Chromebooks have become the object of a love-hate relationship for some students, and I am certainly one of those people. It’s a state-of-the-art piece of garbage.

The Chromebooks that DGS has provided for the students are somewhat effective, I can give them that; however, the Chromebooks are bursting with flaws and inconvenient issues. Don’t get me wrong, I love the fact that our school cares about the student body as much as it does to give each student their own Chromebook. While it seems very nice, in the end we are stuck with using only Google.

The Chromebook’s battery life seems very convenient with its promised seven-and-a-half hours battery life.

Well, not really. The Chromebooks have a tendency to die much quicker than the seven-and-a-half hours it promises us; they often have trouble booting up, require you to do a car battery-like jump start with your charger and sometimes makes the spontaneous decision to turn itself off, despite having a great deal of power left. As you can imagine these traits are not ideal for a work laptop.

Clearly the Chromebooks have problems, but at least we have a department at our disposal to help us fix all of our issues. Well, that is until the problems surface shortly after getting them fixed. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not IT’s issue that the out-of-date Chromebooks we’ve been using since freshman year come with a boat load of baggage.

The Chromebooks’ capability to keep record of everything we work on is outstanding. But we are limited to using Google, and we cannot download or operate programs on our computers, even if it’s in an effort to learn. It is especially ironic when a teacher goes out of their way to use a program with the class while the class can’t even use it because it doesn’t have the ability to run it.

The fact that we cannot use our school computers to complete some school work is just beyond me. If I had a dollar for every time I had to camp outside of a teacher’s room or library to finish a project or homework because my Chromebook isn’t compatible with what I was doing, you could call me Matthew Moneybags.

At the very least we need a somewhat well functioning laptop. Things like keeping your work open on your computer are a shaky subject when dealing with our Chromebooks. I’m not sure if I am asking for a lot but I’d like a working laptop.

Just piling on to how shoddy the laptops are, you can’t have more than eight tabs open without the computer crashing. As a student this is pretty dang aggravating, considering a portion of my homework requires around three tabs to complete correctly.

If you are a person that has had positive experiences with the Chromebooks, I wouldn’t argue with you on that; I would simply say that for many students, they are just infested with inconveniences and frustrating qualities, but in the end they can somewhat come through for  other students. As of right now I believe the Chromebooks and students are in a love and hate relationship, I just hope for future students, the hate can be dropped from the relationship.