Google Chrome CR-48 Bugs

Somehow, I lucked into one of the CR-48 Chrome netbooks that Google is giving away. In the interest of sharing what I’ve learned, I thought I’d put together a list of what I’ve run into and how to fix it or work around it.

Wireless Intermittently Drops Connection

I’ve had this thing for… a month? now and it has one major problem that makes it nearly worthless to me. For some reason, if you do something that takes a little time, like writing up a blog post, the next network operation tends to fail. The wireless indicator goes from having bars, to just a plain x, and then it’ll reacquire an IP and be ok again for a bit.

I put in a call to a Chrome Ninja, which was promptly returned with some suggestions. There’s apparently a known bug with wireless networks that use WPA-PSK-TKIP, an older standard for securing a wireless network. On their advice, I’m now forcing wireless clients to use WPA2-PSK-AES, where as before, the algorithm was decided on by the client. It seems to have helped; I’ve only had one dropout since switching over to the new security protocol last night. Previously I was seeing drops every five minutes or so.