Blog of a Long Distance Worker Tech

The blog about mobile tech

Tag Archives: 1008HA

Something in the Air

As a mobile worker, I slathered over the original Macbook Air however it simply was not attractive enough considering the recent launch of Netbooks from Asus and Acer. I found netbooks to be so much more cost effective without losing any of the functionality I needed. The fact that I am a confirmed PC user also helped. Since then I have gone from the original EeePC900 through the MSI Wind, on to the absolute lovely (and very Air ‘like) EeePC 1008 and now running with a workhorse Asus UL30A.

macbook-air-new2010Now with the new Macbook Air 11.6” and 13.3” models, Apple has reignited my desire. Well initially it did, but since then I have had a more considered set of thoughts (maybe it had something to do with the fact that I was enjoying a couple of jars in my roaming local whilst reading the tweets and web from the ‘Back to the Mac’ event).

Firstly the use of Flash SSD for mass storage is something that I can get excited about but its utility is extremely limited as I do not suffer from disk failures (in fact my most recent disk failure was an SSD on the original EeePC701) and find that having more storage that is slower is better than having less storage that is quicker. I struggle now whenever I have less than 250GB mainly due to the utility of having all my files with me and ubiquitous file sync.

Secondly the battery life, something that is one of the most important (if not THE most important) capabilities of a laptop. The new Air’s have battery lives of 5 hours and 7 hours respectively, something that is quite respectable and I understand that Apple normally hits the nail on the head with their lifetimes. These may seem good and they are compared to my old Asus 1008 which could get 4 hours, but not when it is compared to my Asus UL30 – a machine that I get a real 10 hours out of. The new Airs will not get me through  a working day without a charge, my Asus will.

Thirdly and finally, size/weight… once you get below a certain size and weight I believe there is a law of diminishing returns, and the extra thin and light Macbook Airs do not offer much advantage over my existing crop of machines. It is enough to be light and small, they do not have to be wafer thin and ultra-light.

The final point I have is also an important one… Apple have priced these machines well … for Apple Macs. However, I still bought both my Asus machines for the price of just one Air (the lowest cost one at that). I have the best of both worlds – the ultra light Asus Seashell 1008 (with 2GB of RAM) and the fuller body Asus UL30 (with 4GB RAM) without any premium being paid (and with both of them running Windows 7 Home Premium at that).AsusUL30 I also do not have to pay £21 for proprietary DisplayPort to VGA adapter, or however much it is for an Ethernet adapter… these come built-in to my little machines Smile

I can suggest that you also look at alternatives, and Crunchgear have some for you to look through… there is even a higher spec variant of my Asus UL30 in the list!

Key Performance Factors for the Mobile Worker

I was an instant convert to the netbook concept – the low cost, ultra light and small laptop with good battery life and excellent connectivity, at least when combined with 3G cards. I still am, and I keep my Asus 1008HA charged up and available whenever I am travelling and suspect I need a PC but not needing to carry anything larger. In fact, I used it for a very long time as my primary machine – and very capable it was once I upgraded it to 2GB memory. Over all this time, if I had to pick out its most important performance feature I would have to pick out its battery life.

I come from the depths of time when battery life was measured in less than 3 hours, but the Asus provided me with between 4 and 6 hours of good PC time depending upon whether I was Internet connected or not. This gave me the taster however, and I have just moved across to a slightly larger but still very compact and light machine, the Asus UL30. The key factor in this move? its battery life, the headline value of 12 hours of use.

In reality, it has given me 8 to 10 hours depending upon Internet usage but this has meant I have the ‘all (business) day battery life’. I have proved it in the last couple of weeks with an all day trip by train to Cologne and back, and several days of all day meetings where the power sockets were in very short supply. I survived without a single sweat.

This makes battery life the most important or key performance factor for me, and I suspect that this is the case for many other mobile workers. Which is why the industry is pushing more and more products out with longer and longer lasting batteries, notable of which is the latest netbook products from Asus:

ASUS makes EeePC 1015P and 1015PE official, endows them with 13.5 hours of battery life — Engadget.

Of course, this has to be hand in hand with good keyboards, screens and processor capability and I believe firmly that all netbooks with 2GB are plenty fast enough for office and information worker tasks, although going with multi-core and even the higher performance CULV processors gives a welcome boost without impacting the battery life.

What do you think? Is battery life primary? or is it performance? or light weight? and are netbooks the ultimate for all three?

Netbooks and Performance

ASUS1005HA Almost all netbooks (apart from some of the early Acer and Asus devices running Linux) are supplied with 1GB of RAM. Microsoft has further cemented this by defining lower license fees for Windows XP for computers with small screens and only 1GB of RAM, which means that this is the most popular memory configuration for netbooks.

advent-4211-msi-wind-mini-laptop-small At the same time, many people rule out netbooks as low power, sluggish computers that cannot replace a main machine. After my experience of the last month and a half, I would agree. This is when I purchased a new netbook after a problem occurred with my first one … the venerable Advent 4211C, an MSI Wind U100 rebrand. Amazing how I can call a computer that is less than 15 months old as venerable!

The netbook I purchased was the Asus EeePC 1008HA, a very nice and thin machine which I did not originally desire, but my options were limited. The machine I wanted was the Asus EeePC 1005HA but that was not in stock in the timeframe I needed. The problem with the 1008HA is the shorter battery life and the higher price, but I was desperate that evening for a machine. The other problem is that it came with 1GB of RAM compared to my upgraded Advent machine that had 2GB.

The other problem I quickly discovered was that it is closed up harder than a coconut. The machine is basically not upgradeable by anyone but the brave. Needless to say I proved braver than most, particularly after I managed to pierce the keyboard ribbon connector and cut two wires whilst trying to get at the memory. This is because you have to crack the case open after removing the keyboard, disconnecting multiple connectors and making sure that you use the dip switch to disable the battery feed to the machine (thus avoiding blowing the whole thing).  Who needs the left CTRL, Alt, Windows, Fn, function, delete and backspace keys anyway!  After all the fun with doing that I found I had the wrong 2GB memory stick. Putting my slightly crippled machine back together, I had to focus on my day job and with it using the still 1GB Asus.

What I noticed quite quickly is that the machine perpetually struggled with the lack of RAM at a scale that virtual memory could not help. The machine has had a minimum physical memory used of between 700MB and 930MB, and I now know what happens when the physical memory starts to run out… a machine that goes into coma for 30 seconds plus as it struggles to unload a program, to load another one. This has not been a good experience. If this was all the experience I had ever had with a netbook, I could understand saying that netbooks are useless.

Let us be honest, the sweet spot for Windows XP is 2GB ( just like the sweet spot for Vista I have found is 3GB ). This means that all netbooks are not as performant as they could be, and it will stay this way as long as manufacturers keep with supplying them with 1GB. I have started to see however netbooks and their like coming through with 2GB and this seems to be tied to supplying the machine with Windows 7… At least, Windows 7 Home Premium. I hope this continues.

So my best advice out there for the netbook owner? Get yourself upgraded to 2GB… you will then have a very functional, low cost, very portable machine that will perform every duty you throw at it except really heavy duty graphics/video or gaming. The other advice? Make sure that your netbook is user upgradeable. Me? I now have the machine I need but no warranty.

On the road failure

generic_road_crash Well it had to happen, I am on the road and my netbook suffered a hardware failure. This was a non-fatal failure but a failure all the same – the WiFi went on the fritz and would not connect to any WiFi network. Now in the office this was not a major problem as I have wired Ethernet there but the company I work with has a second office which only have WiFi which pretty much meant that I could not work there nor could I do anything when I was back in the hotel.

So the decision was taken to replace the machine with something that could work particularly since I was four nights/five days from base. So given machine obtained (an Asus EeePC 1008HA), the recovery mechanism started.

What can I say about the experience? It took way longer than I hoped… in fact to basic usage of the machine it took the whole evening (expected) and to fully complete four days. Why did it take so long? Well the big time killer was synchronisation of files using Live Mesh – it just took a long time because I have a lot of data to put on the machine. Even then, this was sped up by the use of the non-dead machine I was replacing being local to the laptop for much of the recovery time, so this is not an issue of upstream performance on the small business ADSL. The one main thing though about the recovery mechanism was that it did work and got me working on the road. How about your on the road recovery mechanism? You really do need one for when you are on the road.

Note: My recovery steps

1. Base install of OS and configuration for basic networking including Anti-Virus (including machine hardening steps that I always follow)

2. Install key applications – Live tools, Live Mesh, Evernote, VPN client, Firefox, Firefox addins such as delicious and Xmarks to ensure I have my bookmarks and saved passwords, RocketDock, Skype, Skype handset drivers, Spambayes, WinSCP, Adobe Air, Tweetdeck (using group sync so I have all my groups) and Syncback.

3. Install MS Office 2007 and Project 2007 using online downloads of Trial software (hey I do not carry the disks, no need to when you can get the Trial versions that work up to 60 days).

4. Configure Outlook 2007 for my multiple Exchange hosted mail and IMAP4 accounts.

5. Install key driver software for 3G card etc.

6. Setup Live tools such as Live Messenger and Live Sync as necessary (I use Live Sync for My Pictures rather than Live Mesh just because it is setup in a better way for those file types).

7. Sync core file folders that are in Live Mesh

8. Sync secondary file folders in Live Mesh

9. Install iTunes and move my iPhone over and setting up Podcasts that I listen to on it (Music waited until it had completed synchronisation as I use Live Mesh that my MP3s are on all my machines).

10. Install Truecrypt for whole disk encryption, although activating this is outside of the four days :-)

11. When back at base, reinstall MS Office 2007 and Project 2007 using my actual media and proper activation keys (needed because the trial versions do not activate with my keys probably because my keys come from a volume licensing deal).