How to convert an old laptop into a Chromebook with CloudReady – FOR FREE!

Enabling Netflix in CloudReady

Until recently, Netflix wasn’t supported by CloudReady even though Netflix works absolutely fine in standard Chrome OS. This was because the resources needed to securely play Netflix content were not available. Fortunately, this has now changed but you do have to go through a few steps to get there.

First, ensure your CloudReady is on the latest version. Then, open up the settings by clicking the bottom-right of the system tray. Then click Settings. Under ‘Widevine Content Decryption Module’ click ‘Install’ to install the module. Once it’s installed, reboot your system so it commits.

Next, you’ll need to install the Chrome User Agent Switcher extension. Once the extension is installed, you’ll see its icon in the top right of the Chromium browser. Right click it and select ‘Options’.

On the next screen, use the form to add a new User Agent with the following details (without the quotation marks):

1. Name: “CloudReady Widevine”

2. String: “Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Fedora; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/46.0.2490.86 Safari/537.36”

3. Group: “Chrome” (should be filled automatically)

4. Append: “Replace”

5. Indicator Flag: “IE”

Now when you open up Netflix in your browser, left click the User Agent Switcher icon, go to Chrome, then select ‘CloudReady Widevine’ and Netflix should be able to play perfectly. With all of these steps followed, you should have your very own fully functioning Chromebook alternative of your own creation.

Using Chromium OS and Performance

If you’ve used Chrome OS before, everything should feel familiar. The only nuances you’ll encounter are the fact that your keyboard is likely a standard keyboard and one not designed for a Chromebook. Your manufacturer’s keyboard shortcuts for volume, that normally need a Fn modifier to be pressed as well, won’t work in Chrome OS. Chromebooks also don’t have a function row of keys, but the F1-F12 keys will operate as though they were on a Chromebook keyboard. They translate as follows:

F1 – Back
F2 – Forward
F3 – Refresh
F4 – Reload
F5 – Full screen
F6 – Switch window
F7 – Brightness down
F8 – Brightness up
F9 – Mute
F10 – Volume down
F11 – Volume up

There’s no lock button, but your laptop’s power button should lock the system instead. Your Caps Lock key should function as the Chromebook’s ‘Search’ key. In the case of Chrome OS, the Search key can be set to act as a Caps Lock, so this doesn’t really matter. All of the keyboard shortcuts worked exactly as they would on a Chromebook. You can also hit Ctrl + Alt + ? to bring up the other keyboard shortcuts that use Ctrl and Alt as modifiers.

In my case, hardware-wise, everything worked straight after installation. The wireless card was fully operational, I had two-finger scroll on the touchpad, the speakers worked. Bluetooth paired without a hitch. Everything just worked perfectly.

Not forgetting that this is a piece of hardware dating back to 2008, performance is more than acceptable when working within the limitations of Chrome OS. The Samsung NC10 only has a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 single-core processor with 1GB of DDR2 memory after all (admittedly I upgraded mine to 2GB of memory years ago).

Running a few benchmarks that we use for Chromebooks, it managed a SunSpider score of 2,062.5ms and a JetStream score of 17.6. Compared to the Acer Chromebook R11 we reviewed recently, that’s a SunSpider score three times slower and a JetStream score just over twice as low. So obviously don’t expect miracles, but for simple web browsing it performed fine. Let’s not forget the Samsung NC10 is approaching eight years old, which in technology terms is positively ancient.

Obviously, performance will be dependent on what system you decide to use but converting an old laptop into a Chromebook could certainly give your old hardware a second wind. As it’s so easy, there’s no reason to not give CloudReady a go rather than letting your old laptop gather dust. You don’t even have to commit off the bat, just run CloudReady off a live USB drive to see how you get on.