When I'm on the road, the computer I usually take with me is my 13-inch MacBook Air. It's loaded up with all my regular programs, the tools I need to process photos and video and assist with our liveblogs, and it runs both OS X and Windows so I can run and test basically anything I'd need to be able to test when I'm out and about.

For CES, I wanted to try something a little different. I still brought the MacBook Air because my experimentation can't get in the way of me doing my job, but I decided a couple of weeks ago I'd try to cover the bulk of the show on an HP Chromebook 11. It's not as harsh a challenge as Wired's Smartphone Thunderdome thing—I could use the Air if I wanted, but whenever possible I'd try to do everything I had to do within Chrome OS. This is what I took away from the experience.

Yes, specs matter

"Specs don't matter, as long as you have enough of them." Intel's Mooly Eden said this to me during a meeting about the company's RealSense 3D camera, and while it's not a new sentiment, the Chromebook I had sleeping in my bag at the time really drove his point home.

The Chromebook 11 uses a year-old dual-core ARM SoC, the Samsung Exynos 5250. For home or casual use it's not a bad chip, but relying on it for time-sensitive things highlights just how much slower it is than even the slowest of Intel's Haswell CPUs. The things I shouted at the Chromebook as I tried to file a story from Nvidia's Sunday night press conference are unprintable.

This was my first inkling that my experiment would be hampered less by Chrome OS itself and more by the particular Chromebook I had chosen. A cheap Intel Chromebook like Acer's C720 is around twice as fast as the Chromebook 11, and I was constantly wishing for more speed, whether I was loading up the resource-sucking Outlook Web App to check e-mail or just trying to load a bunch of tabs in rapid succession.

Not for photo editing

Most of the stories I filed from CES were just text with a couple images sprinkled in. I wrote most things straight into our WordPress CMS rather than screwing around with Google Drive, mostly because Drive tends to insert weird formatting tags that often need to be stripped out.

If I was grabbing the images from a press site or from a previous article, Chrome OS was just as good as any other operating system. Its file explorer is rudimentary compared to Windows Explorer or the oft-maligned OS X Finder, but it's fine if all you need to do is download and re-upload an image, or use the Dropbox website to upload something to a shared folder.

Things broke down when I needed to get pictures from my Canon EOS Rebel T3i on to the laptop and then up on the site. The Chromebook 11 doesn't have an SD card slot, and Chrome OS won't recognize the camera when it's connected via USB. I could have circumvented this by planning a little better and bringing a USB SD card dongle, but I had assumed that the USB connection would be good enough—no such luck.

I put the images on the MacBook Air and then copied them to a USB drive, just to see what image manipulation would feel like on the Chromebook. Once again, the laptop's specs disappoint—while its IPS display gives you nice colors and contrast, something as simple as adjusting exposure takes several seconds to perform. Editing 18MP jpegs on an ARM chip is exactly as fun as it sounds, and forget about RAW files (you'll have to, because Chrome OS won't open them). Doing light image work is possible in Chrome OS but compared to Windows or OS X you'll be doing it with one hand tied behind your back (you know, figuratively).

Not for video editing

Take all of the above and multiply it by a hundred. Even if Chrome OS included a passable video editor, using it with a dual-core ARM CPU would be a fool's errand. And even if you wanted to put up with that, the Chromebook's 16GB SSD would put a hard limit on how much footage you could store locally in the first place.

Charge ahead

I've got the revised, non-melty version of the Chromebook 11's micro USB charger, and for the most part it was actually as convenient as it promised to be. I could stow just one power brick in my bag for the Chromebook, a Verizon MiFi, and my Mophie JuicePack battery, and when you're walking miles with a ton of gear strapped to your back you want to do anything you can to lighten the load.

The only problem is that it takes quite a while to charge the laptop—if you're actively using the device as you charge it, it can take as long to charge as it does to discharge. This isn't disruptive if you're charging the Chromebook overnight, but if you happen to be running low on juice and need a quick hit from an outlet you won't get as much runtime-per-minute-of-charging as you'll get with other laptops.

Switching woes

Most of the gripes I had about my week with the Chromebook 11 were about that hardware specifically, but there were still problems I would have had with any Chromebook. Between Web apps and the stuff in the Chrome Web Store, it was possible for me to replace most of the essential tools in my arsenal. The most mission-critical are the ones that I use to communicate. For an IRC client, I've settled on CIRC because of its clean, no-nonsense interface, though I don't mind Mibbit either. To connect to our private XMPP server, I used its not-awesome-but-good-enough Web interface. I prefer any client version of Outlook to the Web version, especially when I'm traveling between timezones (the Web app can use only one universal timezone setting, while the clients can make appointments in any timezone you want), but it worked well enough to get by on.

Here's the thing that keeps me from recommending Chromebooks to light users without reservation, though. Even if you can do everything you need to be able to do on a Chromebook, switching from any operating system to any other operating system is going to cause some friction. I use OS X to get most of my work done because it's got a bunch of built-in features and applications that I like. I use Full Screen Mode to keep my laptop's display organized and uncluttered. I like Limechat because it's got a bunch of preferences and settings that lets me change the way it looks and works. I like Messages because it lets me connect to our XMPP server and Google Talk and iMessage, all within one client.

That's what bothers me the most about Chrome OS. It's not that you can't do a lot with a Chromebook. It's not even about getting used to different tools. It's just that the operating system works so differently from established desktop operating systems that you'll have to alter many of your normal workflows. No one's saying it's impossible to do, but for people used to something else it can be a laborious process.

It's not all bad

All of these complaints aside, I was able to cover the majority of CES with the Chromebook 11. I had one full cheat day on Monday, because I need Windows or OS X to run our image uploading tools for liveblogs and I didn't want to carry two laptops around all day. Even the biggest sticking point—importing and manipulating images—could have been circumvented in part with a card reader dongle (or better yet, a Haswell Chromebook with an SD card slot integrated). Even during the few times when I was without a reliable Internet connection throughout the show, Google's apps and the Outlook Web App's offline modes are robust enough that I could still get things done. I didn't have problems with battery life (usually between five and six hours on a single charge), or with opening documents or files aside from the image and video problems mentioned above. It was better than working with a tablet or smartphone because it's got a real keyboard and because WordPress hates mobile browsers.

Did I prefer using a Chromebook to using my regular tools? No, not really. Is it possible to do and come back home with your sanity intact? Sure! That's probably something we couldn't have said 12 or 18 months ago, and it's why Chrome OS is so interesting—it doesn't do everything a PC can do, but Chromebooks do enough of what a PC does that they can pose a credible threat to low-end laptops. And in case you hadn't noticed, that's where a lot of the volume of the PC market comes from these days.