Brian Jarvis, UMPC Geek

Update On My Intel SSD

2009-11-13T00:33:10Z

After using the SSD in my netbook for a couple of weeks now, I have to say that I really love having it in there. It hasn’t turned my netbook into a high-performance workstation, but it has definitely made the system more responsive, increased the battery life, and given me the peace of mind that it’s more durable.

To the last point, I take better-than-average care of my gadgets, but now I find myself being a bit less careful with my netbook. Since the upgrade, it hasn’t been uncommon to see me toss my Aspire One onto the couch, walk around the house with it running, or let my kids take it wherever they want to use it. Knowing that I don’t have to worry about the hard drive crashing in the device is very comforting indeed. Now, if I can just keep from dropping it off the roof while I’m hanging this year’s Christmas lights it will all be good (I might need to reference something on the web while I’m up there)! :^)

Intel Solid State Drive In My Netbook

2009-10-23T03:20:02Z

A few months ago, IT at work upgraded the hard drive in my Lenovo T61 to an Intel solid state drive (SSD). The difference in performance was amazing – it was the largest performance difference I have ever seen in a single upgrade. From boot times to sorting email in Outlook, everything was suddenly faster. The speed at which my laptop responds makes the computer a joy to use. Ever since the upgrade, I have wondered what difference an SSD would make in my netbook.

I may be crazy for wanting to put an SSD that cost as much as the computer into my netbook, but I have always wondered if the upgrade experience on my T61 could be replicated. Would the lightweight processor in the netbook cancel any benefit from the faster I/O? Could a person justify spending that much on an upgrade for their netbook? Well, yesterday I got to find out when I got my hands on an Intel X25-M 160GB SSD to play with.

It almost killed me to not rip my netbook open to install it, but I had to practice some patience in order to get some baseline performance info for my system with the native 120GB hard drive. To get some subjective data, I timed how long it took for the system to boot from a powered off state and open a text file I had placed in the startup folder. I then placed shortcuts for a word document, an Excel spreadsheet, and Visual Studio 2008 in the startup folder, logged off, and then back on. The first test took 54 seconds and the second test took 31 seconds with the hard drive.

In our lab at work, we have a hard drive duplicating device that does a bit-by-bit copy of hard drives. I slaved in the SSD and made an exact copy of my hard drive (dual boot operating systems, temp files, data, and all). I then installed the SSD into my Aspire One and reran the tests. This time the boot took 47 seconds and the application launch took 24 seconds. The improvement was 13% and 22% respectively.

The netbook goes to sleep from Windows 7 faster than a worn out gamer after a two day LAN party. It’s tough to get a good time, but it seems to sleep in just about three seconds and resumes in just more than four. It seems so much faster than the hard drive based system that it feels like instant-on!

Anecdotally, the system feels quite a bit faster. It takes about 10 seconds to launch iTunes and parse my larger than average library, only about 3 seconds to open a two page document in Word, and some very small fraction of a second to open “My Documents.” I don’t have anything empirical to compare it against, but it feels significantly faster than before.

Now, to get to the question of whether or not I think the upgrade is worth it. Honestly, probably not in a netbook (although certainly worth it in a full laptop) but I want to spend a couple of days forming a full opinion. I can say for sure that I didn’t see the huge leap forward in performance that I noticed on the T61, so the processor is definitely a big part of the equation. There are benefits to consider beyond raw performance such as battery life and durability that will certainly need to be considered though. For a device that was designed to be small enough to take everywhere with you, these could be important factors. I’ll try to weigh in after a few days to tell you what I think.

Baby Steps

2009-06-15T22:19:40Z

I am married to an absolutely amazing woman but truth be told, she isn’t the world’s best passenger on road trips. If she has a good book to read she does great, but if not, “Are we there yet?” comes more from my wife in the passenger seat than from my the kids in the back seat.

This weekend, we drove from Portland to eastern Idaho for a family reunion: 10 hours of driving nightmare bliss each way. My wife brought two books along for the drive, but she finished the second about 4 hours before we got home. After chatting for about an hour, she confessed that she was going crazy and asked me if I had anything to read on my BlackBerry. With a tear in my eye, I pulled to the side of the road and revealed to her the wonder of Ereader.com.

Within a few minutes, we had Sense and Sensibility up on the screen and she was contently reading from its virtual pages. That is pretty cool in my book, but the real shock came when we got home and she told me that she preferred reading the digital version! She read from my BlackBerry until almost midnight. I don’t know that there was a prouder geek in all of Oregon.

A Bit of a Teaser

2009-01-09T01:23:39Z

At work, one of the mobile product managers has had an unopened MSI Wind in his cubicle for about a week now. Today I shamelessly asked if I could steal it for a while since it was obvious he was in no hurry to evaluate it. Now I have something new to play around with for a few days. I’ll do some side-by-side comparisons of the Aspire One and the Wind. If there is anything that you would like to see, let me know.

Want To Purchase An Aspire One?

2008-12-29T23:34:54Z

Over the holiday, I came across this amazing deal from the Home Shopping Network:

It’s hard to notice much besides the woman who looks like she’s looking forward to taking a bite of her tasty Aspire One, but try to look at the “Retail Value” of the netbook: $847.60 – ON WHAT PLANET???

Good thing they’re offering it for the amazing value of just $499.90 (plus $27.95 for shipping and handling). What they’re really doing is preying on the uniformed because the almost 50% markup they are charging is ridiculous. For people who want one that bad, I’d be willing to part with mine for a mere $475 (with free shipping)! :)

Google Chrome in Full Screen Mode (Almost)

2008-12-03T21:47:13Z

When Google first released its Chrome browser, I used it quite a bit. Over time, I found myself using Firefox more and more largely because it plays nicely with small screens. The screen on my netbook and my UMPC just don’t have enough screen real estate to waste it on Chrome’s huge header. I had really hoped there would be a full screen option for Chrome by now.

Today I accidentally discovered that you can give yourself an “almost” full screen experience. Check this out:

Here’s how I did it:

In Chrome, browse to a good home page (Google’s home page or iGoogle works well as noted below)
Click on the page icon to the right of the address bar in Chrome’s toolbar
Click on “Create application shortcuts…”
Select “Desktop” and click “OK”
Go to your desktop and launch the “Application shortcut” that has the name of your new home page
Maximize the window and enjoy “near” full screen browsing in Chrome

Tips:

There are no navigation buttons available to you in this view. You can use the “Backspace” key to go backwards in your browser history. Alternatively, you can use the Alt key in combination with the left and right arrow keys to go backwards and forwards (respectively) through the history.
You don’t get an address bar this way, but if you use a Google page as suggested above, you can do a Google search for any URL and it will always be the first hit.
If you want to truly maximize your screen real estate, change your taskbar to not stay on top of other windows.

Very Helpful…Thanks Microsoft

2008-12-02T18:03:32Z

Most error messages aren’t very helpful, but today when my Lenovo T61 chashed, I witnessed the mother of all useless error messages:

I went to Microsoft’s support page and read the documentation and they suggest you check a half dozen things, but nothing specific. The error message doesn’t even help them.

iPhone 2.2 Podcast Support Disappointing

2008-11-21T16:49:03Z

I rushed out this morning to install the latest update from Apple largely for one feature: on-device podcast downloads. It is nice that now you can go out and manually pull down single episodes to your iPhone or iPod Touch, but there is one major feature missing that seems like a huge oversight to me.

There is no way to view your list of current subscriptions and do a refresh that grabs the latest episode. The only reason I regularly attach my iPod to my computer is to update my podcasts. I purchase new music once every few weeks in batches, but find myself syncing for podcast support every other day or so. This seems like a great way that Apple could free the iPod from PC’s completely, so I thought for sure it would be a feature. :^)

I hope that future software updates will provide a way for me to automatically get the latest episode of Mobile Tech Roundup without needing my PC.

I Probably Fried My Aspire One

2008-11-20T01:12:31Z

I wrote about killing my Aspire One some time ago, and ever since it died, I have wondered what might have caused it. I know that Acer replaced the board during the repair, so I figure that something significant must have happened. Well, I have a pretty good hunch that it was me being careless that killed it.

The other day, I went to plug something into the USB port and was having a little trouble getting it to go in. When I started paying attention to what I was doing, I realized that I was trying to put a USB drive into the Ethernet port. It dawned on me that this would totally explain my previous experience when my Aspire One stopped working. If I had plugged my drive into the network port before, it wouldn’t have booted (like it didn’t), and it certainly could have shorted the board out (like something did).

I have learned some interesting things:

Apparently I don’t look very closely when I plug in USB drives
A USB connector and an Ethernet port are very close to the same dimension
Warranty at Acer will repair hardware even if mindless behavior caused the problem

New Utility for Aspire One

2008-11-18T16:19:04Z

Yesterday I installed a new control utility for my Aspire One: a1ctl. It is similar to AA1FanControl in that it allows you to control the fan on your netbook, but it also provides additional functionality. For power savings, the software has the ability to step the CPU back to 800 Mhz or you can disable the LAN, Wifi, and webcam separately. It also allows you to downscale the screen so that you can run a 1024 x 768 resolution (I’m hoping I can run Rise of Nations now). I’ll give a more complete review of the software after I have been using it a few days.