Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Cr-48 Update

First of all, I hope you all had a very, Merry Christmas.  And in case I don't see you, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good night, and Happy New Year!  (Can someone give me the movie reference, please?)

My family and I really enjoyed ourselves in Orlando, Florida, this past week.  So, keep your eyes peeled for a post or posts with relevant photos.

Now, down to business.  Here some additional thoughts I've had on my Cr-48, since we last met.

Battery.  Yes, I would say it does last about 5-7 hours, depending on the type of use.  And even though it died on me absent a clear warning, I believe it "saved" my data and tabs, so they were still there, when I plugged my AC in.

Using Google Docs on the Cr-48
Google Docs lethargy.  I've been rather disappointed, here.  I've found that some of my larger docs take ages to load, even on my souped-up HP machine; I sometimes feel like I'm having a Gandalf-out-of-body experience, waiting on the Cr-48.

I think I'm most disappointed when the letters on the Docs' screen fail to keep up with my fingers.  As I write this post in Blogger, I think the drag may be unique to Docs (I'm failing to see the same thing in Blogger).

Underlying Chrome channel unchangeable.  In the previous post, I conjectured/hoped I would be able to switch the Chrome channel I run inside of Chrome OS.  That's a negatory, good buddy.  A Chromium dev informed me that "Chrome and the other parts of Chrome OS are updated in lockstep; there's no way to set different update policies for them.  Newer versions of the browser aren't compatible with older versions of the OS, and vice versa."  Gasp!  Needless to say, as I consider myself a heavy canary/dev build user, I'm uber bummed out about this, cough, development, and hope it changes, fast.

Good Luck with the 3G . . .
Verizon 3G 100MB experience.  Yes, it's nice to have when I lack WiFi, for whatever reason.  On the other hand, I felt like I ate through 1MB (or 1% of my monthly allowance) every time I simply opened up a web page (almost like how cell phone providers charge a full minute, regardless if the call lasts two seconds).  I also felt like 3G was noticeably slower than my already slower Cr-48 experience.

Cr-48 Ninja Team
Hotel wireless.  To be short in writing, I was unable to log on to our hotel's wireless until I made two customer support phone calls and only after I realized that the Cr-48's "hardware address" is (I think) the same thing as a Windows machine's "MAC address."  I imagine this is all part of the beta experience.  The poor IT dude (it was Christmas!) I talked to had yet to even hear of Chrome OS . . .

Funked out fonts?  At a minimum, I'm really weired out with my Times New Roman fonts on Docs (and I think my normal fonts on Blogger, as well).  I hope this is also a beta issue; I imagine fonts are intended to look the same, across OSes.

Chromium OS login screen
Guest Mode.  Thanks for the shot, Sebastian of DLSquad.
Ninja support.  While I was somewhat disappointed with the Cr-48 support I received from the designated "Ninja team," I'm very grateful it even exists and that it responds to user queries.

Where's my ctrl+end?!!?  Call me a keyboard shortcut fanatic, if you want, I'll gladly accept the label.  I'm still grumbling about this MIA shortcut.

Guest mode leaves regular mode in the dust?  I'll end this post with my puzzled musings.  I've been wondering what gives on the Cr-48's speed, so, the other day, I tried out the guest mode and felt like I had my socks blown off, in comparison to regular mode.  Has anyone else had a similar experience?  More than anything, I simply hope Guest Mode's relative zip is an indicator the Cr-48/Chrome OS's speed will improve substantially, soon.

Please chime in with any questions/observations of your own.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Truman Show

Daniel said...

Impressive, most impressive.

Unknown said...

Are you sure extensions running in the background are not slowing you down on your regular account? Try temporarily disabling all background apps and extensions and clearing all cache/etc, or, even better, using a clean Google account that hasn't been installing extensions at all. From my experience, most performance issues are normally caused by faulty extensions.

Daniel said...

Mantas, thanks for your input.

I tried disabling background apps (in the about:flags section) and clearing my cache. I failed to notice a difference.

I think you could be right about extensions being the culprits. On the other hand, given what I see as a huge disparity of speed between my Cr-48 and my HP (and even school lab computers), I think Google could really improve things.

Again, I do think you have a point, as my Guest Mode seemed much speedier. On the other hand, I really think Google can speed things up.

Not sure said...

Yep, Truman Show.