Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

It's fast, silent and runs cool. And I usually have about 25 tabs open. The keyboard is maybe not quite as nice as my $1500 Lenovo laptop, but it's excellent. A cold boot (8 seconds) plus login, plus start the chrome browser, plus open my mail in gmail takes 30 seconds. Most of the time I just close it when not in use and when I open it, it wakes instantly. There's a 2-star review that claims the Samsung Cbook-2 (13 inch) can't play Comedy Central's Net Neutrality video -- "The video would freeze every few seconds." But it's easy for extraneous things to distort such a test. I ran the same video off the same website full screen without the slightest hiccup even on the first time through. I've never been comfortable with a touchpad, but this one is working well for me. Forget the "stickyness" worry, the surface is perfect. But here's a trick for drag and drop that's often quicker and easier: Settings / Show Advanced Settings / Accessibility / Enable tap dragging. To use it: double tap and drag. Otherwise use two hands: click down the track pad with a finger on one hand and drag with the other. (more tips at the end) If you're thinking of buying this Chromebook, you may be hoping to get some real work done on it. It's the first one besides the $1600 Chromebook Pixel that seems like it might compete with a top-of-the-line laptop. That was my hope, and so far I've not been disappointed. The screen could be a tad bigger, but the high resolution is definitely not wasted. The memory is a bit small (yes you can save files directly to the local hard drive, so you might want quite a bit more). But you can expand it by 32GB for about $15 or apparently by 64GB. It's a lovely piece of equipment and there's no doubt that Google is heading the right direction with Chrome OS. Of course it comes with 100 GB of GDrive for two years, and GDrive space is so cheap (now down to $24/year for 100GB) that you don't need to worry about getting trapped into expensive storage. Now I'll try to cover some points for Chromebook newbies like myself, who may be just as concerned with the software -- it's a package deal and the risky part is actually the Chrome operating system. The hardware is solid. [1 week+ later: I still like everything about the hardware. A bit disappointed that I can't buy a device to make it compatible with my printer or scanner (that's Chrome, not Samsung), and that there is no decent app for marking up PDF files. But the Google apps are working better than expected off line.] I was quite concerned the Chrome OS would disappoint, but I've been pleasantly surprised. I will still need Windows at times, and not being able to merge table cells in Google Docs will sometimes drive me nuts. But the apps are improving all the time, and I can already do more with it than I expected. I've got 20 GB of work files in GDrive, and its backup abilities are great in some respects but too limited and risky in others. It can't handle the CryptoLocker virus (It will simply mirror all your locked files, and you will have to recover them one at a time) and accidentally trashed files are not in folders. Anyway, there's an extremely nice solution for $40/year at spanningbackup. (I have no affiliation with them, I just did a lot of homework.) So, right now, if you're a serious laptop user that wants to spend a lot less time in heavy old-fashioned systems and more time in the cloud. Samsung's CBook 2 (13 inch) is the machine for you. Just keep the old one around to pinch hit. Some Tricks you might find helpful (I'll add more later) Ctrl - Alt - / Will get you a live map of the keyboard. Hold down key combinations (eg Shft Ctrl) to see the effect Ctrl - Shift - ? To get Chrome Help Ctrl - Shift - t To reopen the last closed tab. Alt - Shift - M to see the hard drive Swipe faster, go farther. That's right -- swipe all the way across the trackpad slowly and your cursor will move only 1/3 of the screen. Fast and you easily go clear across (sensitivity set to max). Don't use Google's screen capture, by all accounts and based on mSy own experience, it really does not work propery, use Awesome or Snagit (Awesome won't work on PDFs) Warnings: You can't plug in your old printer or scanner. You can plug you old printer into a old computer and "cloud print" to it.