Author Archives: altechnative

Chromebook Pixel – Long Term Review

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I have been using my Chromebook Pixel for nearly a year now, so I feel it has been long enough to form a reasonably objective view, which may be useful to others who are considering buying one.

When I bought it, I was looking for a worthy successor to my venerable ThinkPad T60. The ThinkPad had been upgraded as far as it would go, with a 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo, 3GB of RAM, and most importantly, a 2048×1536 screen. It is still quite a usable machine, but the main reasons why I was looking for a replacement were battery life (90 minutes with the extended capacity battery on a good day), and weight (I haven’t weighed it, but when carrying it around for any length of time it feels like it weighs a tonne. All in all, barely livable with for the commute to work.

The Pixel was promising to address all the issues I had with the ThinkPad – it weighs a fraction as much, the battery life is about 6 hours, depending on the load, the other features are no worse, with the screen being a significant improvement on the ThinkPad. Since I use Linux (EL6), I needed to make sure all of the hardware is fully supported, which was the main reason why I didn’t choose a Macbook Pro Retina – the only other contender at the time.

Needless to say, ChromeOS only lasted for long enough to enable developer mode to facilitate installing a proper Linux distribution.

How did this very promising spec on paper work out in reality? Well, my experience is very mixed. The performance is more than sufficient, even for light gaming loads (e.g. Left 4 Dead 2 with maxed out settings at 1280×800, quarter of native resolution). The screen is nothing short of amazing. The touchpad is reliable. The battery life is good. But that is where the good things I can say about it end.

There are two things that let it down quite badly. The keyboard is less than perfect – it lacks a number of keys: PgUp, PgDn, Home, End, Delete, Insert, F11 and F12. While inconvenient, this is reasonably workable around using a custom keyboard map and key combinations using AltGr.

The fundamental thing that makes the Chromebook Pixel nearly unusuable is the amount of heat it produces. Under any load above idle, the aluminium casing gets too hot to touch for any length of time. Under a gaming load, even the plastic keys on the keyboard get so hot they are painful to touch. The CPU itself doesn’t overheat (it tops out at about 85C), but the outer casing gets past 47C within a few minutes of Left4Dead 2.

47C may not sound like a lot, but given the high thermal conductivity of aluminium, 47C is actually very uncomfortable to touch. This problem isn’t unique to the Chromebook, either – I had a similar problem with the Macbook Pro Retina I was using at work previously. Consequently, I can only strongly recommend against getting the Chromebook Pixel.

Due to these issues, I am still using my old ThinkPad more frequently than the Pixel. My commute to work machine is now an ARM based Chromebook (XE303C12), which stays stone cold even under a heavy load, the battery lasts 6-8 hours, and is even lighter than the Pixel. It’s touchpad is quite terrible, but I can live with that in return for it not burning me as soon as I ask it to compile something for me.

All I can say is – beware the marketing hype and sexy looks. A laptop that looks fantastic on paper can easily turn out to be nearly useless due to how hot it gets.

Microsoft Security Essentials on 64-bit XP

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Yet another Windows related article – this detour from more typical content is expected to be short lived.

Microsoft Security Essentials was never officially supported on 64-bit Windows XP, but version 2 nevertheless installed on it and worked fine. Version 4 (version 3 never existed) refuses to install directly, saying that the version of Windows is unsupported. However, if you install version 2, the version 4 installer will happily run and install version 4 as an upgrade. It will pop up a message every time you log in warning that XP64 is EOL, but otherwise it will work just fine. So the trick is to install version 2 and then upgrade to version 4.

You may be wondering why this is relevant. My findings are that most realtime anti-malware programs thoroughly cripple performance. I used to run ClamWin+ClamSentinel as one of the least bad options, but even this was quite crippling. MSSE, on the other hand, is much more lightweight, and has thus far proved itself to be as effective in tests as most of the alternatives. The overall performance of the system is now much more acceptable.

Chrome Installer Error 0xc0000005 on Windows XP

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I don’t tend to write much about Windows because it’s usefulness to me is limited to functioning as a Steam boot loader, and even that usefulness is somewhat diminished with Steam and an increasing number of games being available for Linux. Unfortunately, I recently had to do some testing that needed to be carried out using a Windows application, and I noticed that Chrome reported the above error when attempting to update itself.

The Chrome installer crash with the opaque 0xc0000005 error code on XP64 (Chrome is still supported on XP, even though MS is treating XP as EOL). Googling the problem suggested disabling the sandbox might help, but this isn’t really applicable since the problem occurs with the installer, not once Chrome is running (it runs just fine, it’s updating it that triggers the error).

A quick look at the crash dump revealed that one of the libraries dynamically linked at crash time was the MS Application Verifier, used for debugging programs and sending them fake information on what version of Windows they are running on. Uninstalling the MS Application Verifier cured the problem.