As reported on Wired.
- BY PRANAV DIXIT
Photo: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED
I’ve been on the fence about Chromebooks for a long time. Their speed, simplicity, and ease of use makes them extremely tempting. And yet, it’s hard to shake off the nagging feeling that you’re using a browser attached to a keyboard. You never know when you’re going to run up against a wall and have to pull out a “real” laptop to get something done.
And yet, as I discovered after a few weeks of using a barebones 13-inch Toshiba Chromebook as my primary laptop, it isn’t hard to achieve pretty much everything that a casual user would do on a traditional desktop or a laptop. Zipping and unzipping files? Check. BitTorrent? Check. Accessing Windows and Mac programs? Check check check. Here’s how:
Zip and Unzip Files
Opening a zip archive on a Chromebook is simple yet clunky. There’s no way of extracting the contents of a zip file to a folder, like in Windows or on a Mac. Instead, when you double click on a zip file, Chrome OS mounts it like an external drive. You can then browse the files within and copy the ones you want to Google Drive.
Zipping up files is even more clunky. If you select multiple files in your Google Drive on Chrome OS and right-click, you will see a “Zip selection” option. Annoyingly, it’s grayed out no matter what you do. The trick is to select all the files you want to zip up into single archive and drag them — wait for it — to the Downloads folder. You know, because that’s the most obvious place to drag files to be zipped up. The “Zip selection” option will now be active and you can now zip to your heart’s content.
If you’re looking for something a touch more elegant, WinZip — yes, the same program that lived for decades on your computer before cloud computing took over — now offers a cloud-based utility calledZipShare. It allows you to not only upload files directly from Google Drive and archive them, but also to move your zipped archives directly between multiple cloud services like DropBox and Microsoft OneDrive.
Use BitTorrent
Just like you, I use BitTorrent for its sole intended purpose: to download Ubuntu ISOs to my computer. There’s no way to install a BitTorrent client on a Chromebook but luckily, the workaround is so simple you’ll laugh out loud.
JSTorrent is a BitTorrent application for Chrome that works entirely in the browser, and works on both Intel and ARM-based Chromebooks. It does cost real money — $2.99 — but once you add it to your browser, downloading torrents, even the huge, multi-gigabyte ones, is a breeze. JSTorrent will save them all in the Downloads folder on your Chromebook. And if they’re zipped up, you already know how to unzip them.
Access Windows or Mac Programs
There comes a point in every Chromebook user’s life when they simply have to resort to using a “real” computer to get something done — like using iTunes, for instance. The excellent Chrome Remote Desktop application makes this a snap. Once you install it on both your Chromebook and your Windows or Mac machine, accessing it from your Chromebook is as easy as entering a six-digit PIN. It wasn’t fast enough to smoothly play back a video stored on my computer (even on a reasonably fast connection), but it is handy for accessing full-blown desktop programs in a pinch.