Everything from installation to the painfully lengthy wait during the initial start-up to the visual murder that passed my eyes as I had to down-spec every graphical setting felt insufferable… and I still ended up freezing out of the game mid-mission.

I was able to get the Steam version of Deep Rock running, but it was a pretty miserable experience. One of my favorite 3D co-ops, Deep Rock Galactic, can be streamed on Xbox Game Pass at decent quality and low latency, but it requires a controller to play on that platform and I’m just no good at using one for this game. But as ChromeOS continues to run on machines without a discrete GPU, there’s only so much more you can expect. However, in adding to my overall judgment on this Chromebook for now, I have to give it a knock as other Chromebooks with fingerprint sensors do allow you to login with a quick scan.ĢD games like Moonlighter and Omori on Steam, even still in beta, run nicely without even so much as a single hitch. I expect to hear more on why this is the case and, if I do, you’ll see an update to this review. HP has confirmed to me that users will only be able to authenticate with a fingerprint read when they unlock the device and not during an initial login from a cold boot, restart, or logout. Next to the power button in the top-right corner is the fingerprint sensor and it doles out pretty snappy reads. The key pitch is a standard 19mm and the chiclets give my fingers a nice bounce to keep the momentum up. As to whether it’s comfortable to type with, it is. I put up a pink wallpaper and the keyboard came up with white. You can also set the backlight’s color to match the prevailing color of your wallpaper in ChromeOS’s Personalization Hub, but don’t expect to gain any nuance in your QWERTY-dom with this trick. In reality, the keyboard is just a bit under-equipped to be full-blown customizable: you’ve got options for white, red, a yellow-ish orange, green, turquoise, blue, purple, and a rainbow gradient featuring every color but white and turquoise. It feels like a lot of press took the juxtaposition of an RGB backlit keyboard on a Chromebook (another Google-HP collaboration) that’s supposedly not explicitly meant for gamers as headline bait during the initial publicity run at CES.

Audacity app for chromebook