So I thought I could hold out but something just kept eating at me to try flashing the BIOS and installing other OSes. Finally I gave in a couple weeks ago and took the plunge. It actually wasn't too bad. I made sure to learn by others mistakes and backed up my bios ROM image first and then flashed the custom bios to my Cr-48 thanks to Hexxeh's Luigi utility. At first I kept Chrome OS running on the Cr-48 and ran OSX, Ubuntu, and even Windows 7 from a thumb drive. After a bit of playing with that I decided to really delve in and wipe the SSD and install the OSes native on the SSD. I started with Ubuntu, an easy choice as the usb version was the netbook one and had a built in installer. That worked amazingly well on the Cr-48. The wifi worked great, the OS itself was light weight enough that it didn't bog down. The 2G of RAM actually made Ubuntu do very well for me, but it was time to move on. Next I tried OSX. I have a thumb drive I've used on a different laptop and that worked OK, it really wasn't optimized for the Cr-48 and the wifi didn't work out of the box. I instead tried iPortable which is a customized OSX on a thumb drive. That one had the wireless working no problem so I installed that for a day or so. I tried Windows 7 on a thumb drive but it was excruciatingly slow, so installing it on the SSD was awesome by comparison. That said, everything worked as well if not better than iPortable OSX or Ubuntu. Out of all 3, the 3G I was unable to make work. I tried installing drivers etc. but never really got anywhere. Finally yesterday, I popped in the Ubuntu USB drive and booted up and ran luigi again and reverted back to the stock bios file I had originally saved. Popped in the recovery thumb drive of Chrome OS and here I am, back on Chrome OS. One of the things I did in all this was defeat the bios protection with a piece of electrical tape so I am free to flash back to the custom bios whenever I wish. I have a feeling I will stay with Chrome OS for a while now though. I actually missed it even though on the other OSes I was able to install Google Chrome, it just wasn't the same. I'm much more interested in seeing what Google does with this OS, I alerady know how they are doing on the other OSes. I also missed the ability to use the search button to open new tabs and the functionality of the top row of buttons was much more generic in other OSes. Perhaps someone will write a windows or OSX or linux program to remap the keys for the Cr-48 in them so that I can keep the same functionality. I think at some point in the future, I may go back to Windows 7 on the Cr-48 as it seemed to be the most usable of all of the alternative OSes. Other than messing around, I don't see that happening on a pernanent basis until after Google is satisfied with all this testing of their own OS. Thanks again Google for a nice laptop with a potentially great OS.