ChromeOS Flex on a Mini PC

The Windows license on the mini PC I purchased was a volume license. I won't say which PC it is, but this is something that can happen with any Chinese manufacturer.

It's not good to keep using it as is, so I was thinking about installing Linux.

In fact, I have a mini PC with an N95 CPU that I bought previously, and I'm using it with Ubuntu installed.

However, this current PC has quite impressive specs: a Core i7-1255U CPU, 24GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage.

Since it seems capable of daily use, I decided to install ChromeOS Flex. This is my first time installing ChromeOS Flex on such a high-spec machine, so I'm excited.

I quickly finished the setup using the ChromeOS Flex installation USB I created earlier.

It's already working without any issues. It's at a level where I'm worried if it's okay for it to run this smoothly.

Let's take a quick look at the benchmarks.

Speedometer 2.0

Octanebench

This score is better than the Ryzen 9 6900HX I use as my main home machine. I'd almost want to make this my main machine. However, it loses significantly in GPU performance, so I think the Ryzen 9 6900HX is better if you're using Windows.

Wow, ChromeOS Flex is amazing. After setting it up, there were no issues at all with Wi-Fi or sound. Naturally, the Chrome browser was already set up, and Google Japanese Input was also ready to go. There is truly no stress before you start using it.

With that said, why not get a used Windows PC and install ChromeOS Flex on it! You'll end up with a very usable laptop!!

It's cheap, so it's perfect for tinkering.

There are problems, too

I regularly use the note-taking app UpNote. It's available for Android, Mac, and Linux, and of course, there is a Windows app, but there isn't one for ChromeOS. Since a web version isn't provided either, the only way to run it is in a Linux environment. This is very troublesome.

Also, I thought I could listen to Amazon Music while doing other things, and it played at first, but then it started giving a 'playback error' and stopped working. To begin with, it's also a problem that I can only listen in SD quality even though I'm subscribed to the Unlimited service.

I'm currently thinking about how to solve this. I might end up installing Linux.