Netbooks survival only in recession?

Netbooks

Will netbooks die off as the economy recovers?

Liliputing has a great post here which is based on an Information Week article.

My own view is that Netbooks are helped by their low cost, but that is not their point. Their success is more about their form factor and utility in a low cost package. There will not be a recovery and increase in cost as the market recovers, primarily because netbook or laptop – the price of a computer in the UK is now fixing itself between £250 ($380) and £400 ($600) – $1000 computers are in the past in the same way that $2000 computers are.

Computers are getting into their sweet spot for price and the profit is being impacted by the OS cost. Microsoft is one who must adapt – their OS is now the most expensive single component in the package. I think Microsoft needs to think about its Microsoft tax and less about the Apple tax.

Travel Assistance

As I have just begun a heavy round of travelling, I started to look around for help with the tracking of all my travel and hotel layovers. As I will be travelling every week for a long period, I really needed something that will both help in the practical forward planning of trips and also in the retrospective tracking of when I was in one country over another.

My initial thoughts turned to using calendar events in my Outlook Calendar but that was a little unwieldy and fairly manual to setup, so I started to think about online services that can assist. I did not look far as I noticed that a service called Tripit.com was integrated into my Linkedin account, noticed because I could see travel notifications coming up for a variety of my contacts, particularly those that are heavy travellers. So I activated it directly from within my Linkedin account, which took me through the Opensocial app configuration and onwards to the Tripit service itself.

Tripit offers two direct ways of registering travel/hotel events – the straightforward (and not very clever one) is to go on and create manual events through direct entry. The better option however is to simply send each email that you receive from the travel services you are using to the plan@tripit.com email address. The service will then simply sieve the email for pertinent information about the flight or hotel booking such as start date/time, end date/time, location from/to and final destination etc, and to then populate your itinerary for the trip automatically. The service sends you back an email once it has processed the information. This service works because in the basic registration, your email is registered by the service and it also allows you to specify a total of four separate email addresses from which you send in travel arrangement emails.

My initial use of the system has been favourable and it seems to do an excellent job of processing the emailed information and certainly setting up the locations and times for all parts of the journey. It does less well at other information such as costs, but that is a minor detail as I use other mechanisms of recording expenses and costs. The service also emails me the summary of my forthcoming trip a few days beforehand – very useful in the preparation for the journey.

As I am using it via the Linkedin account, by default my travel plans are posted to my profile for my contacts to see where I am going and when which has a level of usefulness, particularly when it matches where I am with my contacts. However this may not be liked by all, and the system offers privacy features to reduce the amount of information shared all the way down to none if you wish. The main tripit.com service also offers other services including direct subscription with other contacts, which I have used sparingly at this point but will be continuing to evaluate its usefulness. Additionally the service offers RSS and iCal feeds back out of it which can be integrated into your Calendar to give a clear view of your travel plans alongside your appointments, however I have yet to fully validate how these can be used or how they work.

All in all a useful service for the long distance worker, particularly for those who fly out of the country and have to keep track of where they have been for tax or operational reasons. I have not looked into other services however but for now this works well for me.

Whole Disk Encryption Update

It has been a whole week since I moved my main machine over to using whole disk encryption through Truecrypt. I though it was timely just to give a short update on experiences.

Firstly, it has not crashed .

Everything is working fine exactly the same as my experience immediately after the installation.

Secondly, the performance also has continued to match what I reported – about a 10-15% slowdown on disk access. The worst impact is on standard boot or restart from hibernation, but I have slightly altered my behaviour to account for this. The change is that I am using suspend a whole lot more, and I am lucky that the MSI Wind U100 clone I have has an interesting feature that is almost like a neat feature I have in my Vista machines – the move to hibernation after a period of time in suspend. Let me explain further, if I suspend my laptop on mains then it will stay suspended until I press the magic power button and almost immediately go into the Windows logon screen. If I am suspended on battery however, after a period of time the machine will enter hibernation mode to save battery life. This means I use suspend as the first option (getting around the slow restart from hibernation) always.

Thirdly, have I noticed any other long term effects? Well I have noted that the auto defrag tool of choice does not auto defrag as often as it used to. I believe this is a tuning matter, a property of how I have been using the machine which I will watch over time to see if I can confirm what is going on. Secondly (and related to why I noticed the defrag), the encryption of the HD is (as expected to be honest) is playing funny buggers with the level of fragmentation – the machine does seem to be tending towards getting a higher level of fragmentation.

So all in all, this has been a successful implementation with some areas to watch. I will give an update on a longer term basis of course, so watch out for that in the future. Also are you using disk encryption? What are your experiences?

Whole Disk Encryption – The Holy Grail

You have your nice laptop for running around the world with, you are on a business trip to Warsaw and then suddenly after getting off the plane and on your way to your meeting you find that you do not have it. Doh! you remember that you put it in the little pocket of the seat in front of you just before you landed but you forgot to get it out. You frantically get in touch with the airline who tell you that nothing has been handed in, and then you start to worry about the commercial secrets that you have on the disk and that copy of the spreadsheet that contains all your banking details. It is lost and available to whoever has the machine. Oh, but you say that you have the OS logon to protect you… wrong, that is easy to bypass when you have physical access, just remove the disk. Oh yes, the Bios password – same issue and anyway you can normally get past that with some secret key presses found in many places on the Internet. What about the 40 bit encryption put in place by Excel on the spreadsheet? – nope that will be gone too with a couple of utilities, and anyway that data is spread all over the disk in temp and page files for the half skilled hacker to get.

So you are screwed. What now?

Well there is something that you could of done that is really easy to have implemented and that would have protected you from all but the most serious of attackers – whole disk encryption. Historically tricky outside of certain quarters, it certainly has been available but only in the last 12 months has it really become simple to implement and use. You could use Bitlocker from Microsoft of course, if you have Vista. Then again you are almost certainly not running Vista and anyway Bitlocker is a little tricky to implement and only available on some versions of Vista – definitely not the one you probably have. So what are the alternatives? Well I will not go into the whole bunch, but I will focus on one which is freely available and simple to implement – Truecrypt, in particular version 6.1 which has largely resolved some critical problems for operation with laptops that earlier versions suffered from. The problems that it used to have was that it would not let you suspend or hibernate, but that is now resolved.

So how do we get it? Just go to Truecrypt’s website and download it, make sure that you have read the installation guidance off their website, backed up your important data (because it could go wrong!) and just run the installer and set your passphrase well. In my instance I found a big problem during the installation – I was installing on a netbook without an optical drive and the installation routing REQUIRES that you create a recovery boot cd. It is irritating that a bypass mechanism is not available for this, but this is sort of for your own protection. Anyway, out came the USB CD/DVD writer and a boot CD was dutifully created and installation completed. The installation is pretty simple and includes a test boot but the most interesting fact is that at the end of installation, your disk is still not encrypted. It actually does this as a first step after install completion, and it allows you to continue to run the machine as normal as it churns through all the disk encryption, and allows you to pause the process and/or shut down the machine at any time, for it to continue when you startup again. This is a very nice touch.

The encryption process takes a nice length of time dependent upon disk size but at the end, you have a high level of disk encryption that just happens all the time without you doing anything more. In operation you do not notice a difference at all apart from some performance loss. Now on my Atom based 1.6GHz processor, I reckon that the performance hit in normal operation is about 10-15% where disk access is required (I have not measured it) but there is a much greater effect on the hibernation process – both going into and coming out. Certainly a doubling of the time to do the process and I can only guess that during that phase the disk writing/reading capability is hamstrung in some way but the overall impact is acceptable considering that if I lost the laptop, all my corporate secrets are still secret – as long as I picked a suitably strong pass phrase and logon passwords. Note that for suspend operation, the encryption boot block does not come into operation so your logon password is all that protects you there.

Truecrypt does offer other facilities as well, as it offers multi-layers of encryption and data hiding but for the standard business use a single disk encrypt is almost certainly enough. Truecrypt also offers the more mundane folder encryption particularly for external drives but I will go through that in another post.

All in all then, this is a must both to protect your data and your clients data, and a simple addition to your portable business armoury. If you or your company wants further advice about deployment of software like Truecrypt and security principles that are advisable, then please feel free to contact Blackarrow Consulting via our website for that service.

Online Backup – Jungledisk

One part of your roaming backup strategy should include offsite/Internet based backup services. The one I use is Jungledisk which has recently updated its software to version 2.5b. Jungledisk makes use of the Amazon S3 storage service as a destination (and soon to be Rackspace after its acquisition by them).

When I upgraded I found that my main NAS storage was not being backed up, showing zero files present and a message saying that the username and password was incorrect/not present. Before the upgrade it all worked well, and after the upgrade nothing was doing for the network share based locations.

The problem was simple and related to a new feature introduced in this version of Jungledisk – the ability to backup without being logged in. Jungledisk runs as a service to provide this feature, and it does so using its own credentials which did not have access to the NAS drive. The solution is to change the logon credentials of the new JungleDiskService to an account that actually has both access to the local machine (for the local file storage backups) and to the network share from which you are also backing up. Changing the credentials of a service in Windows is well documented on the internet, so I will not go into it here.

After the change (and an exit and restart of the client), backups continued in their normal effective way.

A major lesson learned here also is… make sure that you test the software upgrade first when it is software that your business depends on.

Evernote – Your External Brain

Evernote is a feature packed note taking application that synchronises it’s data into the cloud, allowing access from a variety of devices and software clients, such as iPhone, Windows Mobile, Windows XP and Vista, Mac OS X, Sandisk U3 USB Flash Drives and a web interface.

Evernote allows for a variety of different types of notes to be saved in Notebooks, including text, freehand drawings, voice or audio recordings, and photos with searchable text. Notes can be tagged with keywords or put into separate notebooks to aid organisation and searching of stored notes.

A great example of the power of Evernote is taking a photo of a business card from a mobile device, uploading the image of the card and then being able to search on information such as names and contact details from that business card to be searched upon, no more having big piles of business cards lying around or manual data entry.

For all but the heaviest of users, the free account proves more than adequate allowing a maximum of 40Mb of data transfer into the cloud per month, you can however, upgrade to a premium account at $5 (approx £3.50) per month or $45 (approx £33) per year which increases your transfer limit to 500MB per month and gives additional features such as SSL encrypted data transfer. Each account also comes with an email address so that you can forward email messages with useful information to be stored within the Evernote system for future reference.

The only drawback I can find is when using the application on a mobile device, your note data is not stored locally as well as in the cloud as it is on a non-mobile device, requiring a connection to the Internet to upload newly created notes and view previously created ones.

Better Defrag

Recently I had a major problem with an EeePC. After configuration and installation of all the software on it and the optimisation of where all the files go, the machine ran slowly. Checking out the C: partition showed that it had a 30%+ fragmentation figure for the files on the disk, notably because of all the tweaking to get files in the right place. Now this performance issue was slightly counter-intuitive as it had an SSD with no seek times to think of, but file access was horribly slow. This screamed defragmentation (and after I did it, it certainly was down to fragmentation as performance is much nippier now). So the basic defrag tool in the Windows XP Home installation was used but it would not defrag the machine at all even though there was 1.4GB free out of the 4GB SSD. It was simply TOO fragmented.

So I brought in the big guns on this one, which came in the form of IOBIT Smart Defrag. I ran this over the disk and with a small bit of manipulation (moving about 500MB of files to the D: partition), I managed to complete defrag the disk and give the performance improvement I needed. Now you may not have the same level of problem with fragmentation, but I can certainly recommend this software tool over the basic XP and Vista defrag tools, particularly as it gives a lot more visual response for what is going on and how fragmented the disk is, and also it offers a dynamic continuous auto-defrag function (not recommended for SSDs by the way – they have wear issues with file writes that make defrag an emergency tool only) that keeps you optimised.

Great tool, and here is the kicker – it is free.

Standard App Screens

I recently blogged about how when you are at home you should have the most screen real estate as possible to make that experience great. However I now want to take a look from a different perspective and that has more to do with the fact that just because you have a huge screen does not mean you have to use it.

Now I had to buy a 22” screen recently purely so I could run an app that had the temerity to require a minimum of 1024 pixels in the vertical. Now they did not have to do this, and it is pretty much bad screen design to require such an outlandishly high pixel count in that direction and not offer a scalable experience down to the more normal levels. What is more normal levels though? Is it 768 pixels or 600 pixels in the vertical?

There used to be a time when applications were designed to work in 640×480 pixels, but I do believe we are now past that. Then they moved on to 800×600, just about the time when the Internet stated to get real big and so design aims of websites also began to assume that the lowest common denominator was 800×600 as well. In more recent times many app vendors and websites have begun to assume that they can have 1024×768 pixels and this was fine until 15 months ago.

This was when the first netbooks began to appear, and those first EeePC 4Gs were 800×480 pixels with scrolling/scaling software to cope with up to 800×600 pixels, which is where I started to really notice that the 1024×768 pixel screen size was pretty much assumed by so many. That Asus though was a bit of a one off, and since the beginning of the year with the 9xx series machines, the MSI and Acer machines it has been pretty much standardised that netbooks have 1024×600 pixel screens.

When running a number of applications, I have received a number of pop-ups when starting applications like Google Earth that state that I will have a ‘reduced experience’ because of my screen resolution. In addition, the number of websites where I basically see only the main banner, adverts and navigation bar and about 2 or 3 lines of content have is many. So what will happen now? Will the availability of netbooks with screen sizes of 1024×600 pixels roll back designers of applications and websites to assume that is the lowest common denominator now?

I certainly hope so, as to assume that you can use the large screen resolutions also gets into the way of some of the best bits of having a multi/large monitor setup – laying out the screen so I can use multiple applications to their fullest.

So you got a Netbook, what now?

You take it home, do the unboxing, get it powered up and running and now what?

1. Get comfortable with the Linux install that you may have inherited or swap it for Windows XP. If it came with XP, then settle in.

2. Get Firefox 3.0 running, OpenOffice 3.0 onboard, get hooked up to WiFi, and get yourself a 3G card unless it is already built in.

3. If you have a netbook with a 2 or 3 cell battery – get out and buy yourself the 6 cell battery as quickly as you can – you do need it.

4. If you have the HP2133, scour the Internet for instructions on how to get it running Linux or Windows XP because that beast is damn slow with Vista.

5. Get yourself setup with Delicious from Yahoo and add its plug-in to your Firefox or Internet Explorer install so that you can have all your cloud bookmarks tagged and running with you and/or get Foxmarks with the password sync – now you will have your bookmarks and passwords synchronised across all of your machines as long as you spread the love a little.

6. Migrate your email over to IMAP4 based services unless you already have it…or better move the whole domain over to Google Apps and use their facilities. This way, your email is always going to be available and not locked to a single machine.

7. Get yourself some web storage like box.net.

8. Sign yourself up to Skype – with that webcam in your machine, you have an ideal tool for getting into VoIP/Video Conferencing and this is on most of the netbooks by default. Share your Skype ID out.

Now assuming that you have progressed to Windows XP on your netbook…

1. Do all the above but in XP of course.

2. Think about Hosted Exchange for business use…it is slightly better than IMAP4.

3. Get Microsoft Mesh on the netbook and all of your other machines, and share the important folders across all of your machines in Peer-to-Peer mode.

4. Make sure that you setup that Skype install.

5. I know it is my preference, but get yourself a Google Reader setup running and make sure all your textual RSS feeds are setup there.

6. Install Juice for podcast downloads and Miro for vodcast downloads, I always find it comforting to have my text/graphics RSS separate to my audio and video feeds, but you could have it all in Miro.

7. Download Windows Live services such as Live Messenger, Live Photo Gallery, and of course Live Writer for blogging.

8. Optimise your netbook setup to maximise battery life when on battery, and run as fast as possible on mains. Use additional power management tools like Notebook Hardware Control to manage the switch automatically.

And then scour the internet for sites that service the optimisation of your particular netbook for those interesting new tweaks.

Oh, and stay with this blog.

Microsoft Mesh – Having it all

Now I could do the big write up of Microsoft Mesh and how it can help you, but a whole lot better idea is to run VT after giving you a couple of notes.

It allows you to store your most important files on every PC you have login access to – they should always be available, and after running this through the bad times of August and September, I can safely say it now works beautifully.
It allows you to store 5GB (maybe more in the future) of those files on a web desktop.
You can access those files via web, PC, Mac (it has now become available) and Windows Mobile (in controlled Beta at the moment) – it means never having to say that you cannot give someone a document.
It scales much better than Foldershare, which is what I used before.

So, let us run VT (you need Silverlight).

Live Mesh: End to End User Demo

This is a very capable piece of software, which I have combined with others to create that great mobile worker workflow, as well as a great way of ensuring that when a machine goes bad – your files don’t. We will go into that backup solution later.

Blog of a Long Distance Worker Tech

The blog about mobile tech

Category Archives: Software/Apps