Showing posts with label Google Chrome. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Google Chrome. Show all posts

Monday, May 11, 2015

Make Google Chrome Use Less......Everything

Chrome, Google's internet browser, was originally designed to stay out of your way and be a minimal browser, but now it's an entire application platform. Chrome manages to burn through a lot of battery life, especially on Macs. Also, if you have a PC with low amounts of RAM, Chrome seems to take up a lot of memory. Even after you close it, Chrome still continues to run in the background. It continues to take your battery life and a lot of your memory, so when you really want to close Chrome fully, you have to right click the Chrome icon and select Exit Chrome. If you installed Chrome apps that continuously need to run in the background, you may just want to disable it. All you need to do is right click the icon for Chrome system and uncheck "Let Google Chrome run in the background." This will shut down Chrome altogether when you close your Chrome browser windows.

If you haven't noticed by now, browser extensions will completely slow down your browser, they take up more of your memory, and drain you system resources. If you are using Chrome, you can what the browser extensions are doing to your system by clicking the menu icon, going to More tools, and clicking Task Manager. The items that appear that begin with "Extension:" are the browser extensions that Chrome is running. Uninstalling an extension that's lets say using over 100 MB of RAM, that's draining your battery power dramatically, and if you don't really need it could help drastically.

Every browser extension doesn't show up in this list, however. Some of them don't run as their own processes and some include scripts that run when you are loading web pages that provide their features. Running these other scripts will take more CPU and help drain more of your battery so make sure you are uninstalling these extensions that seem to be taking up resources in the task manager.

You may see a "Background Page" if you check your Chrome Task Manager. It's different than an extension or app and they consume memory and CPU resources. For example the Google Drive background page appears when you enable offline access to your documents in Google Drive. It causes a background page to continue running even if you close all your Google Drive tabs. This background process syncs your offline cache with Google Drive. If you don't really use the offline documents feature, then you could go to the Google Drive website, go into the Settings screen, and be sure to uncheck the Offline option. You won't have to deal with a background page, but you won't have offline access to your Google Drive documents.

Looking for a Quote on a Tablet Rental for Your Next Business Event? Rentacomputer delivers Tablet Rentals nationwide to any convention center, conference center, hotel or event!

Another thing to be sure to do, in Chrome, to help save some of your battery is to enable click-to-play plug-ins. All you have to do is open Chrome's Settings page, click "Show Advanced Settings," then click "Content Settings," and finally under Plug-ins click "Let me choose when to run plugin content." It will keep Adobe Flash and other plug-ins from running in the background, because a lot of Flash advertisements popping up will help destroy your battery. By enabling click-to-play plug-ins, it will only allow specific Flash content to run, as well as doing the same with other plug-ins.

Saving memory can become a bit of an issue and running multiple tabs at once can take a lot of that memory. If you want to save memory and some battery power then try not to have a bunch of tabs opened. This can have too many web pages running in the background and use CPU resources, as well as taking up your memory and battery life. Just bookmark or save some web pages in a read-it-later service like Pocket, to prevent some of those pages from constantly running.

Chrome can be a bit of a hassle with all of its browser extensions and features. You could always try running a different browser like the Safari browser. It's way better on your battery life when using Macs. If you're using Windows on a PC with a low amount of RAM, then running Mozilla's Firefox will help take up less of your memory. Also using Internet Explorer on Windows will help your battery last longer. If you're just using a modern PC, then using up a lot of memory shouldn't be an issue if you have enough of it. The major issue of running Chrome is how it effects your battery life. Just be sure to uninstall those unnecessary browser extensions and close those tabs you don't NEED open and you should be just fine.

Content originally published here

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

New Asus Chromebook Flip with Touchscreen

Google has been putting their OS on a lot more devices lately, like the Asus Chromebook Flip and the Asus Chromebit. This spring, the Chromebook Flip comes out with a touch screen that rotates 360 degrees. The Chromebit comes out this summer, and it will let you use the Chrome OS on your HDTVs.

The Asus Chromebook will have a price tag of $249, and looks a lot like one of the Yoga notebooks. It has a 10.1 inch IPS display and weighs less than 2 pounds even with it's all metal chassis. It will be powered by a Rockchip 3288 processor with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of eMMC flash memory. There will also be a more expensive version that will have 4GB of RAM and 16GB of SSD storage. It will have 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0, and will be able to last for up to 10 hours on a full charge.

Right now the Chrome OS is not optimized for touch screens yet, so it is a bit unusual that they added one to this notebook. Not only that, but it's pretty odd that they would add a touch screen to a budget system at all. Hopefully it works out great and the added feature really pays off.

As far as what's under the hood, the Chromebit has  pretty much the exact same stuff as the Chromebook Flip actually. It is a little bit bigger than a regular thumb drive and will have an HDMI port and a USB 2.0 port that it will be powered by. It will be able to connect to the Internet via 802.11ac Wi-Fi and it also has Bluetooth capabilities.


Asus is not the only company that is coming out with new Chromebooks though. Haier and Hisense have both announced 11 inch Chromebooks that seem to have the same internals as the new Asus coming out this spring. The only major difference is that they will cost about $100 less than the Asus. Of course, it doesn't look like they will have a touch screen, but if the Asus touch screen doesn't go over well because of the operating system, then you might spend $100 dollars less and have something that is less troublesome. I guess we will find out soon enough when we can get our hands on them!

Content originally posted here

Thursday, May 20, 2010

New Google Chrome Web App Store

New Google Chrome Web App Store Earlier this week, Google announced the Chrome Store at the I/O conference, and shared some details about what to expect. The app store will be Google's own place for you to buy web applications or just download free ones.

According to PC World, the Chrome Web Store will open later this year (before the Chrome operating system ships) and will only sever users of Google Chrome (about 70 million), at first. Developers must follow the developer's guide and only use technology that will work with Chromium Apps.

A few of the apps were unveiled at the I/O conference. According to PC World, these included Google's own Docs, Calendar, Mail, News, Maps, Picasa and Wave. Insiders assume those types of apps will be free, while apps from magazines, games, news and other utilities will have to be paid for (supposedly about $3 or $4). The free apps will appear when you open a new tab in Chrome, as well as a link to the app store.

Gizmodo has some pictures of what is currently being offered. This includes: Pandora, Lego Star Wars, Plants vs. Zombies, Digg, Sports Illustrated, Who has the Biggest Brian, Tweetdeck, NPR, Zoho, LinkedIn, Bejeweled 2, Scrabble, FIFA World Cup 2010, Darkroom, and Poker Rivals. The apps are said to be impressive and high-quality. As a matter of fact, Engadget describes the apps as better than "most anything we've seen on the iPad thus far."

The Chrome apps will be developed with existing open source coding such as native HTML code C and C++, and in the future with coding such as WebM. It is also expected to be a lot less restrictive than the Apple App Store. Some say the future may hold Android apps which can be synced between computers and mobile phones and the store may even cause people to abandoned other browsers, in favor of Chrome.

But some don't see such a bright future. CNET has questioned whether or not there is a difference between visiting a website and having an app for that website. Others feel that Chrome as a whole will essentially be a big flop. Even so Steve Jobs and Apple are feeling the threat and are already on defense. Jobs has been taking shots at Google's products lately (most recently, Android) and will probably do the same with Chrome.



Looking for a Technology Rental to help you GO? Call 800-736-8772 today to reserve a Laptop Rental for your next trip.