My family has become familiar with ChromeOS through education and chromebooks. I would like to set up a Linux distro that would create a ChromeOS like experience on our unused Win7 laptop with 2gigs of RAM and Intel Processor.

I can't find any distros that try to give a similar experience, except Budgie Desktop which seems very experimental. I'm thinking of rolling my own with Arch Linux or Debian. I'm just wondering if I have missed tutorials or resources that have created a webapp centered Linux that would be as easy to use as ChromeOS.

Also, what are the thoughts of buying a SSD for this old laptop (with dead battery)? I fear that Win7 is slowing down because of the 4 year old hard drive. Or could I just run something like this off a USB stick? I'm looking for a low cost way to get some life out of this old laptop when someone needs a device and the Chromebook is in use.

http://chromium.arnoldthebat.co.uk/i...p?dir=daily%2F

for Hexxeh builds of ChromeOS you must join the google group at

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/project-swift

to grab a daily build iso from there. I have ran Hexxeh builds in the past on my 32 bit laptop.

Windows 7 is getting slower because of the updates, also most wins 7 computers do disk cleaning & defragmenting sometime after 12.00 A.M. Weds by default unless you changed it. Most people don't do a disk clean or defrag as often as they should & don't leave laptops on over night especially weds morning.

But in general 2Gigs is kind of small for wins 7. My acer aspire in my sig ran quite well on 2gigs while wins just crept.
Any ways I hope you find something that gives the ChromeOS experience.
Have fun.

I can try again, but one of the reasons I asked is because I've tried one of his daily builds on a much newer laptop with an i5 and 8gigs of ram and it wouldn't boot and I tried every setting to boot from USB. The computer would access the flash drive but then give up without even a message on the screen and boot the Windows 8.1 hard drive which was next in the bios boot order. I'm kind of surprised that no distro has been built with all the wireless drivers a browser and a light weight window manager to create a Chrome OS experience with perhaps Firefox as the browser instead of Chrome.