I don’t know about you but if you’re anything like me you’ll buy a new computer every couple of years. If not you’ve certainly bought add-ons and upgrades which you’ve slapped on a bare bones CPU. Answer me this, have you got a couple of laptops hidden about the house which you’re loath to throw away although you’ve not switched them on in years?

Picture courtesy flickr.com/photos/bruceclay/

I’ll admit I’ve got a couple. And what’s wrong with them? Nothing physically. Apart from the odd wobbly key almost all of the money you spend on computer repairs is spent on software. As your computer gets older it slows down until it’s intolerable so you either have to get it fixed or buy a new one. Rubbish analogy but would you stand for having to buy a new car because your gas was getting out of date? Of course not. So why buy a new machine just because the software is old and the memory’s clogged up?

So, with the introduction of Google’s new Chrome OS on the “Chromebook” laptop your next computer might be the last one you ever buy.

Because the machine you take home has nothing on it but a web portal you have very little that can go wrong. It’s also fast. 8 seconds they say, compare that to several minutes for a clunky laptop rolling on Vista and you’ll be in a land of glee!

Because there is nothing to download you won’t clutter up your drives, everything you do is saved on the cloud, everything you use comes from the cloud. Because it’s cloud based it’s not your job to keep your computer updated, your IaaS provider takes care of all that so you’re always using the most up-to-date applications available.

I’m a bit of a hoarder so I think I would find it a bit disappointing not to be able to download pictures, videos and written work to my computer to read off line. You don’t even need a desktop since if the computer is on, it’s on the web, nothing else. Of course you can link to all of those things, keep them in your own secure files or share them to various degrees of availability to the public so you’re not really losing anything. So, you can’t download but on the upside, everything is on demand so you can have access to industry standard software whenever and wherever you need it. Added to that the speed that cloud based computing is offering and you’ll soon be wondering how you ever managed to put up with twentieth century technology!