G-DRIVE mini USB 3.0 Hitachi 1TB 7200rpm review

G-Drive mini is a high performance stylish  portable drive by G-Technology. Available in variants up to 1TB in storage size and equipped with a 7200rpm harddrive, the G-Drive mini is a fast portable drive for those requiring that extra bit of space.

Formatted originally for Mac OS X's HFS+, a small instruction is printed inside the packaging instructing users of other operating systems to visit their website for solutions to how to format the drive for their respective systems.

Fortunately formatting it for Windows NTFS is simple enough, for me, but I can't see how average computer users like my dad would know. It would be helpful if a more helpful step by step instruction is included in the packaging, or better yet, just format it for Windows. After all, Windows still run on the majority of PCs. If you are a Windows user and have issues mounting the drive, right click on 'Computer' and click on 'Manage', then head to 'Disk Management', where you can format the drive and assign a drive letter. Voila.

Minor usability gripes aside, the G-Drive mini is a fantastic looking piece of hardware. It is also solidly built. The metal protective shell doubles as one giant heat sink for passive ventilation which ensures that heat is dissipated quickly. Through the grills, you can almost peer inside the enclosure for a neat view of the drive itself. The drive itself is a standard 2.5" SATA 1TB drive made by Hitachi running at 7200rpm. A status LED sits just behind the front metal grills. Despite the liberal use of metal, the G-Drive mini is surprisingly lightweight.

Microsoft details Windows 8 desktop mode

In what can be only be described as a ridiculously long blog post Microsoft has detailed the desktop mode of Windows 8 and how it will differ from the glossy effect-driven Aero-look as seen on Windows 7. With Windows 8 set to a tablet-driven interface, there has been concerns raised that Microsoft would do away with the desktop mode altogether. After all, while Metro is pretty - it isn't exactly the most intuitive UI for keyboard + mouse PCs. Due to the need to maintain usability on desktop, the need for a classic mode was always going to be important.

But the move to flat, minimalist Metro UI would mean that switching between the two modes would be jarring. Microsoft has addressed this by Metro-fying the desktop mode. The much disliked Aero Orb Start button is now gone replaced by the Metro start interface. I am also glad to see all the gloss, fake 3D effects, and unneeded effects gone. Shadows and transparency effect (which any sensible person would have turned off on older version of Windows anyway) has also been consigned to history, and the use of gradients has been scaled back, reaffirming Microsoft's new design commitment to simplifying the UI and removing unnecessary effects. Even rounded corners weren't safe from the cutting floor.

Lenovo ThinkPad T420s

A new year, a new laptop. Well three years that is. After six years of using ThinkPad X-series ultraportable, yesterday I bought my first ever T-series ThinkPad, the T420s. The deal was just too good to pass up on. For £650, I got an almost-new T420s that would normally cost £1202 from Lenovo direct. It was originally sold for £1614 in this configuration. And as expected, it comes with standard three-year transferable warranty (got to love business-class warranties!).

The T420s retains the same beloved ThinkPad design that has graced all its predecessor. Much like a Porsche 911, the design is tweaked subtly with each new model, but always retain the same design language that makes it instantly recognisable: that is the rectangular boxy black bento-inspired shapre that every ThinkPad fan likes about it. It is understated, classy and does not shout 'look at me'. The T420s is all about function, before form and yet the classic design means that it will never age. My only complaint about the T420s, design wise, is it isn't quite as beautiful to look at as the X220-series.

It isn't all just looks though. Hiding underneath all that black is a series of rollcage made of hybrid carbon fibre reinforced plastic, designed to reduce flex on both the internal motherboard as well as the LCD display. This design keeps the weight down (my T420s weighs a feather light 1.7kg) while also retains the robustness that has always been known in a T-series ThinkPad.While I am not one to test the durability of a new laptop, my previous experience with other ThinkPad notebooks gives me confidence that the T420s is similarly well built and is able to withstand a couple of rough knocks. The lid is covered in matte rubber - none of that glossy nonsense that came with the Edge-series.

Samsung Story Station 2TB review - a cautionary tale

Last week I asked on twitter about the best harddrive available. I have been out of the whole computer hardware loop for a while I thought I would ask. Normally I would buy Seagate, but was told that their drives reliability has dropped since they bought Maxtor (ugh). I was advised that Samsung harddrives were the way to go by a friend who works in networking. Surely they can't be wrong? So I ordered the 2TB Samsung Story. It was priced only £10 more than the equivalent Seagate, and it looked downright sexy.

Yesterday evening I finally got my hands on the Story. It certainly looks like a great external drive, but who cares about the looks when what's important is the reliability and performance. I plugged it in and started moving my films, music and maps from my laptop onto the drive. I didn't measure the speed, but it wasn't slow. So for the next three hours, I started moving more crap onto the drive. 100GB later, I felt confident that I could start trusting it by moving some pictures too.

All hell broke lose.

I was watching a film on my telly. Despite the loud TV volume, I started hearing a loud clicking sound. Immediately I looked at my PS3 expecting to see a YLOD or something, but after listening carefully I found that it was coming from the new Samsung drive. I immediately turned it off and tried connecting again. No loud clicks this time, but my PC would not see it. I rebooted by PC just in case and still nothing happened. Eventually a drive letter came up and Windows urged me to format the drive. Distressed I connected the drive to my partner's Macbook Air, and even Apple's finest would not see it.

The Samsung drive was dead.

It lasted from 7.15 pm 6 October 2011 to 12.15 am 7 October 2011.

So that's it. That's my review of the Samsung Story 2TB. It's a piece of crap that does not work. In fact looking back at it now, I am glad it crapped out so early. Imagined if I used it for a week, moving more of my precious irreplaceable stuff on it, only for it to die on me. I think I would probably launch a lawsuit or something. I am now faced with the dilemma of returning this dreadful drive to Amazon, along with whatever personal data on it, and trust that they or Samsung dispose of it properly, or keep the broken drive and write off the £80 I paid for it.

Rather than sleeping, I am actually in the process of recovering my files from my laptop. Thanks a lot Samsung. You make great TVs, smartphones, world tallest buildings and even memory cards, but I would never trust my data on one of your sorry harddrives ever again.

Fellowes GoRiser portable laptop riser review

The Fellowes GoRiser is a portable laptop riser and part of Fellowes range of ergonomically designed products aimed at providing mobile warriors with the means of using their laptops in a more comfortable manner. It is capable of holding lalptops up to 17". What is different with the GoRiser and other laptop risers I have used in the past, including the Belkin Cushtop, is it is foldable and thus portable. Fold it up and carry it on your laptop bag for easy transportation. This product is part of Fellowes's Smart At Work campaign of increasing awareness on work ergonomics.

Apple MacBook Air (late 2010) review

This blog post will be about the MBA. Not the clever MBA, no, this is about the MacBook Air, specifically the 13" version. So if you are looking to do the business degree, you will have to look elsewhere! This blog doesn't do any sort of overtly geeky things like business degrees. :)

Apple, apple, apple, the forbidden fruit in the Adam and Eve 'tale', the sweet fruit that can be in the colour of green or red. But we are not talking about fruit here, we are talking about Apple Inc. that Steve Jobs co-founded in 1976.

If you are looking for a 'I love Apple forever' post and about how amazing and god awesome they are, unfortunately this would not be it. There are tons of fan sites out there that will suit you better.

Am I a Mac or a PC?

My purchase of the MacBook Air began when my previous notebook gave up recently. It's the second Apple product I've ever owned (the first was a fourth generation iPod Touch). It was a toss up between the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro.

There was a rumour that MacBook Pro was due to be upgraded at that time whilst the current MacBook Air was recently updated in late 2010. I didn't want to wait for a couple of weeks for Apple to release the new Pro, hence I decided to opt for the Air. The next dilemma was whether to get the 13 or 11inch. I decided to go for the 13" because the portability of the 11" version wasn't a priority. I also need a decent size screen to work with Autocad etc, and after a couple of upgrades are taken into account, I found the 13" Air to be more value for money than the 11" version.

The first thing that impressed me was Apple Store's efficiency. I placed the order on a Sunday and they called to confirm my details the very next day. There's this one freaky thing - they called my office despite the fact that I've never given them the number! Not too sure whether I should feel impressed or worried in regard of this...

Even more impressive however was the fact that the Air was delivered the following morning. I was greeted with a brown box on my office desk. From ordering it on Sunday evening and getting it on Tuesday morning - that's what I called efficiency!

After carefully unboxing, I settled to get to know my new love. Unfortunately, my happiness didn't last long... As a twitter addict, looking at the keyboard, my first thought was: "Where the hell is the hashtag symbol???"

And yes, thanks to twitter, I got the answer. It was 'Alt+3'!

But this irks me, why isn't there a hashtag symbol on the keyboard, whereas there is € sign on the number 2, despite also having to use 'Alt+2'. It also seems to be missing a 'delete' button. Another downside is that there is no backlight on the keyboard like the old MacBook Air. Even a light similar to Jon's ThinkPad would be enough.

Okay, perhaps I am rather fussy, but the most painful thing I encountered was transferring my music from my iPod Touch to the Air. In fact, there are no straight forward way to transfer my music to the Mac! iTunes would not allow me to do it. The only way is to install a third party app for this purpose.

Right, enough of the cons, the MacBook Air has plenty of pros as well. I must admit that I primarily chose the MacBook Air because of the design. It is sleek, light, has a brilliant display and is well built! Mac OS X boots quickly and despite the now outdated Core 2 Duo architecture, the thing is far quicker and thus more productive than cheaper netbook alternatives. I also found the VAIO-like chiclet keyboard to be very comfortable to use.

I was also told that Mac laptops tend to hold their values better than PC laptops, but perhaps it's because of Apple's tendency to update their line ups far less than PC manufacturers. It is a sleek, light, gorgeous designed laptop but you shouldn't expect it to be a powerful workstation like a high end MacBook Pro or other powerful ultra portable notebooks. All in all, I do like it and despite my issues with Mac OS X, it is a keeper.

This review of Apple's MacBook Air 13" (late 2010) is by guest reviewer Jennifer.

Chrome OS

The amount of attention by self proclaimed experts on Chrome OS is rather unnerving. For those who do not know, Chrome OS is a Linux distribution filled with adware, basically a trojan horse for Google's advertising business - minus the bits that makes Linux great. You may realise that I have adsense on this blog, but you can always adblock it if you want to. With a Google controlled OS and browser, you may not even have a choice.

If you want an open source operating system, stick with OpenSolaris or many of the billion Linux distributions out there. Also harddrives are cheap as chips, so I see absolutely zero reason to trust your data to the "cloud". Anybody who is excited by this and "cloud computing" ought to open up their eyes and realise they are basically putting their data into the hands of a corporation, whose interest lies with their shareholders and no one else.

OpenSolaris 2009.06

With the pending arrival of Windows 7 (it's great - no doubt about it) and the glamour of Linux, people could be forgiven to believe that no other alternatives exist. Thankfully, there are. OpenSolaris has always been a favourite alternative OS of mine, and the latest release 2009.06 is a step in the right direction.

My 2009.06 Live CD arrived about 2 weeks ago, but I haven't had the chance to play around with it much apart from that one time. I once again booted it up today and found the latest distribution to be very stable. It recognised all my ThinkPad X61 components without any issues, though the same can be said of its 2008.05 release. Some of the bundled apps are outdated, and VideoLan isn't even installed (Totem is included instead - which is a rather useless media player IMO, but this can easily be fixed).

Once I get a new harddrive, I'll definitely be creating a partition for OpenSolaris and Windows 7. Both are exciting enough.

Fn Ctrl

The Fn key was originally placed by the ThinkPad designers in the lower left hand corner to make the key easier to locate when using the keystroke combinations. There was a rationale. This is especially handy for turning on the ThinkLight in the dark. Aim for the two extreme corners. Desktop keyboards have never had the Fn issue to deal with since there are not such stringent size contraints for their keyboards that require the use of such a key. (Lenovo Blogs: Fn Versus Ctrl)

In all honesty, ever since I started using ThinkPads, I have found that the Fn Ctrl placement makes the most sense. Personally I never use the Ctrl key, apart from maybe word processing, so perhaps that is the reason. To me the single most deciding factor of keeping the Fn key on the extreme low left of the ThinkPad keyboard is the ThinkLight. I reckon that I probably use that key combination the most with my current X61. Others include launching the power scheme panel, quickly putting the ThinkPad into standby mode and dimming or brightening the screen.

To me a more sensible solution is to:

1. Swap the 'CapsLock' key for the 'Ctrl' key. 'CapsLock' is a redundant key, one that I or the majority of people I know would never use in its default state.

2. Offer a BIOS solution for those who are keen on remapping the 'Fn' and 'Ctrl' keys. This is probably an ideal solution. All ThinkPads should still ship with the default 'Fn' 'Ctrl' positioning though.

Getting rid of the 'Windows' key in order to fit in a larger 'Ctrl' key seem to be a popular request, but I think the request is born more out of hatred of Microsoft than anything. Perhaps replacing the key symbol with something more neutral would be more appropriate. Personally, I still believe the best solution is to replace the 'CapsLock' key with the 'Ctrl' key.

Windows 7 UK pre-order is go

The hype is true - Windows 7 is great. If the Release Candidate version is anything to go by, the retail version of Microsoft's latest and greatest OS will be a winner. It is faster and more reliable. It works a treat on my ThinkPad X61 and with plenty of spare RAM after boot.

Due to some weird European Commission on competitive ruling regarding the bundling of Internet Explorer, Microsoft has decided to sell the full retail version of Windows 7 Ultimate E, Professional E and Home Premium E in Europe at a discounted price (upgrade price for the full retail edition version). And for a very limited time, you can get them even cheaper if you pre-order quickly: Windows 7 Professional for £89.97 and the Home Premium for a recession busting £44.97. This is great news for those still stuck with a Windows XP license (like I am), who has no legal upgrade path (and thus discounted) to Windows 7. The 'bad' news is a clean install is a mandatory requirement to get Windows 7 onto your machines.

Now the decision is which version of Windows 7 to get. I am leaning between getting the Professional edition or Home Premium at the moment, with Ultimate out of the question due to surplus features (and it doesn't seem to be getting any pre-order offers). The only exclusive feature from Professional that is tempting is XP virtualisation, but I can always dual boot to XP if I want to.

Update: I've placed an order for two quantites of Professional edition, seeing how cheap it is. It is nice to have a full license for Windows XP for only £40. I may place an order for Home Premium and cancel the order for the Professional edition if the price dips below £49.99, and once Amazon UK sort out their web store.

Update 2: Ebuyer has the Professional edition for £80. Just make sure you opt for free shipping. Unlike Amazon UK or Play.com, I believe they will charge your card straight away, but I can't be sure. I am taking my chance with Amazon UK until someone can confirm that Ebuyer won't charge me until the day of shipment.

Update 3: Placed my order for the Home Premium edition at Amazon UK (a snip at £44.97) for my partner. Brilliant price that is, and I suggest anyone who hasn't yet placed their pre-orders to do so today. This pre-order allocation offer won't last forever.

Update 4: It appears that most places has sold out the initial 'offer allocation'. I know you can't sell out something that does not exist yet, but you know what I mean. The prices of Home Premium has risen up to £74.97 (50% off), Professional to £179.97 (18% off) and Ultimate to £189.97 (17% off). Well, you should have bought them when I told you to do so!

Update 5: PC World still have the Home Premium for £44.99 and Professional for £79.99, even cheaper than Amazon UK. Obviously not many people knows about it (who shops at PC World these days?). Hurry up before the initial allocation runs out.

Lenovo ThinkPad X61 ultraportable review

Ever since Lenovo took over IBM's PC division, there has been speculations that the legendary built quality of ThinkPad would suffer. Having recently acquired a ThinkPad X61, I can safely brush aside these concerns as unjustified. ThinkPads laptops are still quite possibly the ultimate notebooks for people who who demands the most reliable portable workhorse, and the ultra portable X61 is no different.

The X61 has since been replaced by the X200, but there are several reasons why you shouldn't yet dismiss this older model, especially when you can get them for a fraction of the cost of the X200. Coming up from the X31, I found the X61 to be almost exactly the same size (smaller actually) and lighter too (200g less with standard 4-cell battery). The overall classic bento shape of the ThinkPad has been retained while thankfully black remained black, making this iconic series instantly recognisable from other me-too notebooks. Personally I kinda dislike the new X200 due to its wider footprint as well as huge bezel, but maybe that's because I am jealous!


Specifications:

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo T7100
Chipset: Intel 965 Express with Intel X3100 GPU
Memory: 2x 1GB DDR2 PC2-5300 (max 8GB)
Hard Drive: 100GB 7200rpm SATA
Screen: 12.1" 1024x768 LCD
Other: Bluetooth 2.0 EDR+, Intel PRO/Wireless 3945 ABG
Operating System: Windows XP Professional SP3
Warranty: 3 years walk-in (2 1/2 years remaining)

I was initially disappointed of the lack of rubberised texture from the ThinkPad X31 notebook, though I still suspect that the lid is still rubberised. The display is fitted with a 12" LCD screen sporting a fairly disappointing XGA resolution (my decade old Inspiron 7000 had that resolution!). The screen here is very bright and does not suffer from dead pixels or light bleeding. On the top you have one of the most beloved IBM innovation, the ThinkLight, which is a LED that shines down at the keyboard allowing you to type in the dark. Two latches near the edge keeps the lid shut. On the bottom are a set of status lights. Depending on configurations you can easily see the status of the ThinkPad's WiFi, Bluetooth, battery, hard drive, power, standby etc.


Like previous X-Series ThinkPads, the X61 is fitted with an almost full sized keyboard. If there is a single reason to get a ThinkPad, it is for the keyboard. Quite simply, ThinkPad keyboards destroys all their competitors. I even avoid using external full size keyboard as the keyboards here are very robust, has a comfortable key travel, isn't too loud and does not flex. You can comfortably use this for hours without nary an ache. A TrackPoint sits in the middle of the 'home' area. Some may hate the nipple as a mouse device, but I absolutely adore it. The middle UltraNav button allows you to quickly scroll down documents or web pages. As a package, the TrackPoint is more intuitive and accurate, and its position allows for less finger travel thus allowing for increased productivity.

The power button sits above the keyboard near the middle. Next to it are the volume keys and ThinkVantage key (formerly Access IBM on older models), which when pressed will bring up either the Productivity Centre that help configure or diagnose problems with the notebook, or the Predesktop Area (hidden partition recovery area). Unfortunately compared to the X31, the keys here are small and clumsy, but they do work much better than those touch-based one you find on flashy notebooks. As Lenovo now fully owns IBM's former PC division including the ThinkPad line, the old classic RGB IBM logo is now sadly gone forever (no amount of pleading will bring them back lest IBM buys back the ThinkPad division which I doubt). Imprinted on the bottom right is a new ThinkPad logo, with the words 'X-series' highlighting Lenovo's desire to acknowledge the strong brand loyalty.


The bottom front of the X61 has a WiFi on-off toggle. The left side contains a single type-II CardBus slot. Below it is a full size SD-IO card slot (it is SDHC compatible). A Gigabit LAN port sits next to them followed by a legacy VGA port, a single USB 2.0 port and finally the vent. On the right side of the X61, we have a 4-pin IEEE1394 port (FireWire, i-Link), two additional USB 2.0 ports, headphone and microphone 3.5mm jacks, 56k modem port, the new power socket and a standard Kensington lock port. The hard drive access bay is also accessible from the right side, though you will need to remove a single screw from the chassis to pull it out. The back side is reserved for the battery. The optional 8-cell battery does stick out quite a bit. As for the battery life, the standard 4-cell battery works extremely well, providing me with enough juice to do a complete system recovery and play time to boot during my first test.

On the bottom is a single speaker, RAM door (which gives you access to two SODIMM slots), the UltraBase docking station port, battery latch and various screws. If you look closely you will also see two keyboard drainage holes, where accidental spillage of water on the keyboard will just drain right out. The speaker is okay for watching various YouTube videos of morons attempting to prove Darwin, but you'll definitely want to hook it up to an external speaker for watching films. Removing the bottom will reveal two MiniPCI Express slots, one of which is taken up by the WiFi card (in this case an Intel PRO/Wireless 3945 ABG). The other is empty and can be configured to take an authorised WWAN card. Speaking of wireless, the Intel PRO reception is good though I did wish that it was configured with an Atheros powered ThinkPad 11a/b/g card. Jennifer's Acer has an Atheros card that is able to see networks my X61 was unable to. That said the Intel PRO card performance was still acceptable.


L-R: Sony PS2 Slim AC, Lenovo 65W AC, Dell Latitude 65W AC

Overall built quality is excellent. The stainless steel hinge allows you to swivel the screen 180 degrees and is so sturdy that where other notebooks will simply snapped into half, you can have no worries carrying a X61 by its lid (I don't recommend abusing your ThinkPads - but they are built to be abused!). At 1.41kg, the ThinkPad X61 is extremely portable. Even with the optional 8-cell battery the notebook weights around 1.6kg. Including the optional UltraBase docking station, the weight barely exceeds 2.7kg. Sadly the X61 uses the new AC barrel plug design, so it won't be compatible with previous ThinkPad chargers. On the upside the new Lenovo 65W AC adapter is small, petite and weighs less around 260g. The total weight for a X61 with 4-cell battery and the 65W AC is a shoulder friendly 1.7kg.

Performance wise the X61 blows my old X31 away. This isn't surprising as the X61 is fitted with a Merom-based Intel dual core processor, but even in single threaded benchmarks like Super Pi, the X61's 1.8Ghz clock speed completely thrashes the X31's 1.4Ghz clock speed, calculating at more than twice the speed despite the modest clock speed advantage. Even then, the X61 is almost always silent and if the fans do kick in, isn't as loud as the X31. Heat was never an issue with the newer model too, despite having opted for a full voltage C2D. I can comfortably use it on my lap. Unfortunately despite supporting Socket P, the T7100 is soldered down. If you desire to upgrade to a faster processor in the future, you'll have to replace the whole motherboard. You can easily purchase spare parts direct from Lenovo so long as you know the FRU part you are seeking.


The benchmark results certainly would not set the world on fire as the T7100 processor and hard drive is clearly on the average side.

Super Pi 1 million: 31s
wPrime 32 million: 48s

In terms of real world usage I find it more than fast enough. With multiple processes queueing on start-up (mainly ThinkVantage utilities, Comodo firewall and AVG), the system is able to cold boot to usable state in less than 40 seconds despite the processor rarely clocking above 1.2Ghz. Even a bloated workhorse like Firefox 3 is able to start up with minimum fuss despite having eight add-ons enabled. I am running Windows XP with it, but I don't see any possible issues with it running Vista. The Intel X3100 integrated graphics won't allow you to play modern games, but it is good enough for Telltale's Sam & Max and perhaps even SimCity 4. I had no problems playing 720p and 1080p WMV files, though it did struggle at times with 1080p h.264 files.


The ThinkPad X61 notebook came bundled with some bloatware, of which I purged by doing a complete re-installation through the Rescue & Recovery application during boot-up. You can select which program is omitted during the recovery. Naturally first class junks like Google Desktop, Live Toolbar and Norton something was de-commissioned at the source. Apart from Lenovo's Message Center, I allowed most of them to be installed as unlike most third party applications, ThinkVantage is actually useful. For example their Power Manager program is great for optimising battery life and even gives you detailed battery information including manufacturing date, current charge capacity as well as the number of battery charge cycles you have used up. Perhaps the most useful is the Active Protection System which automatically parks the hard drive's head when it detects movement via the built-in accelerometer, though if you do install a SSD drive you will be stupid to keep this utility activated.

Overall I am glad I got the X61. Sure I could have gotten something flashier, faster, thinner and more expensive to sit with in Starbucks, but the X61 is just as sexy offers features that may not exist in more expensive alternatives. Most importantly is the reliability and durability that comes with this machine. Despite getting mine used, the transferable 3 year warranty (2.5 years remaining on mine) and the peace of mind that comes with it makes it worth it. ThinkPad X-Series are powerful machines that can be configured up to the fastest mobile Core 2 Duo processors and make suitable desktop replacements (provided you get their UltraBase), so don't be fooled by their petite size.

+ Good general computing performance
+ Mature ThinkVantage applications
+ Sturdy built-quality
+ Still the best keyboard on the market
+ Classic ThinkPad design
- CPU soldered down
- Outdated screen resolution
- No recovery DVD

9/10

The perfect netbook

Netbooks are all the rage now. But for some reason they've never appealed to me. Either the keyboard sucks or the trackpad are too small or the dumbed-down Linux experience too shallowed, convoluted and restricted. And let's not forget about the design. Most netbook are just toy-like. You may as well replaced 'EEE PC' with 'my first computer'. Even the classic Psion 5mx released more than a decade ago provides more oomph than a modern Acer Aspire. You would think with improved tech and miniaturisation they would attempt to put a modern x86 Atom in something similar. But for whatever reason, they don't.


What I would like to see however is Sony re-entering the market with an updated version of their classic VAIO Picturebook. The Picturebook shown above was the C1VN. It was released in 2000 and despite its age still completely outclass the majority of new netbooks in certain key areas like ergonomics. I had the opportunity once back then to play around with a Picturebook and found the keyboard to be awesome (for its size), the widescreen screen perfect for web browsing and a trackpoint that makes so much more sense than a small trackpad. The only issue it had was the price, and back then it was ridiculous to spend more than £1k on a netbook, let alone on a normal ultraportable. But the design was great and even today still tests . I regularly see derivatives of the Picturebook sold at prices (£300-£800) that would make current new netbooks blush with envy.


Oh and if Lenovo has any clue on where the market is heading, they would do best to update the ThinkPad S30 series and bring them over here!

What I would like to see in a netbook:

• Great design
• Great keyboard
• Great battery life (6-9 hours)
• ULV processor
• Windows XP or a none-crippled Linux UI
• Trackpoint, nipple, pointing stick whatever you call it - it just has to be there
• Support for at least two memory cards (SD and MS) with the ability to boot from

Trackpoints vs touchpads

"I believe my main point was that only the 40-plus crowd, whose first laptop was probably a ThinkPad with a pointing stick, still even knew how to use these stupid things, and the rest of us youthful, forward-thinking types were part of the touchpad generation." Dan_Ackerman

Sorry Dan, what a silly comment there (though I expected nothing less from a Cnet editor). My first notebook was a Dell Inspiron 7000. It had a touchpad, and while I got used to it I've always felt that they were inaccurate. I now have a ThinkPad and can't possibly think of going back to using touchpads. Trackpoints are infinitely more user friendly, accurate and intuitive, at least in my more superior opinion. Even when I've a USB optical mouse by my side I always revert back to using the venerable nipple. Quite how touchpads, which are useless and causes the cursor to randomly jump around the screen can be considered forward thinking is beyond me (I am younger than 30).

Cnet poll: touchpad vs pointing stick

O&O UnErase

Now this is something I rarely write about, but since this software practically saved 30GB of my data - I guess I was bound to at least write something good about it. As some of you may know (if you followed my Twitter), yesterday Vista SP1 wiped off 30GB worth of data from my portable harddrive. Not sure how or why. All I did was delete a single file, then the screen blinked once and the drive became unresponsive. After that only three sub folder remained, and all were empty. Vista threw a hissy fit at me when I attempted to right click on the folder to look at the properties. Anyway I unplugged it and plugged it onto a XP workstation and found that my worse fears were confirmed.

Fortunately I have a version of O&O UnErase installed (can't remember which version it was, but it definitely isn't the latest). Fired it up, and within a couple of mouse clicks it was recovering the missing files, with its file names and folder structures, onto the desktop. Once done all I did was recopy the files back to my portable drive. Very simple and efficient, though the application does seem reserve an awful lot of resource - almost locking up the computer and certainly making it almost unusable during the restore. After that I did a virus scan on the Vista machine, just in case, but it revealed nothing. So I am going to put the blame onto Microsoft's software incompetence.

LaCie Mobile Disk review

It was about time I upgraded my five year old SmartDisk FireLite 40GB mobile drive. It was constantly locking up Windows XP and when I found that about 20 of my digital images were corrupted I almost flipped. Fortunately I live nearby a Staples and instead went and bought a replacement - the LaCie Mobile Disk 160GB. Call it a bank holiday treat. It was a toss between this and an Iomega, but I am a bit apprehensive of their brand after being forced to go through loads of failed Iomega Zip disks. Also I decided to forgo the massive storage that 3.5" external hard drives provide for increased portability for various reasons, as my desktop already contains close to 200GB of free space to play with plus I may consider investing in a NAS server once prices drop further.

The LaCie drive contains a 2.5" Seagate SATA hard disk with a rotational speed of 5400rpm and 8MB cache. It supports USB 2.0 and comes with a mini USB cable and a USB power cable for low powered USB ports. Those I left in the box as I have like ten USB cables just lying around, and my ThinkPad's USB ports provides sufficient juice power even two portable hard drives. The drive has been preformatted and comes with LaCie's own synchronisation and encryption software. I immediately formatted the file system into NTSC as FAT has proven to be too unreliable to me in the past. A blue LED blinks when the hard drive is used.

The curvy enclosure is made of matte metal and comes in black. It remains warm to touch even after I copied 30GB worth of files under one sitting, so it obviously performs well. It is a little thicker and wider than Jennifer's Freecom Classic Mobile HD, but slightly shorter. At 170g it is a pretty light drive, though it is heavier than my FireLite drive. It feels solid and thus 'expensive'. A pair of rubber legs ensures that it doesn't slide around the desk should you accidentally knock it about. Still one should always practice extreme caution when dealing with portable drives with moving parts.

Data transfer speed is reasonable. It took me around 50 minutes to transfer 30GB of files (mixture of tens of thousands of videos, music and pictures) from the old drive to the LaCie disk over two USB 2.0 connections, which I believe is reasonable considering all the bottlenecks. As you can see from the HD Tune benchmark results that I ran on both the LaCie Mobile Disk and FireLite drive (which has a Fujitsu hard disk), the LaCie is substantially quicker on all rounds. Note that both were optimised for quick removal under Windows XP USB device properties, so the LaCie's performance could have been higher without the bottlenecks and/or restrictions. Despite the SATA interface, it was always going to be bogged down by USB 2.0.



The price of the drive is £50, which is significantly less than what I paid for the old drive back then (£120) or some proprietary 360 drive. They also sell a 250GB version for £90, but I didn't think it was worth it. For £50 it is a pretty good deal. On the downside, it only comes with a one year warranty - but I hardly pay attention to such things anyway as no amount of warranty can protect your data. I am aware that SSDs are the future, but you can't beat the price ratio on this. As for my old drive, I am probably going to shred the disk inside and try to source for a cheap IDE replacement.

Seeing red

This is what five months of maintenance neglect will bring on your harddrive as demonstrated on one of my harddrive's partition. Something tells me that I ought to allocate some time to defrag my harddrive, soon.

Cisco, whatever happened to product testing?

I just got off the phone from a relative who has a problem with her Linksys WAG54GS wireless router which keeps dropping connection and resets itself. Now I have created a temporary backup file for her to restore the settings any time the fucking thing decides to hard reset itself, but this has been going on a weekly basis for months now ever since her I.T. friend brought it in. He also uses the same router and has no problem with it and even exchanged his for hers when the problem started popping up.

At first my gut feeling tells me that the fault likes with the ISP, UKOnline (they are known to be awful, if not cheap). Even then I am sure no matter how awful an ISP is it wouldn't erase settings from a modem. I will probably try to do a firmware upgrade next week but right now every week I get a phone call from her regarding the issue I want to tell her to bin the bloody router. Someone else who owns the same product confirmed to me that this particular Linksys model had issues with keeping its settings and downloading the latest firmware will rectify it, which I confirmed via Googling. So hopefully once I apply the new firmware this crap product will work as advertised.

Personally I should count myself lucky. Of all the negative things being said about Belkin wireless routers and Virgin Media/NTL, we have been online for 3 months now and only experienced a handful of drop-outs (like once a month) and never was it the fault of the router. And to think we almost bought a Linksys because it "looks nice". With the Belkin, never once was I forced to break out the manual from storage. Hell Virgin has never even throttled our connection despite super heavy usage.

Hardware review: Belkin Wireless G Cable/DSL Router

Belkin's Wireless G Cable/DSL Router is a no frills easy to use router that is compatible with Virgin Media, NTL Broadband and Telewest broadband cable connection as well as DSL connections. It comes equipped with four 10/100 Base-T Ethernet ports with support for up to 253 wired LAN users and 32 wireless LAN users. It is reasonably priced for a wireless router and is about 10 quid cheaper than my first choice Linksys Wireless-G router, which wasn't in stock.

After a quick setup via the included CD where it detected the broadband settings and then connecting the Virgin Media (NTL) cable modem to the router and allowing it to reboot, the thing was up and running all within 10 minutes. Unfortunately on my ThinkPad (which was also the installation PC for the router) did not manage to connect wirelessly, but after a quick check and enabling automatic IP, it worked fine.

Configuring the security is easy, probably will take about five extra minutes. Just navigate to the router's IP via Firefox or your browser of choice and click away. Enabling security is important. One of my former neighbour had this exact router and never enabled any sort of security, be it on the wireless connection itself or even the router (it was great filtering out MAC addresses). The router has support for two WPA2 keys where the first pre-shared passphrase allows full network access and a second 'guest' key allows only internet access via the router. Perfect for friends dropping by.

The wireless connection is excellent and I can't stress that enough. ThinkPad, Nokia N80, XDA Exec, Nintendo Wii, an Acer lappy with Atheros wireless card - all were connected within seconds. I have yet to test my PS2's wired network capability with the router though but my gut feeling is it would be fine.

Signal strengths are reasonable considering that this Belkin is an entry level model worth £35. The router is sitting next to the telly in the living room and signals up to 50% were obtainable from the pub across the road making pub quiz cheating easier. Signal in the bedroom is roughly 90% even with the doors closed. It is obvious that in a typical small apartment an entry level router like this would work just fine. Anything higher (like Belkin's own MIMO range) is overkill unless you are planning to share internet connection in a four story Victorian flat.

A caveat with this product is it does not include a modem (which is understandable considering the price) as well as a USB port. Most ADSL modems today comes in USB flavour but the Wireless G router only comes with Ethernet ports. It is very old school but if you are lucky enough to have a Ethernet broadband modem then this shouldn't be a problem.

This product comes highly recommended. It is easy to use and gets the job done.

UK broadband very ancient (and slow)

Then stop advertising 'up to 8Mb' when you yourself concede that virtually no one will get it. Or spend money in upgrading the facilities. Lord knows you guys (BT) tend to be one of the most expensive ISPs providers here, so I am sure you have the dosh to actually do something about it. You know, like rolling out FTTH or actually speeding up the ADSL2+ and 21CN upgrade program (which is outdated already). Screw what Ofcom thinks. Fibre is the future. Not old tech copper.

Screw it, I think I will switch to cable soon.

via BBC News

Sandisk 2GB microSD (TransFlash) Multi SD Kit

The problem with the SD card format is they have too many sub-formats. There is the generic Secure Digital format which I first used on my Palm m500 many years ago. Then the miniSD format and recently the microSD format formerly known as TransFlash. Within this are the new SDHC spec for high capacity cards. A card you buy now is not guaranteed to work in future devices. In my case a device I am using now requires a miniSD card, but if in the future I purchase a device that requires microSD cards than it would be obsolete.


It is fortunate that SanDisk release the microSD multi SD kit which costs only a few quid more than a vanilla microSD card (I paid around 1 quid for it two weeks ago). It comes with two adapters so that it could be used in any SD, miniSD and microSD slots. Wonderful as this provides the type of flexibility I require. So right now I am using a 2GB microSD card on a Nokia N80. I am planning to get a HTC Kaiser, which has a microSD slot, in the future so at least the card is future proof.