What does it cost you to be without a computer for a day? How about a week? The number is huge. It’s scary. And you can be certain that you or one of your team members is going to be without a computer at some point. It’s the nature of the technology.
My MacBook Air is defective. I’ll save my rant about the decline of quality at Apple for another day (except to say that getting as big as the company is now is clearly hard to manage). This is my second defective Air in six weeks. This one likes to shut down spontaneously. It’ll be out of service for three days while we wait for a part.
Do You Have a Backup Plan?
We have about 20 laptops of various makes and models being used by our team. It’s a rare month when one of them doesn’t die or get seriously injured. It’s just something that happens.
When a laptop goes down and a lawyer is left with nothing but a smartphone, productivity diminishes fast. There’s not much a lawyer can do without a laptop. We’ve got to be prepared to replace these machines instantly. For us, that’s trickier than it used to be because many of our employees are distributed in various locations. More often than not it takes us a day, if not longer, to replace a machine. Keeping all of them up and running is a challenge.
Google to the Rescue
Lately, we’ve been using Chromebooks as spare computers. We can buy a great Chromebook for under $300 and keep it lying around for quick access. I suppose we could just buy one for all of our lawyers and ask them to keep it in a drawer.
Our Chromebook of the moment is the HP Chromebook 11, which is available for overnight shipping from Amazon. It sells for $279, and it’s a great little laptop.
Of course, Chromebooks are cheaper than other laptops because there is less to them. Think of them as mini-laptops. They don’t run Windows or Microsoft Office. They have limited storage capacity. They’re really designed as a front end for the cloud-based storage and processors offered by Google.
The key to the Chromebook is having a Google account. We use Google Apps for e-mail, calendar, and limited document storage and drafting. If you’re already a Google customer, you can input a password and have your user up and running almost instantly. If you’re not using Google, then it might take a few extra minutes to access your data in the cloud.
I suspect that before long, we’ll be moving our users to Chromebooks as their primary laptops. At the moment, however, these machines are best in a secondary role as the vendors continue to develop and expand the capabilities of their offerings.
The time to buy a Chromebook as a backup is right now. Do it before disaster strikes. At $279 for a Chromebook, you’ll break even on the deal the first time one of your laptops breaks down. You should definitely have one of these little laptops sitting in your drawer.
