[Music] is your laptop or desktop pc starting to feel sluggish is it nearing the end of its useful life hi everyone kevin here today i want to show you how you can install chrome os flex on your old pc and hopefully by doing this you can give your laptop or desktop a new life google just recently released chrome os flex and it’s completely free to install but first what is chrome os flex google offers something called chrome os and this is the operating system that you get when you purchase a chromebook it’s a linux based operating system and it uses a web browser as its main user interface most of the applications are web-based meaning that it works really well on older computers chrome os flex uses the same underlying technology as chrome os it’s just that flex is intended for conventional pcs that in the past ran windows mac or linux there are a few key differences for one you can’t install the play store and you also can’t install android apps but aside from that it’s a pretty similar experience now that we know what flex is how do you actually get it and the neat thing about getting flex is you could just test it out you don’t have to make it your main operating system but if you decide you like it and you think it performs a lot better you could install it as your main os on your computer but before we jump into that we should have a quick look at the minimum system requirements compared to windows 11 this is a relatively low bar basically if you bought your pc in the last 12 years flex should work you’ll also need a usb stick or an sd card and they should have at least eight gigabytes of space to install flex first we need to create a usb installer to do that open up your chrome web browser and then navigate to the chrome web store within the store search for the chromebook recovery utility or just to make your life easier you can click on the link right up above on this page click on add to chrome and then click on add extension within chrome now when you click on the extension icon you’ll see a new extension for the chromebook recovery utility click on that and then click on get started click on select a model from the list under manufacturer select the option that says google chrome os flex and under the model select chrome os flex click on continue on the next screen we have to choose where we want to place the installation media i’m going to select my usb stick next click on continue and then select create now as a quick aside at the very end once you’ve installed flex if you decide you want to use your usb stick or your sd card again you’ll have to remove the insulation media and it’s pretty easy to do that you simply open up the recovery utility again and there’s a gear in the top right hand corner click on that and then you can erase the installation media once again only something you would want to do at the end if you want to use this again for something else now that we’ve created the usb installer we need to boot from it to do this simply restart your computer and then immediately start pressing the boot menu key i happen to have a dell so i’m going to press the f12 key but if your computer is from a different pc manufacturer you may need to press a different key this opens up the boot menu and here you simply want to select the drive where you place the insulation media so look for things like your usb stick or an sd card i’ll select my sd card and here i see the chrome logo and now i have two different options i can test it out this won’t at all affect any of the files that are on my hard drive it’s purely a way for me to evaluate what i think of flex if i restart my computer it’ll land me back into the operating system that i already had with the second option i can install flex as my new operating system and this will wipe out everything on my hard drive and when i boot up my computer in the future this will now be my new os if you decide that you like flex this is the preferred option the reason why is you get performance improvements and you’ll also get ongoing updates in the future and check that out i now have chrome os flex installed on my computer and i didn’t even have to buy a chromebook once again this is a fantastic way to make an old computer new again let me know down below in the comments what do you think of chrome os flex will you consider installing this on your old computers to watch more videos like this please consider subscribing and i’ll see you in the next one [Music] you