Blog of a Long Distance Worker Tech

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Tag Archives: Asus

Death of Netbooks

Asus PC701 4G NetbookA little over 4 years ago I bought an Asus PC701 4G Netbook. It was small, light, and did the job… well mostly. I struggled with the inability to have Outlook on a Linux based PC and I really needed Outlook. I upgraded to Windows XP and it all worked out well enough. At least for a secondary machine that is. In the end, that little SSD died and I upgraded to my next netbook – one that I actually used as my main machine for quite some time, a rebadged MSI Wind U100. This one was more sprightly running as it did an Atom processor with an (upgraded) 2GB of RAM, and an (upgraded) 160GB HDD. I could do everything on that little machine, even running Windows 7 Premium Home as soon as that came out. It is still a fine machine, if a little sluggish at times but with excellent battery life running above a real 4 hours.

Since then I have moved away from those little netbooks to my current Ultralight machines (a 13″ Asus UL30 and an 11.6″ HP DM1), but those machines owe quite a bit to those early netbooks, which in my view leads very much into today’s Ultrabooks. Netbooks identified the following very important requirements for a laptop – it had to have good to excellent battery life, be very light, have enough storage and sufficient performance. Those little Atom based machines have sufficient performance for browsing, a little wordprocessing, email and playing music – exactly what the average family need in laptops that are owned by every member of the family, and in fact what most busy business travellers also needed. All of these features have made their way into pretty much every single 11.6″ and 13″ based laptop today. Netbooks also helped greatly in the removal of the need to have an optical drive, so much so that very few actual machines these days have built in optical storage and most people don’t miss that except about twice a year, when a separate drive can be used.

HP dm1 Ultralight 11.6" LaptopUnfortunately things have moved on in the processor stakes, the memory stakes and the required workload stakes. Netbooks as they are today have not moved on except in the growth of the 11.6″ based ultra light laptop which also corrects the other main problem of netbooks – the manufacturers margins. The new “netbook” is the 11.6″ ultralight running Windows 7 Premium Home with 4GB of RAM, 320GB of HDD, a 1366×768 screen, and most importantly a dual core processor that is also ultra low power to give 5 to 6 hours of battery life for normal use.

So I do agree Netbooks have died but they begat some very interesting children. Without Netbooks we would all still be paying £600/$750 for a 14″ monster with 2 hours of battery life. Be thankful for Netbooks.

iOS4.2, the iPad and the Laptop/Netbook

Brook Crothers of CNET seems to believe he can now make the iPad work for him…

CNET’s Brook Crothers claims that with the launch of iOS 4.2, he is pretty much ready to abandon his MacBook Air in favor of full-time use of his iPad. Even before the upgrade to the mobile OS, Crothers found that he was almost exclusively using the 3G tablet in the airport, hotel and plane for his various tasks.

via iOS 4.2 makes iPad a productivity rival for MacBook Air, says CNET.

I do believe that iOS4.2 has made the iPad much more usable (although the multi-tasking is still not a great improvement), I do not agree that it replaces the ultra-light laptop. I think however that this is down to whether you are a generator of content or a viewer of content. I am a generator of content, which I though that Brook would be as well, but maybe my content generation is more feature rich than his. I do not just generate copy for others to work into something pretty, I have to do the pretty too with documents and emails.

After all, although I own an iPad, I am not carrying it with me as I have my one device that does it all – my nice ultra-light 13inch Asus UL30, currently with 10% battery used and still with over 9 hours of batter life left, which is going to come in useful to charge my less than 5 hours MiFi via USB in a moment…something I cannot do via the iPad! (In action shot below… apologies for the low light, this is on a bus crawling its way along in the snow on a cold Amsterdam evening!)

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).

Travelling … service resuming

ASUS1005HA Things have been a little quiet on the site for a while, mainly because I have been involved in a pretty intense period of project work which has required me to do a multi-country commute for almost six months now. During this time, I have really appreciated the smallness of my netbook main machine and gained a (poor) appreciation of hotel provided WiFi, as well as just how far ahead of the game the UK is in Mobile Broadband (particularly in terms of PAYG tariffs). I have also experienced a sea change in my phone experiences also as I have moved from Windows Mobile to the Apple iPhone. One thing I can really push is that the iPhone has proven a worthy secondary device to go with the MSI Wind netbook – not a replacement, just a secondary device. With the release of the v3.0 software, the Apple iPhone has become a great business device for the mobile worker, particularly one that travels to multiple countries. The applications and the iTunes App store are THE killer aspect for the phone. So much in fact, I had to get two – one for the UK and one for the remote country :-) . I guess an iPhone with support for two SIMs is still too much of a specialised requirement.

More on that another time, but I would like to return to the ‘secondary’ device comment. Walking around, the iPhone is a great emailer and mobile work business helper but it simply cannot replace a PC for working email and documents. You do need a PC to get the job done, and netbooks are really a good package for that, particularly when you have a large screen and keyboard installation in your semi-permanent working locations.  Working with the MSI Wind though has really punched my buttons with regard to battery life – my MSI Wind is simply too short lived at 4 hours, although good for many I am now looking at the latest batch of machines that give 8+ hours. However I am torn between waiting for Windows 7 based machines or getting an XP based machine now. I will have to see how long I can tough that one out. You can sense an update coming…

How about your experiences with iPhone? Netbook? Recommendations for a long life battery netbook? Feel free to comment.

Redfly – a miss by a mile

CelioRedfly Celio is a company that has produced the Redfly Smartphone Terminal since earlier this year. They have just released new update hardware in terms of the C7 and C8N, where the differentials are purely in screen size, weight and ‘Media Port’ – all of this for between $229 and $299 (I would expect that to be £180 to £230 over here – around the same RRP as the EeePC 4G to EeePC 900 / Acer Aspire One devices). These are interesting and novel devices which require a Windows Mobile phone to actually provide the processing and software aspect, because they are nothing more than a glorified screen and keyboard. Interesting – yes, successful – no.

This device competes in the same realm as netbooks with none of their advantages of providing you with a similar/same environment to work in as a full desktop, with full client application functionality. What about web applications I hear you ask? well unfortunately this device requires a Windows Mobile Phone as its only host, which means it is hamstrung with the same application limitations – a shoddy browser that is circa 1998 in capability.

They do cling to the enterprise market and push for data security as one of its advantages but sorry, data leaves the company just as easily on a Windows Mobile Phone as for a laptop and is just as obtainable – without going anywhere near my own mantra about the silliness of enforced control measures on devices when the true knowledge in a company is in the employee’s head, and they leave the company every night and no-one requires people’s brains to be locked down. You can use good common sense security mechanisms on a netbook, with greater capability than you can with the Celio Redfly / Windows Mobile combination (can you encrypt the entire storage of a Windows Mobile Phone?).

No, I cannot recommend such a device for anyone. Get a good netbook and a decent mobile phone instead (I say this, and I have a Windows Mobile Phone but then I feel comfortable with its lack of features in the web and application side and I use Exchange for contacts/calendar – the iPhone is calling me right now).