Thoughts on HP Chromebook 13 G1

When I first heard about HP Chromebook 13 G1, I immediately wanted one. For three reasons: (i) 3200×1800 screen, (ii) USB type C charging, and (iii) the looks. As soon as it became available, I bought the 8GB RAM variant with the Core m5 processor. I have been using it for a few days now; this post is to record my thoughts on this laptop’s hardware.

Things I like

• This is the first hardware device ever that made me like it for its build quality. I really like the metal build of the machine and its strong screen hinge.
• USB type C charging. Of course! It’s one of the reasons I even bought this laptop.
• Keyboard is really nice to type on. Has good tactile feedback. Way better than the 2015 Toshiba Chromebook 2 I was using before.
• Touchpad is smooth. I can actually use this touchpad for an extended period of time without my fingertips asking me to stop.
• Some reviewers are not fond of the B&O speakers that come with this laptop, but I like it. (But then, my reference points are Toshiba Chromebook 2 and ThinkPad P50. Coming from these laptops, I would like pretty much anything.) From what I see, this Chromebook 13’s speakers are on par with the speakers of Nexus 9.
• There’s an LED that shows status when the laptop is sleeping, charging, etc.

  

  LED glows red when the laptop is charging

Things I neither like nor dislike

• Although the screen is impressive on paper, it doesn’t live up to the expectations in reality. I believe it’s the same panel that was in Lenovo’s Yoga 2 Pro. I can see pixels on this screen just as I could on the Yoga 2’s screen. Yellow rendered by this screen is the same dull yellow like on the Yoga 2 Pro (expand the “spoiler” to see the colour difference). When I am not actively looking for pixels or colour accuracy, this screen is nice; I can live with this. 

Things I am not a big fan of

• There’s exactly one USB Type A port. I need to always have a security key inserted into a USB Type A port, so I have zero usable Type A port. I don’t often plug things into my Chromebook but it’d still be nice to have a free port.
• MicroSD card reader. The only place where I use an SD card is on my digital camera, and it’s a full-size SD card. So this MicroSD card reader is essentially useless to me.

Comparable devices
Anyone considering the m5 variant (with 8GB RAM) or a more expensive option should also look into the base model Chromebook Pixel 2. For less than $200 more, you get a better screen, more USB ports, Type C ports on both sides for easy charging, and more Google Drive storage quota. The HP has an edge over the Pixel in its fanless design and being lighter and thinner. It’s a choice you’ll have to make for yourself. (I am still torn, and I honestly can’t choose between the two.)

Chrome’s Duplicate Tab feature

Have you used “Duplicate Tab” feature of Chrome?  If you right-click on a tab and select Duplicate, a new tab with the contents and history of the current tab is created.  I use it in the following case:
- I am on Page A.
- I click on a link.  Now I am in Page B.
- I have to do something that requires looking at both Pages A and B.

Now I can duplicate the current tab, which would give me two tabs with Page B.  I can press Back in any of the two tabs to get back to Page A.

I stumbled upon an easier way to use this feature today.  Instead of duplicating the tab first and then clicking Back on the new tab, I can Ctrl+click on the Back button to open a duplicate tab and go back in history one step.  Works with Shift+click as well, but as you may expect it opens the duplicate tab in a new window.

Borderless Chrome windows in Linux

Chrome on Linux lets you use Gnome or KDE’s default window borders if you don’t like Chrome’s minimalistic window borders.

I prefer to use KDE’s window borders for two reasons:

• I have customised my window title bar to add an “Always on top” button to it.  It’s handy once in a while.
• When using system window border, I can see the full title of the current tab.  This particularly useful when there is a nontrivial number of tabs open—which is like always.

What’s annoying is if you toggle this option from ‘don’t use system borders’ to ‘use system borders’, KDE would render all existing Chrome windows without any border, like this:

Chrome windows that are opened after the change, however, are rendered correctly with border, title, minimise/maximise/close buttons, etc.  If you are stuck with a few ‘naked’ windows like this, you can force KDE to draw borders by closing and recreating those windows.  To avoid losing state in the process, use Chrome’s “undo close tab” feature.

Press Alt+F4 and close a whole window—close all tabs in that window at one go.  (You cannot close that window otherwise because it doesn’t have a close button.)  Now, from a different Chrome window press Ctrl+Shift+T for Undo Close Tab.  This will restore the window you just closed with all tabs that were present in it.  Since it’s a newly created window, KDE would paint all borders correctly.

Chrome freezes

Does Chrome freeze periodically on your computer?  Have you installed Google Mail Checker extension?  If you have, uninstall that extension and the chronic freezes will go away.

(Why does this happen?  Is there an alternative to using this extension?  I have no idea.  But removing that extension seems to solve the problem.)

Dealing with Windows's slowness

I am not a fan of Windows, and everyone knows it.  I have to run Windows (XP, if you care) for some time, and so my laptop has Windows on it.  One problem with Windows is that it becomes very slow after running for a few days.  Do you know why?  Because applications that we keep running eat up all the memory and Windows doesn't have enough memory to keep running.

When you see that the apps are getting slow, open Windows Task Manager (by right clicking on task bar and choosing Task Manager from the menu) and see how much memory your computer is using.  In this particular screenshot, about 1.42GB memory is used by Windows and all currently running applications.

If it's using more memory than what your computer actually has[1], your computer will be slow and you should free up some memory.  Freeing memory is easy: just restart the apps that are consuming a lot of memory.  If you are like me, most of your memory would be taken up by browsers.

Go to the Processes tab of Task Manager and sort the list on descending order of memory usage.  You will see something like this:

You can see from the image that Chrome is taking up a lot of memory.  It's natural because I never close my browsers.  You will see several entries for Chrome in the task manager because Chrome starts one process for each tab, extension, plugin, etc.  Close the unnecessary tabs and restart Chrome.  (Your Chrome restores all previously open tabs, right?)  Restart any other app that has been running for a long time and consuming a lot of memory.  This should make your computer considerably faster.

Maybe you don't have to do so much
Sometimes, one Chrome tab could be using a huge amount of memory and you could probably close only that tab and keep going.  Chrome has its own task manager.  Chrome's task manager, when sorted based on memory consumption, shows which tabs take up lots of memory.  In my computer right now, Gmail alone is consuming 82,500KB of memory (which is a lot).  If I don't need Gmail to be open now, I can close it and I will get this 80-odd MB's of memory back.

Of course, this technique may not work for you if your usage patterns are different from mine.  By doing this once in a few days, I have been able to run my Windows machine for more than 17 days now, which is impressive.

[1] It might sound ridiculous, but your computer can really use more memory than you actually have.

Frozen tabs in Chrome

Every now and then a few web pages freeze on Chrome.  Especially Gmail.  I hate it when that happens.  But it's not a bug in Chrome itself.  It's a problem with the Flash plugin.  (This happens to me on my Ubuntu machine; I don't know if it's the same case in Windows too.)

When you see only a few web pages freezing and you think the freezing pages use Flash, just restart Flash and everything will be back to normal.  Here's how to do it:

• Right click on the tab bar and choose Task Manager. Or press Shift+Esc.
• Select the item Plugin: Shockwave Flash.
  
• Press End process button.
• You will have to refresh Gmail and any other frozen web pages.  If you see a yellow banner saying "The following plugin crashed" on any tab, refresh the tab, and the tab will reconnect with the crashed plugin.

That's it.  Now everything should be back to normal.  Until Flash goes mad again ;)

Search is a hard problem

Text search is a very hard problem.  Especially when it comes to Web search.  Bing is growing very fast as a web search engine, with more than 10% market share.  I've been using Google Search for years, and I like Google.  Every now and then I compare Bing's results with Google's to see how Bing is catching up with Google.

Recently I am annoyed with Java updates plugging in Carbonite backup software, so I wanted to see what people in general think about it.  I did a Twitter search and got no results at all!

I myself had tweeted about it a few days back, so I knew Twitter Search is broken and I should use a different search engine.  I tried Google and found at least 60 tweets!

Now that I am sure Twitter search is terribly broken, I thought of trying the same query on Bing.  Bing cannot see more than 5 tweets.  But still, it's better than Twitter's own search.

For now, I have set up a custom search engine in my Chrome browser so that I can search from the address bar itself.  This is how I did it:

1. Click on Chrome's wrench menu and choose Options.
2. In Basic tab, click on Manage button near the default search engine's name.
3. Click on Add button.
4. Type http://google.com/search?q=site:twitter.com+%s for URL.
5. Enter a name and keyword of your choice.  I entered Search Twitter.com as name and twit as keyword.

With this new search keyword, I can type twit bing google in address bar to search for tweets containing the words bing and google.

(BTW, did you notice there's no link to Advanced Search UI from Bing's home page?)

Chrome apps on Linux

Update: As of version 4.0.213.1, Chrome on Linux supports applications shortcuts.  (However, it uses Chrome's icon for shortcuts instead of the website's icon.)

If you are running the pre-release dev version of Chrome on Linux, you probably know that the Application Shortcuts feature of Chrome is not functional yet.  If that is one of your favourite features, you don't have to wait till the Chrome team implements it; if you are willing to create the shortcuts manually, you can get that feature right now.

Here is how you'd create an application shortcut for Gmail (in KDE):

1. Right click on desktop, select Create New > Link to Application...
2. Download Gmail logo from http://mail.google.com/mail/images/2/gmail_icon_32.png and save it somewhere.
3. Click on the icon near the app name to change the icon.  This brings the Select Icon window.  Choose Other icons options.  Click on Browse... button and choose the icon you saved in the previous step.
   
   
   
4. Type Gmail for the name of the application.
5. Switch to Application tab.  Type /usr/bin/google-chrome --app=http://mail.google.com/ --enable-plugins for Command.
   
6. Press OK button to save the shortcut.

That's all you have to do.  You can now click on the Gmail shortcut from your desktop and it opens Gmail in its own window.  As you might have observed, you only have to change the URL in the command line and the icon to create shortcuts for other web apps.

Does Chrome stop responding occasionally?

Does Chrome take a while to respond when you click your mouse or type something?

Short Answer: Close tabs that have Flash content.  (For example, YouTube or any video site, Flickr slideshow, etc.)

Long Answer: I have a habit of keeping so many tabs open always.  I just don't feel like closing my tabs.  For the past few days I had about 3 or 4 tabs with some YouTube videos loaded.  Whenever I close and re-open the browser, my tabs are restored so these pages were always loaded for a few days.  This caused Chrome to become sluggish.  Every now and then Chrome wouldn't respond to my actions for a few seconds.  Suddenly Chrome would freeze and I couldn't click on anything.  I will be typing something on some page and suddenly Chrome would stop taking my text input.  It always comes back in a second or two, but that's enough distraction to hate Chrome.

Today I found that closing all YouTube tabs does really solves this problem.  Maybe some issues with the Flash plugin.  I hope Adobe or Chrome, whosoever is responsible, would fix this problem soon.