Acer C7 Chromebook questions?

http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/acer-c7-chromebook.html#specs

It comes with a 320GB HDD. Can I put another OS on it? Or is the OS in the BIOS or something? I mean it's only $199.

 

This Chromebook doesn't look good to me. Really lame battery life and it's kinda thick. Not great hardware, though it is really cheap.

You should be able to boot a separate operating system but it's probably very difficult. You'd have to flip the hardware switch to disable the secureboot. From there you might be able to boot into a new OS.

 

What do you mean by flip the hardware switch? And what is secureboot?

 

Why go with all the trouble of putting another OS in it? Why not just use the OS already in it?

 

Just saw the specification. Battery life is 3.5 hours? That's not good. And I thought it would be a bit slimmer. But hey it's cheap. I'd go for it.

 

For 50 dollars more you can get the Samsung version, which has a much better battery life. It's only got a 16GB SSD or something like that though so it makes sense to stick with ChromeOS.

@Zap,

There is a hardware switch (on the CR48 it's behind the battery) that you literally just flip/ press. This disables OS verification.

The SecureBoot/OS verification checks what's running at bootup. It only allows the ChromeOS to start up - any other software is not allowed. It's a security feature, if malware tries to boot up in front of the OS (to bypass encryption etc) it gets wiped.

 

Oh I missed that. Now I'd go for that. Nice specifications.