I’ve been using a Google Chromebook since the middle of June as a full-time replacement for my dead desktop and laptop computers.  After 4 plus years of 24-7 usage both died within a month of each other.  Both are suffering from FHDE — that is Fatal Hard Disk Exhaustion.  I was tempted to replace both drives, but would not have been able to do so for a price I deemed too high to get both back up and running.

After some debate, and some research I opted for a Samsung Chromebook.  The ChromeOS that is used allows you to use one of three different variants of the operating system: stable, beta, and developer.  Currently I am using the developer channel, and while risky in the fact that certain functionality could crash or not work, I haven’t had any major issues.

The main reason for this post is to explain a small issue that I have been seeing, and whilst I have searched for this issue, I’m only finding similar issues from at least a year ago for folks on the stable channel, and the fixes that they give haven’t worked for me.

Anyway, the issue I’m seeing is a black screen when powering on the device from sleep.  The screen is not actually completely black, as you can see the extremely faint outline of what is on the screen, but it is by far too dark to be functional.

In playing with different scenarios I have determined that this is happening only when the power cable is plugged in.  I have determined that if I power off the system, unplug the power cord, and then whilst unplugged power on the device, ChromeOS will reload back to the same point, including the same tabs, where you left off.

This is not ideal, but as a user of the development channel of ChromeOS, I can live with some small issues.