Chromebooks?

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Hi folks,

I need a cheap laptop for my second job so I can make use of dead time away from my desktop.
Tempted to purchase a Chromebook but don't know anyone who has one. Second job involves quite a lot of data entry, cutting + pasting from PDFs into a web based company system.
I'm a big Google user, Chrome, Drive etc and I like simply efficiency so this seems to tick the box.
Any experiences?
 
Hi, I'm in the process of deploying 100's of Chromebooks out to the business at the moment.

Generally, Chromebooks are great if your work within their limitations; if your main use is Google Apps, Drive etc, they work like a dream - better than Chrome on a laptop or desktop as they work offline much more seamlessly I find (due to the automatic caching), and are much more tolerant of temporary connectivity drops if you're working on a train. We've enough of our userbase switched over to Google now that it's the default means of working, so they are a good, secure and cheap solution for us.

One of the stumbling blocks we're still working through is access to some legacy systems that only run under IE. If the company system you refer to works under Chrome, your good to go, it not, it get's a little tricky and man not be worth it.
 
That's really helpful, thank you. It does seem to tick all my boxes, yup the company system is web based and I use Chrome on the PC for it. Can I ask which model you are deploying? The Dell 11 seems to get all the plaudits but I really need 13". Toshiba Chromebook 2 looks good but not out yet and some reviews say its a tad slow.
 
Is it possible to remove some of the apps on the Chromebook? Say I want to remove Google+ app for example, can I do that? Or are all the Google apps protected?
 
Sorry - been away from this for a while! To answer some the the questions.

Model wise, we're spreading the net wide initially; we're trialling 200 units in total. The HP 14, esp the 3G model is popular, but big; the HP 11 is very very light but looks a little like a kiddies toy and is slow. The Lenovo are good - we've the N20p, the 11e and the Yoga 11e (my favourite). The new Samsung was popular until they exited the market. There's a few toshiba in the mix too.

In terms of managing the units - bear in mind these are being deployed into a Google Apps for Work OU, we're purchasing management licences for each unit that allows us to centrally add / remove stuff (I'll have to check on the built in apps), but you can I know dis-allow Google+ via the Apps for Work admin tool even if you can't on the device. G+ is relatively key to a number of the collaboration technologies though (Corporate communities).

On the subject of patchy internet - a Chromebook works much better offline with the Google apps than a laptop with Chrome installed, at least from an end-user perspective. Drive caches 4,000 latest files and all the apps are locally hosted, so it drops off / reconnects almost seamlessly. The feedback from our users is that it actually copes much better with transient connections than their laptops do.
 
I think 4000 cached files should cover your document access nicely. Especially if you can work on them locally at local speeds, with changes being synchronised independently in the background. Similar in a way to Dropbox syncing.
 
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