Chromebook General advice

By Daniel Ein Alshaeba, 2025

Published 3/9/2023

Chromebooks are incredibly useful tools offered by Cheshire High School.  While some students may be dependent on their families for a computer, Cheshire Public Schools was willing to issue devices to all students in middle school and high school.  However, the lack of power offered by Chromebooks is evident.  Equipped with an Intel Celeron processor and 16 GB of storage (most of which is occupied by ChromeOS by default), school issued Chromebooks can be strained by a simple Google Meet.  As a result, the following advice can help make the most out of a chromebook:

1. Clear Cookies from Chrome’s Settings

Over time, cookies can pile up within a Chromebook’s storage, occupying excessive space and slowing down the device.  For this reason, cookies ought to be cleared every few months, or whenever a noticeable drop in performance occurs.  To do this, open Chrome and press the three dots just below the close button in the top right.  Then, select settings, search “cookies,” and choose “clear browsing data.”  After this, select “All Time” from the time range dropdown, make sure that “Cookies and Other Site Data” and “Cached images and files” are checked, and select “Clear Data.”  Doing this may result in some sites loading slower at first, but overall, the speed of a chromebook should improve.  

2. Avoid excessive extensions

As nice (and tacky) as a custom cursor may look, extensions can be very taxing on a browser.  Many extensions, by default, constantly run in the background of Chrome.  Generally, the number of extensions installed should be kept to a minimum.  However, one exception to this rule is an adblock.  Aside from being a visual nuisance, ads can slow down a website by requiring more assets to be loaded.  For this reason make sure that an adblock is enabled whenever possible while browsing the web. 

3. Keep track of tabs

A common issue that’s overlooked on slow Chromebooks is excessive tabs.  As a general rule of thumb, try to have as few tabs open as possible, with no more than six to seven tabs open at once for general browsing, and less than three tabs while a Google Meet is running.  Doing this will allow the device to allocate more memory on a few tabs, helping them run faster, rather than have the memory spread out among many.