Test driving Google Chrome on older hardware

So for the last couple of weeks I’ve been test driving Google Chrome on an old laptop running windows XP.  A Toshiba Tecra 8200 with a 750mhz cpu and 512mb ram. This laptop has been working overtime offering up web pages as a development system with apache installed…. so the first thing I noticed was Google Chrome was quicker at loading localhost web pages than firefox…. a lot quicker.

Not exactly a scenario that most people with older hardware find themselves in! So what about general browsing of the internet? Well ‘jolly’ good also! Some content rich blogs for instance with flash banners and pictures littered over the screen are  smoother to scroll through.

Then twitter! Indeed I am a twitter user and with firefox found typing updates painful on my old laptop. Reminding me of the days of using mainframes via a very slow modem and waiting for the updated inputs to actually be processed…. you know…. type one character and wait for it to be displayed or type a series and hope you didn’t make a mistake! Again Google Chrome works smoothly with twitters ajax system on my overworked old laptop.

I intially thought I wasn’t going to get used to Google’s display. It shows in a new tab a selection of my most visited web pages for me to choose from. Being a chap who generally just uses bookmarks, I didn’t see the point. Yet obviously there are certain pages or sites I visit more often than most and I’ve gone a couple of days at times without even using my bookmarks.

Now sorry folks, I have not used Google Chrome for https, ftp etc. So can’t talk about security or ftp transfers etc. However for breathing new life into older hardware running windows, I thank you Google. Now I can’t wait for Google’s linux port of Chrome to use on my primary machine and indeed older linux systems.