old Dell chromebook

I converted an old Dell chromebook sometime back, removed the "screw", reflashed bios via mrchromebox, etc. At time I installed MX cause it was only thing that let sound come out of the speakers. It has tiny 16GB eMMC. Never really used it cause of small storage space and its kinda slow.

Well nuked MX and installed my Bookworm Dog with Waydroid (not hard just copied "live" and "changes" and grub.conf) It works, Waydroid works. Has a whopping 8GB free space.

So noticed it has SD card slot. And yes the mrchromebox UEFI bios will boot linux from an SD card. Downside, SD cards kinda suck for this purpose. Well unless you have newer top of line one. Still slower than a thumbdrive. You would be happier booting from thumbdrive or usb SSD. Honestly even an old mechanical laptop hard drive is faster than SD card. But SD card is more portable, can even leave it in slot if you have one of those shorty adapters for the mini SD card. If you have only mini SD slot and the mini SD card sticks out, not lot you can do. But a mini SD card is well very mini. I will mention though the converted chromebook can boot from SD card, my HP Stream which originally had windows, can not. Again the idea of these was to force people into the cloud to rent space and apps, not upgrade it to use as normal laptop. Cloudbook was just windows version of a Chromebook.

Truly annoying how manufacturers went out of their way to make the chromebooks/cloudbooks very unfriendly to hardware updates. Only few models, older models, can you update storage cause they use real SSD instead of soldered eMMC. And couple models slot for standard RAM rather than have it soldered to motherboard.

On other hand they sold these Chromebooks by the millions to schools, and they are lot heavier duty than consumer cloudbooks as they have to stand up to use by careless kids.

Update. I had run into couple videos on youtube showing people upgrading HP Stream with a NVMe SSD. By pulling the wifi card and using an adapter in the wifi card socket then put the NVMe SSD into the adapter. Ok, well two types of these, one is $5 and one piece, you can shorten along preperforated lines for space you have and size of the SSD (get the shortest one you can find). The other is three piece, one goes into the wifi socket, then a ribbon, then on other end ribbon the adapter for the NVMe SSD. This gives options if you dont have space for the one piece kind. Cheapest I found the ribbon type is $15. Still reasonable if you need it.

Well I figured this old converted Dell Chromebook 3120 with only 16GB eMMC could seriously use bigger storage drive. So found a used shorty NVMe 256GB SSD for $13 on ebay. The adapter was the $5 kind cause this laptop has space for it. But took like 3 week for the slow boat from China. Anyway put it all together. The mrchromebox UEFI bios saw it before I had even partitioned it and installed anything. I first put winXlite "micro11" on it. It booted fine, but no drivers in win11 for sound or trackpad. Then installed MINT 21.3. It had sound and trackpad, but oddly sound after about five minutes turned into a WHINE/squeal. Then installed BookwormPup64. Sound works and didnt do the whine/squeal thing. But...

I also noticed much faster boot times and no lag typing while connected. The old Dell Chromebook is not a high end computer... LOL Its the NVMe SSD, even though it loses speed by the limited capacity of the wifi socket, its still three times faster than the eMMC drive. Its very usable. And its 256GB!!! instead of 16GB.

Ok, with my fascination with mini laptops, saw a Asus C300M with a buy it now for shipped price plus tax around $11 total. In pics it looked good. So got it today. Yea only 2GB RAM compared to the Dell's 4GB. And unfortunately in 2024, it does make a difference even with a lighter OS cause of how RAM hungry browsers are. Anyway just nuked EOL chromeos and installed mrchromebox UEFI bios. Went very smooth. Installed BookwormPup. Its fine, though do notice it does more swap file than on the Dell. But its fast enough to be quite usable. While I had back off removing the write screw, noticed it has space enough around its wifi card, so it too will get NVMe upgrade. I do appreciate the larger screen. Not big fan of the little 11.6 screens though sure they are more portable.

Lot of these EOL (end of life, no more chromeos updates for you) laptops, seems they are widely used in schools. Think of how much e-waste could be avoided if these were upgraded with linux and large NVMe SSD. Google and the chromebook manufacturers rather you were forced to buy another new chromebook... LOL I love it that some that love chromeos, are doing the mrchromebook bios then installing Flex, its offered by Google to put chromeos on old windows and mac computers. They really dont want you using it to update EOL chromebooks....

Oh by way on the videos, only the newer HP Streams have a bios that can see NVMe drive. On the older ones you have to use rEFInd or CLOVER boot loaders installed on either usb drive or the internal eMMC drive. So first boots to rEFInd which chainloads system on the NVMe.

Now I did find a video of a first generation 13inch HP Stream. It has the older mpcie wifi card. But there is an adapter than can convert it to mSATA. I was curious and looked and there are a few out there that say they are for Asus EEE netbook only. Your guess. Now I found a $1.50 adapter that goes from mpcie to m.2 wifi adapter only. Ordered one. Want to see if I can plug this in an older Dell D430 laptop with mpcie wifi card, then put one of the adapter I used on the Dell Chromebook plugged into that adapter, then an NVMe SSD. He I am willing to gamble $1.50 and another three week. Be kinda cool if it worked. I am impressed with the NVMe SSDs. Oh might need to use CLOVER to boot anything on it from older laptop with legacy bios. CLOVER has ability to boot a UEFI system on legacy bios computer. And you can add optional NVMe driver.