After an evening of unboxing, cording and oohing and aahing, my new desktop Chrome OS computer is up, running and keeping me fully productive. The Samsung Series 3 Chromebox is a compact unit that now fits in a corner in my desk, freeing up a wide swath of space on top of my desk where my largely deskbound Dell Latitiude laptop had been sitting. With a Samsung Series 5 Chromebook as my “go-to” road warrior and around-home computer, rare are the times when I even unplug the laptop, with almost all of my productivity tools living in the cloud of Internet services like Google Drive, Zoho Writer and other great tools powered by browser technologies. Add in the increasing instability of any Windows PC after more than a few moments of newness and it was time to get back to a sane desktop.

Sanity was very easy to come by in this instance. Unbox the tiny Chromebox – no larger than a Macbook mini (for half the price) – cord up your USB peripherals and monitor, hit the power button and away you go. The first screen helps you set up your network – essential for a cloud computer – then you log in (I did so with two-step authentication) and it updates the unit with the latest Chrome OS software and all of your Chrome OS settings.

The initial update process took several minutes for me, since I make heavy use of Chrome extensions, bookmarks and Google Drive, but when that was done I rebooted to a normal login prompt and was looking immediately at my full complement of Chrome tools already installed. No hours/days of software installation, no fussing with CDs, drivers or downloads – everything was there, my plug-and-play webcam and headset worked flawlessly and I was immediately productive.

The only two very small wrinkles were screen wallpaper and mouse speed. The stable/production version of Chrome OS now allows you to load in a personal image of your choice as your screen wallpaper image, but for some reason this was not loaded, although I had specified an image on my Google Drive. No worries, loaded in seconds. The default mouse settings for Chrome OS in the stable channel were rather slow for navigating across the HD-resolution 23-inch monitor that I purchased with the Chromebox, so I switched to the Beta channel and discovered that the mouse settings were much more responsive. So hopefully that’s a bit of goodness that comes to the stable “Stumpy” version of Chrome OS for Chromeboxes some time soon. In the meantime, this was a true “it just works” product setup.

The rest is pretty much just using Chrome OS, which is a great experience, but the best part is that my plans for turning my PC into a legacy app server seem to work perfectly. One of the really great features available in Chrome is an extension called Remote Desktop Beta. This allows you to access any networked PC from anywhere as a secure desktop emulation. With my new hi-res monitor, my Remote Desktop connection to my Dell Latitude PC enables me to keep my PC as a separate window in Chrome and to access any PC-specific software or functions that I may need as if they were running natively on the Chromebox.

This works very smoothly indeed with a good network connection, so I highly recommend this as a way to go Chrome-first without having to make a large array of choices about leaving things behind on your PC. As it is I had already bought a Cloud Print-compatible all-in-one unit from HP for scanning and printing, so the transition is all that much easier – I don’t have to have the PC operating to access my printer from anywhere via a Chrome browser or computer.

The other great bonus of this Remote Desktop setup is that I have a version of Photoshop on my PC that’s compatible only with Windows XP and requires me to use Windows XP emulation to run the software. To upgrade that software would cost me $800 – $300 more than my whole new computing rig. So now I use Remote Desktop emulation to access Dell Latitude Windows 7 PC running XP emulation. It’s kind of a wild concept, but it works fine.

So now I have a beautiful new setup that just plain works as it should, a reclaimed desktop and my Dell Latitude laptop sequestered under my desk with its cooling fan pad taped to its back and its lip taped closed with a small eraser stuck between the keyboard and the screen to give it a little extra ventilation. I will use it as my server for CDs when I have music to burn, since you need PC software to upload tunes to Google Play Music (ironic, but I get it), and for the time being the PC is also my SD card reader.

That’s right, one oddity is that the Series 3 Chromebox does not have an SD card bay. Why? Well, my best guess is that it emphasizes the concept of keeping your content stored in the cloud, rather than pack-ratting it on little drives that are easily lost or broken. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if enterprises that are eager to downsize desktop technology for their staffs may have wanted one less way for content to walk away from their offices.

Whatever the reason, all you need is to shell out $5-20 for a good USB plug-and-play card reader and you’ll be fine. Perhaps keeping the cost down was also a factor – this is a $329 unit, after all, so it seems to be maximized on great features that provide the greatest amount of value for the greatest number of people – typical Google product strategy. So no SD card reader but two DisplayPort monitor ports for dual-headed monitors, a DVI port, six USB ports (two in front – handy for USB headsets and on-the-go USB drives), a 1 gigabit Ethernet connector and wireless b/g/n network connectivity.

So far the unit’s performance has been excellent, fast and highly stable in spite of me pushing it to its limits. Okay, I did get one “he’s dead, Jim” browser crash unexpectedly, but that seems to have been a passing thing. An hour-plus Hangout went off flawlessly, even while playing songs on Google Play Music and sharing my desktop to show Remote Desktop – an act of faith, but faith rewarded perfectly. All content comes up crisply, vindicating the Intel Celeron dual-core processor, though I had had my fingers crossed for an i5 Core chip that snuck into Chromeboxes given out at Google I/O. As noted in the packing materials, there is just a touch of lag when you go to full-screen HD video. I assume that the +Google Chrome team is on the case.

The Celeron is more power-thirsty than other processors on the scale of portables, so I am skipping the Series 550 generation of Chromebooks for now, but in a desktop configuration it runs cooly beneath the Chromebox’s excellent ventilation system. On a warm, humid summer day it’s just sitting there, with not even an audible whisper of fan sound coming from it. So now I am largely future-proof for a good long time. Chrome is in the driver’s seat, updating automatically, keeping me insulated from “gotcha” proprietary hardware and software and attached to all of the best goodness that the Web can offer – which covers more than 90 percent of what I need out of a computer for work, and lots for play also.

To me the Samsung Series 3 Chromebox is a “no-brainer” investment. Give yourself the edge of a Web-first view of the world, and the rest falls into place.

This is kind of a side note of elation.With our accounting, CRM, and ERP software all provided as a service in a browser, Google Drive allowed me to shut down our last server (except for SIP-VOIP and Scanner/Document).We are server-less (except the afforementioned).Now all I have to maintain is a DHCP server. I hate to sound giddy, but, really I am.This is the future.

1. It takes up almost no space on my desk.

2. 97% of the time it is silent. Every once in a while if I’m loading multiple graphics-intensive web sites simultaneously, the fan will come on for 15 seconds.

3. Boots super-fast. I think it was around 8 seconds from power off to done booting up when I bought it in early June 2012. Now it’s somewhere between 5 and 7 seconds. Quite a change from my last 20 computers which were “fast” (booting under a minute) when brand new, but ended up booting in 3 to 12 minutes after being used for a year.

4. No viruses (and no anti-virus software slowing the system down)!

5. Plenty of USB ports (4 in back + 2 in front). 2 will get used by mouse/keyboard.

6. No more Microsoft Windows updates! On my other computers: half the time the updates would fail, sometimes they would mess up my wifi, and they almost always ended up making the computer slower.

7. It really DID work right out of the box!

8. I can unplug it, throw it in my glovebox (did I mention how nice and small it is?) drive to a friend’s house, hook it up to their monitor/keyboard/mouse, turn it on, and be working in 5 to 7 seconds.

CONs:

1. As multiple people have pointed out, when the Chromebox is not in use, but plugged in, it sends a huge buzz through the speaker cable. I just have to remember to turn off the speakers when I go to bed at night or when I wake up the speakers whine as the ChromeBox has gone to sleep.

2. It supports dual 30″ monitors, but (for now) will only display the same thing on both–you can’t have a double-wide desktop (yet). [Edit (2013/03/17): Extended desktop has been implemented! Resolution is 1920×1200 for DVI and 2560×1600 for DisplayPort.]

3. No Java. For me, this has only been a problem in that it can’t play RuneScape. So I keep a secondary desktop computer running Linux for that.

4. The only other website I’ve found that the Samsung ChromeBox can’t handle is my credit union’s site. Again, I keep the Linux PC around for that.

5. Older USB devices are hit-and-miss. The only one I’ve had a problem with is my old webcam.

6. As far as I can tell, there is no way to find out how full the internal SSD is. It holds 16 GB, but I have no idea how much I’ve saved to it, and have no idea if there’s a way to find out.

7. Apparently no way to edit a local text file. I haven’t even found an app to do it. My workaround for the last 5 months has been to throw the file on a thumb drive, move it to another computer, edit it, move the thumb drive back, and copy the new version over the old copy. Not an elegant solution, but at least there is a workaround until Google fixes this.

8. No way to manually invoke the screen saver. I’d like this, since then I can start a podcast playing, and then blank the screen. Ctrl-Shift-L will lock the screen, but doesn’t invoke the screen saver–just makes you re-enter your Google password. The only workaround is to power off the monitor or wait the 8 minutes for the screen saver to kick in.

8b. No way to change screen saver settings. I think it currently blanks the screen after 8 minutes of inactivity. Sometimes I want it to stay on longer (if I’m reading something long but don’t want to have to jiggle the mouse) and sometimes I want it to kick in much sooner.

9. The built-in Media Player needs more options. I miss being able to listen to podcasts at doublespeed like with the default Windows MediaPlayer.

10. File Manager doesn’t tell you the length, bitrate, etc of audio and video files.

11. If you use LastPass, you will end up having to enter your master password about three times as often as on other computers.

There are a lot of other things (like not having a way to bind useless keys like F11, F12, right-most Windows key, etc) that aren’t important, but would be nice. Also, Google has fixed four items from my CON list, so I have not included those here. 🙂

I realize my CON list is longer than the PRO list, but the things on the PRO list are so much more important that I would buy another one without giving it a second thought.