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Message: [QUOTE="neema_t, post: 12715091, member: 107035"] I've arranged for my Chromebook to be replaced tomorrow, that does unfortunately mean I have to carry the box - which is too big to put in a bag - with me on the tube at rush hour, but what can you do? In the meantime I'm still using the defective one, I'm writing this on it right now actually. I'm quite surprised by how easy it was to get used to the keyboard, usually it takes me some time to calibrate my fingers but this has been a really smooth transition. I think the only thing that still throws me is the @ sign being shift-' instead of shift-2 as I'm used to on my MacBook Air, I don't make that mistake when switching between Mac and Windows keyboards at work but as I haven't used a non-Apple laptop for any significant amount of time I guess my brain associates the shift-2 @ with being a laptop thing rather than a Mac thing, if that makes sense? As I've mentioned about a billion times, one key thing I wanted from a Chromebook was the ability to use a remote desktop program to connect to my PC. While Parsec does work really well it doesn't quite work perfectly, and for some reason I can't make it work on the Chrome version, just the Android one (I have yet to try the Linux version but I'll save that for when I get the replacement). It doesn't pass trackpad gestures and the 'GUI' key (search key in ChromeOS, Windows key in Windows) doesn't make it across either, then if I move my mouse to the bottom of the screen to get my hidden task bar up in Windows it just brings up the hidden shelf (ChromeOS's equivalent to the task bar or dock) so Parsec never actually gets to follow the mouse all the way to the bottom row of pixels. That's kind of a pain so I might set up a batch file to toggle between task bar hide on and off. For non-gaming use, though, Chrome Remote Desktop works perfectly - it passes all inputs to the host so the Chromebook's shelf never comes up instead of the task bar. Gestures all work and it seems totally fine, so that's great and it's good to know there's a backup option in case Parsec breaks. Splashtop also works but has all the issues of Parsec with added latency and less configurability. I've also tried a couple of Android games out, unsurprisingly all the ones I've tried run fine but like all Android apps, a) not all are available on x86 platforms like this and b) they're often unresponsively designed around a narrow portrait orientation so they can look really weird on a big, landscape screen like this. I have yet to try Ridiculous Fishing, easily my favourite Android game, but Super Hexagon and #Drive work - they're still weird, for example pressing space or enter in Super Hexagon just makes the screen go a solid colour for as long as you hold the key down, but they are playable. One thing I can't work out is the whole using your phone to unlock your Chromebook thing. It seems that by default, closing the lid doesn't put the Chromebook into a low-power state or anything like that, it just turns the screen off. That alone is... Weird, but fine (I guess), but if you set the Chromebook to sleep when the lid is closed (which extends the idle battery life by a lot, of course) it breaks the ability to unlock it with your phone, presumably because the WiFi radio turns off (rightly so) so it can't see your phone. So, unless I'm missing something, that doesn't seem super useful! Maybe there's a setting I need to change or an update Google needs to release. Oh and setting the scaling from the default to whatever I've set it to was really useful - I was a bit worried that the 1080p, 14" screen of the Chromebook felt more cramped than the 1440x900, 13" screen of the MacBook Air rather than less, but it was because the scaling options were set to "feels like 1366x768 (or something)" - at "feel like 1080p" things are obviously quite small but not uncomfortably so. I do sometimes struggle to tell the difference between an i, l, 1 and I, though! [/QUOTE]

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