, especially with the amount of research and fact-checking I do. Also, because I’m slightly obsessive, I back up my desktop computer to a portable pretty frequently, too, and that includes my Google Drive folder there. Bases pretty covered.

If you keep your machine clean you can probably just avoid this, but a cheap Chromebook with a lot of stuff stored on it, and a cheap Chromebook with a lot of stuff open, is going to be a slow Chromebook.

Check your specs. There’s great information here on how to see your space and usage both on your Chromebook and on Google Drive. Do some spring cleaning if necessary, and again, move stuff around. Clean out and organize your downloads, frequently. I also work in Google Docs offline a lot, so turning that option off is not an option for me – but if you don’t need it, turn it off.

Change this setting, after you read about what it does. As the author notes, this may not improve the situation for everyone, but it did for me, despite being from 2014.

As for Facebook and Chromebook’s seeming hatred of it, turns out Facebook + Chromebook + Grammarly were always a bad idea.

AdBlock Plus can also be very useful, but if you’re like me, you’ll notice that most quality news sites these days know when you’re using it – and they’ll offer you an option to either turn it off or get behind a paywall.

I don’t mind supporting high-grade journalism in whatever way I can. Writing takes time, effort and research and we deserve to eat, too. The unfortunate thing is that I can’t afford to buy into every news source I enjoy, so I turn off AdBlock when I can – but ads really, really, really slow down your browsing experience on a cheap Chromebook. The more ad-laden a page that requires me to turn off ad blocking is, the more likely it is I’ll just leave, instead.

Finally, reboot it. Frequently. The beauty of Chromebooks is that a reboot takes just seconds. Everybody and everything benefits from a frequent reboot.

So, if you’re on a cheap, sluggish, and very useful little Chromebook, I hope this helps.

Speed Up Your Chromebook
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