Archive for June, 2006
If there is anyone reading my blog, you probably were wondering if I got my new notebook on Monday like predicted. I did. I just have been so busy playing with it I couldn’t find time to post.
I really like the battery life. It is amazing compared to what I had before. I guess not buying an off the shelf, low end machine helps. I got the 8 cell primary battery and an extra modular 6 cell that fits into the DVD bay. Total estimated time seems to be between 8 and 6 hours depending on what I am doing. I couldn’t believe it. I don’t need to carry around the charger anymore unless I will be using the laptop all day.
The Wi-Fi and Bluetooth can easily be turned on and off using the function key. I kind of wondered about that since some new HPs had such nice wireless on/off buttons and I wanted to be able to turn them off easily to save power. Volume, brightness, and the other usual stuff is also available with the function key. But there is a nice built in popup display that tells you the level or other status information when you use these keys. There is even a battery and wireless status popup. And these are not Windows popups so no drivers or EXEs running to provide them, they are built in to the hardware and appear as a small blue box in the upper left corner.
Speaking of EXEs and stuff running, there was a lot of stuff preinstalled that I didn’t want. There were 14 tray icons worth of things running and I have now cut it down to 7 of those though 2 are only hidden. I could probably even drop the ATI , but I will wait and see if I ever need to use it for a while. There is also a “protected” partition on the computer where they put recovery stuff. I would much prefer that be on CDs and not taking up space.
I am happy with Windows Media Center, it is very much like XP Pro with a few multimedia additions which aren’t really useful to me, but the $100 lower price was really nice. Hopefully they keep that up for a while.
The mouse touchpad is pretty good, it is a bit smaller than my old HP, but not too small. I am not so annoyed by the horizontally undersized right mouse button anymore. It isn’t that bad, but the size and surroundings of the mouse buttons is a problem. The small size of both buttons is less a problem than the sounding. The area around the buttons and under the touchpad is smooth and clearly to the touch separate from the rest of the surface. The size of this separate area is just about the size of my HP’s buttons. Sometimes I repeatedly end up pushing this border area rather than a button wondering why it isn’t working.
I didn’t want to get the glossy LCD screen so I went with the old fashion style which Dell was not offering. The texture on Gateway’s screen though seems to cause some minor lightness distortion. It seems that solid light grey areas are lightly textured when viewed at the slightest from perfect angle (as in the edges of the screen when looking at the middle). It is very minor and most people probably would never know, but I do a lot of photo scanning and editing especially of black and white photos.
What I really hate about this laptop is the keyboard. I thought the mouse was going to be the big annoyance in switching, but the keyboard is certainly as least as important (if not more) if you do anything more than just simple typing. If you frequently use Home, End, Insert, Delete, Page Up, Page Down, Print Screen, or the left Control key and know where they are on a regular keyboard, you will hate this keyboard.
They flipped the laptop Function key with the left Control key. That is horrible. I have been using this machine for over a week now and 90% of the time I want to press Control, I miss and don’t realize it at first. You might think you can get used to it, I have started to. But that turned out to be another problem, lately when using my desktop I can’t hit the Control key without looking first. Not because I ever miss it, I just hesitate unconsciously preparing to miss as I always do with the laptop keyboard. It is driving me nuts.
Print Screen can only be accessed by holding down the Function key and then pressing the Insert key.
Down the right side of the keyboard from the top are: Delete, Home, Page Up, Page Down, and End. Home being next to delete means I have to hit undo frequently. And with End where it is, I have started to avoid using it, the mouse is easier.
Keyboards were basically standardized long ago for a reason. Just because it is a laptop doesn’t mean you can’t try to get close to the standard layout. On this laptop there is a one inch border along both sides of the keyboard they could have used to spread things out and do it properly.
With all these complaints, would I buy it again? Probably. The extra modular battery, non-glossy screen, and lighter base model were all important factors in deciding on Gateway over Dell. I still hate the keyboard and probably will be extremely happy when I replace this machine in a few years, but it is a really good one otherwise.
June 20th, 2006
Links to John Sadowski’s castle illusion seems to be going around all over the place lately. Not to be left out, I have to post a link as well. Really I just don’t want to forget the address, it is such a cool illusion. In one of my classes last year we covered some of the causes for optical illusions like this so it is very interesting to see how well this illusion works. None of the examples in the book were this cool. John even has a tutorial so I may try this out on some of my own photos someday.
More optical illusions with scientific explanations can be found here.
June 11th, 2006
I downloaded the public Windows Vista Beta 2 and gave it a try on my year old Athlon 64 desktop. I thought finally I would get to use my CPU to its full potential. It should be pretty fast. It was not. I am sure it is partly due to a lot of debugging code still in the beta, but I was surprised.
So far I was not able to try out the Areo Glass interface but the default theme was pretty anyway. My video card rates a 1 on Windows’ System Performance Rating even though it is a Nvida GeForce4 MX 4000 I bought last summer. It doesn’t support something that the Areo interface needs so gets a 1. For 2D graphics, they give the card a 2.0. The rest of my components are 3.3 or above yet my overall system gets a 1. That really adds up. It seems that the max number is a 5.9, but as faster hardware is released, the max number will go up.
I am not the only one unhappy about low overall scores. Computer manufacturers don’t like the idea of customers seeing how bad their brand new $400 system rate. Integrated graphics and slow components are not going to rate well. And guess what $400 systems are made of.
It seems like everything in Windows is moved just for the sake of moving it. Things might be more discoverable through menus and related topics, but things are not easier to reach. Getting to Classic Control Panel is not as easy as it used to be either. And the User Account Controls thing does come up way too often for the most stupid reasons.
Does anyone want to guess where the Undo file operation option went or how about Folder Options? Remember there is no menu bar anymore in Explorer. I gave up and went to Control Panel to get to Folder Options. Eventually I discovered both were under the Organize button along with Copy, Cut and Paste. Who do those options have to do with organizing?
There is no more Display option in even Classic Control Panel, it and a bunch of other stuff now make up Personalization. I would never have found it had it not been for the icon being very similar to XP’s Display. Even right clicking on the Desktop gives you this Personalization menu. Under it though, the first option is to the regular Display panel.
There is still no Internet Explorer icon on the desktop (as in XP with the new style Start Menu) and until I first ran IE, it wasn’t in the Quick Launch area either. Yet, we still have the Recycle Bin at the top of the desktop. Which do you use more, the internet or the recycle bin?
You can still get the Classic Start Menu which as in XP, puts more icons on your desktop. Using it, I now get Computer (renamed My Computer), Control Panel (why on the desktop?), my name (this is the root of my user folder rather than My Documents which does not get a desktop icon), Network (renamed My Network Places), and finally the Internet Explorer icon. Now I have 8 icons on my desktop, taking up 80% of my vertical desktop space which is set at a tiny 1280×1024 resolution.
It would be nice if they could combine the classic style Start Menu with some of the search features of the new Start Menu. But is it really a start menu anymore if it doesn’t say start? In the default theme, it is just a Windows logo. How are we supposed to tell people click on the start button? What do we call it now? Windows logo button? If we are helping people out that need help finding the start menu, it is hard to predict whether they will even recognize the Windows logo.
I also found that when you shutdown from the Start Menu (which is identified only by a power off symbol) you go into sleep mode rather than power off. When I turn something off I like it off. Of course, it gets worse, the machine appears to try to power down to sleep level, but once it gets there, it instantly wakes up. And how can it get worse? My wireless mouse is not recognized when it wakes up. A popup balloon says a USB device is not recognized. Of course, pulling out the wireless receiver and reinserting it makes the mouse work fine again.
I then went hunting for the way to make that button really shut down my computer. It was a long hunt. I don’t remember where I eventually found it, but it was under a deeply buried button named advanced something. Shortly after that I realized, by clicking the side arrow next to the Shutdown and Logout buttons, I could choose from all the usual options. But still is sleep a good default choice? Hopefully that is not the default on laptops. You need to conserve all the power you can on a laptop.
I was also impressed to discover that by default you are running 32 bit Internet Explorer. I had read that the 32 bit version was left for compatibility with older plugins and maybe embedding but didn’t remember it was the default. Why should I have to specifically go hunting for the 64 bit one? If you start IE from the Quick Launch or where it is listed at the top of the the new Start Menu, you get the 32 bit version. And there is no sign of IE 64 bit unless you look under All Programs. Only under the Classic Start Menu is it easily visible right next to the 32 bit version. But what normal person is going to understand the difference? They both look the same.
Notepad had a major upgrade, it now has an optional status bar showing Line and Column numbers. Wow. You can’t get better than that. Well, I guess you could, but it would require a tiny bit of effort and then you would put out of business all the notepad replacement programs. We know how MS doesn’t ever want to put other companies out of business.
They got rid of my favorite mouse cursors, the animated hourglass ones. I hope they will come back with the final release.
I wanted to see what some files looked like in Vista so I went to my XP Documents and Settings folder. I don’t remember what it said, but I wasn’t allowed in at first. It offered to do something and stupidly I said ok. I have no idea what it was doing, but now I can access my XP documents. I worried it was screwing up my file permissions and I wouldn’t be able to log into that account in XP anymore. Turns out whatever was happening didn’t cause a problem that I have found yet. My username and password for both XP and Vista are the same so maybe that had something to do with not screwing everything up.
It took me about an hour to install it which wasn’t bad for taking up most of an entire DVD. I have really wanted to give it a try for a long time now so it was worth the wait. I knew there were going to be things I didn’t like in Vista. There usually are in new versions of Windows. But I didn’t think it was going to be this much. I no longer think I will be an early adopter when it is finally released. Eventually I will give in of course (since I can’t stand using Linux as a desktop system). It was pretty and fun to try but that is about it. I am sure the speed will be greatly improved by the time it is released, but that was the least of what annoyed me.
June 11th, 2006
Wow, my computer is finally one the way. I guess Gateway either doesn’t update their order status page very well or they put these things together super fast with little testing. Just yesterday it said my order was still being processed. This morning it was on its way from Shanghai, China and has already arrived in the US. However, its current location is in Anchorage, Alaska. FedEx’s estimated deliver is Monday and the weekend should give it plenty of time to travel down here. I still want it now, but I can probably survive till Monday.
June 8th, 2006
It has only been three work days since my laptop order, but what is it still doing in “Order Processing?” The estimated arrival date is June 14. If I ordered a Dell today, the shipping date is June 15 with 3-5 Day Delivery. But with Dell, I know systems usually ship much faster than the estimated ship date. According to Dell, their order processing, only takes one day.
Now I am looking into desktops. My mom’s computer died. Maybe I will try HP this time.
June 7th, 2006
I have been looking into buying a new laptop. My current one, an HP Pavillion ze4530us isn’t bad, but I need something more powerful. I originally got it on sale site unseen. I was looking for any relatively cheep laptop to replace old Dell (bought used) I had that was physically falling apart. The one I wanted sold out but they said they had this one and I said ok. I had never bought an HP before, but it has been a really good laptop. I know nothing about their support though, I have been lucky enough not to have needed it.
While I bought that one without much research, this one I planed on getting exactly what I want. As I found out, that isn’t at all possible. In my search for a new laptop I have used a lot of gas. I have been to about six electronics/office supply store (some more than once) to see what is out there. Most everything about laptops is going in directions I don’t like. Lots of extra buttons, wide screen, glossy screens, and tiny touchpads are on most every notebook on shelves.
I can live with extra buttons or a widescreen monitor, but glossy I think I would get sick of quickly (pretty, but too much glare). But the worst is the mouse. What part of the computer do we most interact with? Lets see how small we can get it then. And to make things even harder to use, why not recess it. Thankfully at least Sony, Gateway, and maybe Dell (but they don’t sell retail so I can’t actually look at them in person) still make reasonable sized touchpads. The MacBook wasn’t bad either, but not good enough to overcome my fear of OSX and/or WinXP under BootCamp with a one button mouse.
Well, the real reason I decided to post this was when I got finished configuring what was likely to be my next laptop, it was a bit expensive. So looking to shave a few dollars here and there, I looked at what I upgraded. First being Windows XP Pro for $100. XP Home and Media Center Edition add nothing to the base cost. I know Home sucks, but I couldn’t find any information on exactly what the difference between Media Center and the others were. I tried Google and had little luck.
Then falling for all the TV ads I have seen lately, I tried the new Ask.com. I asked “what is the difference between Windows Media Center Edition and Home Edition.” The first result was a pretty helpful forum post pointing someone to the Wikipedia page on Media Center. Maybe I just got lucky with that result though, since others on the page weren’t as factually accurate or not direclty on topic, but Google just wasn’t getting it done. The best I could do with Google was this thread.
For anyone else wondering what the difference between XP Pro and Media Center, it seems to be that Media Center is based on Pro and has most of its features. I am not 100% sure about all the differences, but it seems that it will do what I want. According to Wikipedia, other than not being able to join an Active Directory domain (which there are hacks availble for), it “retains most other Windows XP Pro-specific features, such as Remote Desktop and the Encrypting File System.” Some place even said the setup screens call it Windows XP Pro.
Anyway, I am going to give Media Center a shot. I hope it isn’t a mistake. If it is I will update this post.
I had two very similar setups from Gateway and Dell and was having a hard time choosing. One of the final deciding factors came when I used each site’s online chat to ask questions about the systems, most important being touch pad dimensions. Gateway didn’t have them. Dell did, but was not sure if those dimensions included the buttons as well. From the size I doubt it did, the measurements seemed close to what I was estimating for Gateway. That didn’t help me decide, but the sales people and chat programs did. Dell’s chat window sucked (I was using a Firefox 2 Alpha/Bon Echo nightly so that could be partially to blame), it kept refreshing and scrolling back up to the beginning of the conversation.
Plus, after I pointed them to the system I had configured, they were pushing upgrades on everything. Bigger hard drive, faster hard drive, surge protector, etc. When I asked if the faster hard drive would use more power and create more heat, she said no. At the time I thought that was clearly wrong, a bit of Google research shows that might not be/isn’t always true anymore.
What really got me though, I did not type back fast enough to Dell’s (probably automated) are you still there question and the chat session was ended. I was in the middle of chatting to Gateway and researching things on the net at the same time. Isn’t that an important feature of chatting over the internet, you can do more than one thing at a time. Cutting a prospective customer off is certainly not the way to make a sale, so they didn’t. I ordered the Gateway NX560XL shortly after that.
June 6th, 2006