Chrome OS notebooks from Acer and Samsung are expected to launch next month at $349 and $429, respectively. The fact that you can get a more powerful netbook with Windows 7 pre-installed for roughly the same price, or even less, is already putting some people off.

But that doesn't mean you should disregard Google's operating system without so much as giving it a try, especially since it's available as a free download for you to test on your own hardware. We'll show you how to create a bootable USB flash drive with Chrome OS or run the it using a free virtual machine.