Now would that be because everyone who wants one, has one? After all, there has been little apparent change in specification for three years… come on someone, add some extra functionality and power into the price bracket and people might upgrade.
Microsoft says there’s been an 8% decline in the consumer PC market and a whopping 40% decline in netbooks.
There has been quite a bit of talk about this video and how amazing it is to see Windows upgrade from 1.0 through to the present Windows 7. However the narrator and originator of the video pushes the view that it is so commendable that Microsoft has maintained ‘compatibility’ for over 23 years.
If you use Mac, then you have absolutely no hope of doing this and that is not just because of the changes of processor from 68000 to PowerPC and then to Intel, but also because fundamentally MacOS is not OSX. Apple has taken great pains to move its users through several major step changes in platform architecture to improve the user experience and LEAVE the old behind. Through this, in my view, they have always ensured that they give their customers a great experience that builds on the latest features and not the oldest. They do not expend effort now making sure that software produced 10 or more years ago still works for corporate users.
You can see where I am going now with this… think about how much better Windows 7 would be if Microsoft put all its effort on the new features and ensuring programme compatibility with just the last decade and not 23 years+.
There is actually little business case support for Microsoft in keeping ancient software that does not attract revenue still working and actually holds them back in my view. I think Microsoft have begun to understand this, which is why they are finally (albeit slowly) making it clear that they really only support now and yesterday, and not the day before yesterday… so now Windows XP is finally dying and is almost dead (2014 if not already) and the newest software from Microsoft like Windows Live and IE9 will run on Vista or later only. This should improve things all round.
How old are your oldest software apps?
This is a post specifically targeted for the small company freelancer, even an individual. You have your workhorse notebook, and you are running out of space on the old 160GB HDD but cannot afford downtime. One alternative is to purchase a second notebook (not a bad idea to be honest!) with the much larger HDD that you need, but that does not get around the upheaval of the move to new kit so is there an alternative? We also have to note that although you may be technically proficient, you may not be the total geek that is au fait with the inside of a laptop or a wiz with the software.
The alternative is to just replace the Hard drive. Modern laptops (most of them that is) generally allow very easy access to the hard drive through either 1, 2 or 3 screws. This sounds horrific but is today an extremely easy thing to do, particularly as most 2.5″ Hard drives fit most most laptops and you can also check the dimensions of your old laptop and compare them to the new one on most websites. But what of the OS and data? That is easy as well as most hard disk manufacturers have special versions of disk cloning software specifically to allow you to do this task. So what are the steps (for Windows users only 
).
0. Always the first step – make sure all your DATA is BACKED UP! Of course, this is already done as you ensure you have backups all the time
1. Identify your existing HDD manufacturer and type by using Device Manager and looking for the Disk Drive properties. There is normaly a long sequence of letters and numbers that are normally very descriptive. For example mine is now ST95005620AS which can be looked up using Google to find out that it is a Seagate Momentus XT 500MB 7200 rpm Hybrid drive
2. Use the best specifications you can find to compare the dimensions of this drive with the new one you wish to buy. It is a good idea to actually keep to the same manufacturer sometimes, particularly if your machine is very compact and tiny. Look for the new one with the right size and spin speed that you want. Make sure that the disk interfaces matches the one your laptop supports, for example SATA300
3. Order the Hard disk along with an external USB disk caddy that matches the disk interface of the HDD you have ordered. You will need this for the cloning of the old drive contents to the new and is also useful to turn your old drive into a backup drive.
4. If you are using Truecrypt or other Hard drive encryption, now decrypt your old drive. If you were not using Truecrypt, please shoot yourself now… you need it, and for reasons why look at my old posts about it. The decryption is only to ensure that there are no problems during the cloning and partition resizing.
5. When you have everything, go to the website of your new Hard drive and download the cloning software. Seagate have a nice rebadged HDD tool for example. Other cloning software can be used, but ensure that you get one that allows resizing of partitions as you are going to move your 160GB set of data to a 500GB or even 1TB drive and you don’t want to be left with two partitions now do you. Install the software on your notebook.
6. Get the new drive into the new disk caddy, and connect it to your laptop.
7. Use the software from the disk manufacturer to clone the drive to the new USB connected HDD (taking great care with the instructions about what drive is the source and which drive is the destination). Once finished (and it will almost certainly require reboots doing exactly what the software says on screen), you can then shutdown the notebook and disconnect the new drive. Note that unless you do something wrong with regard to the source/destination, you will alway be able to go back to the old drive . THIS WILL TAKE HOURS, sometimes as long as five hours depending upon the size of the old drive.
8. Using the screwdriver, remove the old drive and replace it with the new drive. Once everything is back together, power on the notebook and the golden test will be that everything boots up fine and you should then be able to login as if nothing has happened. Note that in all the ones I have done previously, at no time has Windows required to be re-authorised.
9. Bed in the new system for a few days (taking great pleasure in your newly available space) and then re-encrypt with Truecrypt. You can now use the old drive in the USB disk caddy as a back-up drive, remembering to delete and recreate/format new partitions on the USB connected drive.
10. Simples as the Meerkat is always saying.
Of course, you can always use the upgrade as an excuse to re-install the OS and apps from scratch, which is a noble way of doing things. This is actually quite good if you have the time, as you can always drop back to your old drive if things are not as good as you want them to be.
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.
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.
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.