Daily Archives: January 4, 2013

More fun with Chromebooks, enabling the swap file…

I’ve been enjoying my Chromebook, but one issue that’s been a bit frustrating has been the way it discards (& reloads) tabs when you have several tabs open. This isn’t an issue on the 4GB ChromeOS devices like the ChromeBox or the Samsung 5 550. However, on a 2GB ChromeOS device, it’s been a bit of a pain. More than 4 or 5 tabs would mean a reload, particularly with memory-intensive AJAX pages like Gmail. It looks like I’ve found a way around it. I’ve been spending a bit of time on the ChromeBook Central Google Group, and ran across this thread on enabling zRam (swap file). So far, I’m quite impressed with the results. Right now, I’ve got 10 tabs open, and still have ~240MB free per top in crosh. I’m not sure what the downside is, and why this is not enabled in the build for 2GB devices. I’m running on the beta channel with R23. Time will tell if there’s any problem, but I sure wonder why Google doesn’t put this in as a default on 2GB ChromeOS devices.