Home > News

Chromebooks Will Soon Be Able to Dual-Boot with Windows 10

By Simon Batt
Chromebooks Will Soon Be Able to Dual-Boot with Windows 10 Featured Image

If you keep tabs on Chromebooks, you’ll know how finicky it is to get Windows 10 running on one. Chromebooks don’t naturally support Windows – you have to do all kinds of workarounds to get it running. Once it is up and running, driver issues cause difficulties with the hardware.

The main piece of advice for installing Windows on a Chromebook is to get a cheap laptop instead. Chromebooks aren’t the ideal product to get if you want a Windows-based operating system.

Thankfully, Chromebooks are about to get a little more adaptive. Google has made a bit of a surprising turn by announcing that they will support Windows 10 on their Chromebooks. Moreover, this is more than just simply supporting Windows 10; this is allowing a Chromebook to dual-boot between the default OS and Windows, much like bootcamp does in macOS.

What Does this Mean?

Simply put, dual-booting means that a computer has two operating systems installed on it. When the computer boots up, it asks the user which operating system they’d like to use. Should the user want to change their operating system, all they need to do is restart the computer and choose the other option on boot.

This does mean you can get all the joy of two (or more!) operating systems without having to buy multiple machines. You don’t even need two drives to do this; simply designate a chunk of the drive to each operating system and let them share the space. This does mean both operating systems have less storage space to play with, but it does make it very convenient when setting up a dual boot system.

chromebook-dual-logos

When Chromebook receives dual booting, it’ll be dividing its single SSD into two portions: one for Chrome OS, one for Windows 10. This means Chromebook users don’t have to sacrifice Chrome OS in order to run Windows apps. They also don’t have to use workarounds in order to get Windows apps to run. Simply swap between the two as you see fit and get the best of both worlds.

Can All Chromebooks Dual-Boot Windows?

chromebook-dual-microsoft

This feature still hasn’t been officially announced yet, so we don’t know the specific details on the system requirements for dual-booting. What we do know, however, is that it’ll only support the higher-end models of Chromebook, at least to begin with. You’ll need 4GB of RAM and 64GB of SSD space in order to fully support dual-booting. This is unfortunate news for people with lower-end machines, but with an already small SSD being divvied up between two operating systems, it’s easy to see why they made this decision.

What About Other Operating Systems?

chromebook-dual-apple

You can already install Linux on Chromebook, and with Windows added in the mix, it is only left with macOS. While in theory it’s possible, the actual fact is that it is going to be a difficult task. Apple doesn’t allow macOS to run on hardware other than its own, so it is unlikely Google can get a hand on it. It might be down to the hackintosh community to get it done, but the hardware driver issue could pose the greatest challenge.

Booting Up

Getting Windows onto a Chromebook was such an issue, users were better off buying a dedicated Windows machine. With the announcement of dual-boot support, high-end Chromebook users can get Windows 10 on their machines, thus removing the need to perform workarounds to get Windows-based apps to run on their machine.

Does this new announcement make you more excited for Chromebooks? Let us know below.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Simon Batt Avatar
Simon Batt
Simon Batt is a Computer Science graduate with a passion for cybersecurity.

Read next

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.