Got Frisky with the Chromebox

As I mentioned in my initial review of the new Chromebox, it arrived ... used. There was a user account for someone else on the box.

I'm told by the client who purchased the box for me that Amazon issued an apology and a store credit for selling an "open box" product as "new," so that's all good.

I was initially hesitant to mess with that existing user account. Its existence didn't mess with the stuff I do for the most part, and I found some scary stuff online about needing to "re-enroll" the box if I wiped it back to its factory settings.

But, there turned out to be some things I couldn't do as long as that user account was on the box. I was not the root/superuser, so I couldn't manage other users, control updates, and so forth. And a little more research helped me figure out that the "enrollment" stuff only applied if the box was for a business that used multiple Google Apps accounts.

So ... turn off the machine, use a pin to flip the switch on the back to "developer mode," turn it back on, follow some (scary!) prompts to get it to wipe the machine, let it roll, flip the developer switch back, restart the machine.

Done. Worked like a charm. Now I'm the godlike superuser on the machine and that previous owner's account is gone. And all of my stuff made it through the changeover just fine via Google Sync.

Feeling newly empowered, I went in and changed the OS updates setting to the "beta channel." So now I am running new hotness Chrome OS 23.0.1271.84 beta instead of old and busted Chrome OS 21.x. So far so good.

I also redeemed the offer for 100Gb of free storage for two years on Google Drive. Don't know that I'll use anything like that much space, but might as well have it available as not.