Happy (thrilled? relieved?) to announce that the HP x360 Chromebook running Windows 11 now has speaker drivers. With this step, the transition to Win11 on a newish Chromebook is complete!
(In related news, I’ve now officially canceled my MS 365 subscription, which seems contradictory. But it’s all part of the masterplan. Nyahaha!)
I spent $10 buying the audio drivers (which is paltry, considering the amount of programming work that went into them, and the fact that the rest of the process is free; heck, on the previous Chromebook it was completely free). And then spent 5 days wandering the labyrinth of the process for installing it — only because it was as unintuitive as a pre-GUI 1980s-style experience:
- Buy the driver by putting money in your Patreon account, which is already sort of backward to Patreon usage.
- Then subscribe to the programmer’s Patreon project with that balance.
- Follow a link back to the programmer’s Website to download the installation program. (Be sure to get the correct 1 of 3!) Then unsubscribe from the Patreon. (Hang on. I forgot to do that! Back in a sec.)
- Extract the zipped folder. Go into its GUI folder. Run the GenLicense program, which involves:
- Click a button to generate an unsigned license binary file;
- Click a button to open the online portal to upload the unsigned file;
- Click to have them to generate a new, signed binary; download it;
- Run the GUI again to select the signed license binary file;
- Run the now signed driver installer.
- Next up, open Windows Device Manager to see if the driver took effect. Often with any new driver, you have to restart the PC for it to happen. Sometimes in the old days, I’ve even had to delete a device from the Device Manager, then restart to force the machine to rerecognize it and look for a driver. In this case, I just had to use the Device Manager’s option to browse to a new driver so the PC could recognize it.
Voila!
Sounds pretty easy, right? Not so fast. Complicate it with 5 days of sending emails with screenshots of error messages along the way, and 24+ hours each time waiting to receive a cryptic one-sentence response.
Tonight, while taking screenshots to demonstrate that I had, indeed, bought the license, I came across the Read Me file again, scoured it for clues, launched the license GUI again, and thought, “Wait, can they really mean to generate an unsigned license, upload it to verify, download the signed binary, and relaunch the GUI to recognize it? What the hell, let’s give it a try.”
Maybe it would’ve made perfect sense to you. To me it was like putting a locked box of cake mix into the oven and photographing it; then taking the photograph to the store for them to unlock the cake box; before going home again to actually mix, stir, and bake the cake.
Pretty tasty cake, though! And this is a pretty sweet little touchscreen, foldback, Windows 11 laptop.