I was one of the fortunate people who received one of Google’s coveted Chrome OS notebooks late last year. It was really interesting to see how well an OS could function when it was essentially just a browser. Google has done a great job with it, though in the end, it wasn’t a good fit for me. If you want to test it out, but don’t want to drop the necessary cash on one of the new notebooks with the company’s OS, you can still do it.

Lifehacker has put together a guide that walks you through the steps of turning an ordinary laptop into a Chromium machine. You’ll note that I didn’t call it Chrome OS. This is because Chromium is the open-source brother to Chrome OS. It’s a little less polished, but still very functional. The only thing you’re really going to need is a 4GB flash drive to do the install on. Well that, and a machine capable of running the software. It might not revolutionize your computing experience, but it can be a fun weekend project, just to see how the new operating system functions.