When you’re using your computer rather than having it sit idle, anything you do with it adds to the energy drain. That means keeping the number of open programs and open browser tabs down to a minimum can help save power.There are two other easily tweakable settings that affect power draw. Display brightness and audio volume. Dial down both (via your keyboard shortcut keys or the OS settings) and you should see your computer using less battery or mains power as a result.It’s also worth mentioning peripherals, because the more devices plugged into your laptop or desktop, the greater the power demands. Disconnecting printers, speakers, external drives and extra monitors can make a difference, even when your computer is in sleep mode. So too can turning off Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, just like on a smartphone. If you don’t need these connection types to be constantly open (you’re watching a video stored locally, say), you can cut down on the amount of power your machine is using up.Finally, there’s the familiar choice between shutting off your laptop or desktop or putting it into sleep, which keeps your computer in a low-power mode ready to go at any time. These are labelled slightly differently on Windows and macOS, but essentially the sleep options keep your apps and files open while drawing as little power as possible.

Shutting down your computer is always the best option for saving power, but bear in mind the extra time (and energy use) required for doing a full boot-up. If you’re going to be using your computer again in the near future, hibernate or sleep might be a better option.
I was working on the new Samsung Chromebook Pro, furiously putting together a post that needed to go up stat. The final touch was an image, but I needed to edit it, and I didn’t want to reach for my normal work machine. So I popped it open in the Adobe Lightroom Android app, flipped the screen around so the computer was in tablet mode, and pulled the stylus out from its holster on the side of the computer. I had my image edited and ready to go in less than two minutes. It felt completely natural, saved me a little bit of time, and hinted at exactly what the future of the Chromebook could be—a genuinely good alternative to the fussiness of Windows and the priciness of MacOS.

In January, Samsung announced two new Chromebooks: a cheap Plus model (powered by an ARM OP1 CPU) and a pricier Pro—the only difference between the two being an additional color option (black), and a more powerful processor (Intel M3 CPU). Both were designed with considerable input from Google, and the two companies hope that all the careful engineering and a neat stylus will convince you that this device is worth spending $450 to $550. You can get a reasonably not garbage Windows machine for the same price, so Samsung’s newest Chromebook has to be damn great. Especially to surpass the trials of its predecessors. Google thinks it really has something going for it in this souped up OS version of its popular web browser. Unfortunately, unless your needs are excruciatingly simple, the Chromebook has not been very good. It’s been bereft with compromise. You can spend half of what you would on a Windows laptop, but the build quality would be cheap and the display ugly. Or you could throw down the money for a premium device, and feel hampered due to Chrome OS’ inability to do more than browse the web.

Samsung’s new Chromebook Pro is nearly perfect (I reviewed the Pro, but most of this review applies to the Plus as well). For the price. And for the compromises demanded of Chrome OS. This still isn’t—and will never be—the OS for the hardcore. If you’re normally glued to your PC making major photo or video edits, or coding a new app, Samsung’s Chromebook isn’t for you. This is for budding digital artists who want a cheap hybrid laptop with a built-in stylus. Or kids and college students who need the 10 to 12 hours of battery life the device can get in daily use. And it’s for people who like a pretty display that somehow found its way onto a $550 device. It is one of the best looking displays you’ll find on something this cheap, with blacks so dark they blend into the bezel and beautiful vibrant colors. Though Samsung did decide to go with the iPad-like 12.3-inch, 2400 x 1600 display with a 3:2 ratio instead of a more popular 16:9 found on other laptops.

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It also charges via one of 2 USB-C ports, packs in a MicroSD card reader, has a keyboard that’s a dream to type on, and it continues Samsung’s trend of having one of the best trackpads in the business.But Samsung’s new devices also add a new feature: the ability to convert into a great tablet. The 360-hinge and touch display aren’t new—the wonderfully cheap Asus Flip let you go into tablet mode, too. Yet that was back in 2015, before Chrome OS began optimizing for our fingers. Now that Chrome OS supports Android apps the device is perfect for reading comics, jotting down notes, or even drawing. Photoshop Mix, Lightroom, and popular apps like Sketchbook by Autodesk all open easily and work nearly identically to how they should on a much more expensive Android tablet or iPad. The included stylus even has a roughed up nub, so it doesn’t skate across the glass of the display like Apple’s $100 Pencil. That tweak to the stylus is part of Google’s plan to make this device as easy to write on as pricier tablets. It can’t compete on hardware without increasing the cost, so instead, Google relies on minor alterations to the stylus as well as on software, using machine learning to create an algorithm to anticipate your next pen stroke. The idea behind it is that it should make writing on the device feel more realistic without the telltale lag you’d expect from something with such a low-powered processor.

Drawing on the devices is still laggy. As much as I adore the Chromebook Plus, it’s damn sluggish when you first press the stylus to the screen. In the video above you can clearly see when writing the Pro is sometimes an entire letter behind the pen. The problem persists in traditional drawing scenarios, too—but in both cases, your brain quickly adjusts to the lag, and after about five minutes, if your co-workers aren’t looking over your shoulder shouting, "THAT THING IS SLOW,” you won’t even notice.Unfortunately, the lag isn’t just present when writing on display. I tested the premium "Pro” version of the device, and after having it choke up on me a few times when messing with Android apps, I can’t even imagine how painfully slow the Plus might be. It’s especially sluggish when I try to have multiple Android apps open. In fact, Android apps ran so slowly I had to go uninstall a lot of them, including Slack, Twitter, Trello, and Plex. The only apps that didn’t cause the computer to slow down like a ten-year-old laptop dragged out of the bottom of the closet were ones specifically optimized for Chrome OS—like the Adobe apps.

And the Adobe apps speak to the future of what this device, and Chrome OS, could be. An affordable hybrid that doesn’t demand you compromise quality for price. This is a true competitor to Windows and MacOS that sacrifices bells and whistles for lean, smooth operation. It is the perfect device for people who only have $550 to spend, and it’s a fantastic secondary device for people who have a lot more. If more app makers start optimizing for Chrome and more computer makers start building hardware this good, then the new Samsung Chromebook Pro could be the future of Google operating systems.The Samsung Chromebook Plus is currently available in stores for $450. As it has the slower ARM processor, I’d be wary of buying it if you plan to take advantage of beefier Android apps. Instead, wait for the $550 Samsung Chromebook Pro, which will be available in early April in either silver or black.If you often get the feeling there just aren’t enough hours in the day, then the lunch break your bosses should generously afford you could be one opportunity to make more of your time (and it beats listening to co-workers talking about sports you don’t watch). Give yourself thirty minutes a day five days a week and you could be well on your way to being a polymath by picking up one of these five skills. Whether you want to make websites, apps, or both, there are myriad ways to learn how to do it over the web or through your smartphone (and we’ve covered some of them before). From YouTube channels to paid courses, there’s a lot of choice out there for the budding programmer, and your approach will depend on what you want to learn and how quickly.

A site such as Codeacademy is good for beginners who don’t want to pay anything, whereas Treehouse is more advanced and comprehensive and requires a subscription (though you do get a free trial). It’s probably a good idea to make sure you really do want to learn to code before you start, because it can end up taking a lot of your time and effort. Picking up a spoken language, like Spanish or Arabic, might seem like an obvious lunch time improvement course, but it’ll be best if you’ve got somewhere where you can practice your pronunciation in peace (so maybe not your open plan office space). It’s up to you if you want to follow courses on the web (if allowed by the office IT policy) or through an app on your phone, and there are a pile of free and paid-for tools for you to pick from. Duolingo is one of our favorites because it’s free to use and starts at the very beginning with most of the popular languages; plus, it’s easy to track your progress. Other apps worth a look include the likes of Babbel, Memrise, and Busuu (which claims to help you speak a language with just 10 minutes a day), though you’ll probably want to try a few before you settle on the language course just for you.

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If you have an industry-standard software package installed on your office computer, or you’re able to bring in your laptop, then use your lunch hour to master it - if you choose wisely, those extra skills you acquire could help you bag a promotion (or even a better job). In a lot of cases you can teach yourself just by trying out different tools and features.Fire up your web browser and you’ll find online courses for packages including Photoshop and Word at Alison (free) and Lynda (paid-for) and a bunch of other places to suit whatever level you’re at. If there’s a strict internet policy at your office, you could be able to swing access to one of these sites if you promise it’s going to make you a better worker... The first step to writing a novel is just sitting down and putting words to the page. With a little discipline that should be easy enough to do daily on your lunch break. But once the book is done (and you’ve had a very understanding friend or family member edit it) you’ll still need to publish.Highbrow has a nice course to teach you the rudimentary ins and outs of self publishing, and because they’re delivered to your inbox you can check them on your office computer or your phone as you like. The course lasts 10 days and takes five minutes a day. If you need something more comprehensive to get a foot on the self-publishing ladder, give the (paid) 44-lecture course on Udemy a try.

For some of us college was a while ago, and some of the most needed skills have been forgotten—along with that one drunken weekend you never left your dorm room. To brush up on old college lessons you can head to a site like Coursera and enroll in an online course covering anything from computer science and programming to law and psychology. The courses are offered by colleges like Penn, Standford, and Duke, so your mom will be very impressed with what you’re learning while you chow down on a salad at work.There are a few similar sites you can make use of if Coursera isn’t your bag. We’ve already mentioned Udemy above, but Khan Academy is another fantastic option and features short bite-sized tutorials on a broad range of subjects.
Despite all the extraordinary advances in technology—particularly computing technology—there is one place where we’ve languished. It’s a key facet of the future that was, in many ways, better in 1987 than in 2017: the keyboard.

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