Another New Road

I don't usually usually write about products. My old Dell computer had served well and long. It was getting past it's "sell by" date. Also I was tired of fighting the war on viruses and malware. It was time to look at new technology,

I started researching the Chromebook. Since I was using the Chrome browser, I felt it would be an easy transition. It is small and light with a real keyboard. Since most things were in the cloud, including data storage, there was no need for a hard drive. This also isolates the computer from all the nasty stuff out there trying to attack your machine.

My family heard me talking about Chromebook favorably. So guess what I got for a birthday present. God, I have a great family! It comes with a basic office type software, some games, gmail, and various other things, but you can add software from the Google store. Most are free. I down loaded a really nice program to replace my Photoshop, for zippo.

 When I got the computer, I fired it up, tied into wi-fi, and, since I was using Chrome browser on my old machine, my personal links, data and my blog were all there from second number one. And, oh, it the machine fast. I believe it saves me an hour a day that I wasted waiting for screens to finish.

So much for the commercial. Now I am going to do a public service. Since you are on wi-fi and operating in the cloud, your printer needs to be in the cloud too. I was fortunate. I replaced my printer about a year ago. The one that I bought happened to be cloud ready. So that is the first thing, you need a cloud ready computer. They are not expensive. The method to get the Chromebook talking to the computer is not totally transparent to the casual observer.

Your computer and the printer must be on the same wi-fi network. So follow your printer's instructions and connect to your wi-fi. At the end of that procedure you should be given a chance to print out a Network Status sheet. Do it. You will need it. From here on you will be working on the computer. Bring up your Chrome browser. Click on the flower in the lower right hand corner. On the little window that comes up, click on "settings". When the settings screen opens, scroll to the bottom and click on "advanced settings". Now you can scroll down to "Google Cloud Print". Click on "Manage".

This will bring up the screen that you need to connect your printer. On the address line type in the Cloud Print Configuration URL. It should look like (http://###.###.#.###/). The #s represent the IP Address on your sheet. Don't use the parentheses. They are there just to separate. Now hit enter. Since Chromebook updates automatically, you won't need "update firmware". Now just complete that page and all should be good.

It took me a while to figure this out. I got scant help from any online sources. I am sure with all the readers that come to my blog, some will end up with Chromebooks. So I'm taking a day off from my usual rantings and trying to provide a little extra service. I hope it helps.