Category: hardware

new laptop – initial impressions

So I got my ThinkPad E520 today, and I thought I’d write up some initial impressions.

  • It’s lighter than I thought it would be. I guess it’s mostly plastic, and the battery isn’t huge, so that must be why. It feels weird though.
  • This is the first laptop I’ve ever bought that had a numeric keypad as part of the keyboard. (Well, technically, I had a barely portable Amstrad back in the early nineties that had a full-size keyboard with numeric keypad, but that wasn’t really a laptop.) This also feels a bit weird.  When I’m typing, my fingers aren’t in the middle of the laptop, they’re in the middle of the main part of the keyboard, which is a bit left of center. And the trackpad  is centered under the main part of the keyboard, so that too is left of center. I think I’ll be able to get used to it, but it does feel weird right now.
  • The keyboard isn’t bad, but, given the size, I wish they’d gone with a more conventional key layout.  Ins, Del, Home, and End are up on the top row, but PgUp and PgDn are tiny little keys on either side of the up arrow key.  (On the plus side, they did maintain the inverted T arrow key layout.)
  • This laptop has the Lenovo “Enhanced Experience“, which is supposed to speed up boot time. My experience so far is about 45 seconds to the login screen, then 45 more seconds to the desktop after entering my password. Not bad, I guess, but not stunning.
  • This machine has a fingerprint reader.  I set it up to allow me to login with a swipe of my index finger, but it hasn’t worked so far.  I might need to go through the setup wizard again.
  • Lenovo tends to ship a bunch of proprietary utilities on their machines.  This one has a handful of programs pre-installed, but only a few are really useless and need to be uninstalled. 
  • I’ll definitely be uninstalling Norton Internet Security.  I’ll probably install F-Prot for anti-virus protection. I’ve been using it for several years on all my machines with no problems.

So those are my initial rambling thoughts.  I’ll probably post more in a few days, when I’ve gotten a bit further with it.

    old laptops

    Once I get my new Lenovo, I’m going to get rid of my old Dell Inspiron and my Acer Aspire One. For some reason, whenever I’m getting rid of a computer, I like to go back and review some stuff — when I got it, how much I paid for it, whether or not I feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of it, and so on.

    I bought the Inspiron in February 2007, so that makes it about four and a half years old. I usually consider three years to be a decent life span for a laptop, so this one has certainly lasted long enough. I bought it through the Dell EPP (Employee Purchase Program), back when I was at NMS, my previous job. I was surprised to see that I spent $2000 on it. That seems like a lot now — the new Lenovo is only costing me $550, and it’s a pretty good machine, not a refurb or anything. I got a fair bit of use out of the Inspiron. I took it on a few trips, both personal and business, and I used it a lot when my Mom was in the hospital (and later the nursing home).

    I bought the Acer Aspire One from Woot in July 2009, so it’s only about two years old. I never did get much use out of it. At this point, most of the scenarios where I could see myself using a netbook, I’m more likely to just go with the iPad. I think, for me at least, the iPad really killed any need for a netbook. If I need a full-featured computer, the netbook isn’t good enough, and if I don’t, then the iPad is easier to lug around and use.

    I turned the Aspire One on today, to make sure it was still working, and I took a look at the event log. The last time I had it turned on was March 30. So, five months without any use pretty well indicates that I don’t need the thing. I’ve occasionally thought about wiping out Windows on it and installing Flow or UNR on it. If I did that, though, it would just be for fun; I don’t see any real utility in using either of those on a regular basis.

    new laptop

    I just ordered a new laptop from Tiger Direct — a Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E520 1143-3FU. (Heck of a name, huh?) It was only $550, and has a couple of things I want that aren’t usually included in most consumer laptops: Windows 7 Pro (instead of Home), and a 7200 RPM drive.
    This will be replacing my Dell Inspiron, which is old enough that it has a PATA hard drive, and can’t be upgraded past 2 GB.
    I actually don’t use my Windows laptop that much — I use my MacBook for everyday use, like reading email, surfing, writing blog posts, and stuff like that. I still feel like I should have a reasonably up-to-date Windows laptop on hand, and this Lenovo wasn’t too expensive, and should hopefully last me for a few years.

    Netgear ReadyShare

    I bought a new router back in July, a Netgear WNDR3700-100NAS. It has a USB port that can be used to share a USB hard drive on the local network. I’d been meaning to use that, but just never got around to hooking a drive up. Well, I finally started playing around with it last week, using a 1TB MyBook drive that has been sitting in a box on my floor since November 2009 (long story). I didn’t quite manage to get it working then. (Another long story.)

    I tried again today. I didn’t get it working at first, so I tried to upgrade the firmware on the router, thinking that would help. I couldn’t manage to get that done, at first, but I hit upon the brilliant idea of power cycling the router, and that allowed me to finally download and install the new firmware. (“Have you tried turning it off and on again?“)

    With the new firmware, I had much more luck. The router recognized the drive, I could browse to it on my desktop PC, and I even managed to connect to it from my MacBook.

    I think I’m done with this for the night, but I’m hoping to try backing up my MacBook to it at some point, maybe next weekend. I really need to start doing backups again.

    GPS

    I just ordered a new GPS from Amazon. I’ve been using an older TomTom that I bought back in 2007. It still works, but it’s been a little flaky, and my map update service has expired. I decided to take advantage of a Black Friday special, and pick up a new TomTom with lifetime maps & traffic, and a few other features that the old GPS didn’t have.

    I like the TomTom interface, so I decided to stick with them, rather than switch to another brand. I’ve never been any good at driving anywhere unfamiliar — I’m always getting lost — so the advent of GPS technology was a godsend for me. I don’t have to use it that often, but when I do need it, I really appreciate it.

    new router

    I dropped off my Dad’s old computer monitor and an old CRT TV at Best Buy for recycling today. While I was there, I picked up a new Netgear router, model WNDR3700-100NAS. Since my old router died a while back, I’ve been using an old D-Link. It was working OK, except that I had to power cycle it every morning, otherwise it wouldn’t work with my MacBook for some reason. And I often had to power cycle it after using it copy any large files. So I decided to pick up something more powerful. I was looking at a variety of routers, but I picked this one up pretty much on a whim.

    Looking around at reviews and such, I see that Small Net Builder likes it, and there’s a positive thread about it on DSL Reports. So I have high hopes.

    I just finished setting up all (ok, most) of my devices to attach to it. I definitely have too many wireless devices in the house. I’ve got the MacBook, Dell laptop, Acer netbook, iPod Touch, iPad, Wii, PS3, and Apple TV. (Technically, I still have a Tivo also, but I’m not really using it anymore.) No problem connecting any of those to the normal 2.4 Ghz side. I haven’t really messed with the 5 Ghz side yet. I’m not really sure which of my devices (if any) support it and would benefit from it. I haven’t really been following this stuff lately, so I don’t know that much about it.

    I also haven’t hooked up a USB drive to the thing yet, but I plan to do that. I have enough drives scattered around my apartment that it shouldn’t be a problem to find one and hook it up. Then I can start playing around with the idea of setting up some automated backups to it, maybe. (Not full backups, but just key file backups from my desktop and laptops.)

    Gazelle


    gazelle
    Originally uploaded by andyhuey

    I just boxed up my PS2 and PSP to send off to Gazelle. I’m not getting much money for them, but that’s fine — I’m really just looking to keep them out of the landfill. I think I’ve had the PS2 since 2000, and the PSP since 2005, so I’ve certainly kept them long enough.

    I can still play all my PS2 games on my PS3, but I’m looking to get rid of all my UMD-format PSP games now. (I even have a couple of UMD movies. No one seems to be interested in those at all.)

    I’ve gotten rid of a couple of the games via Swaptree, generally in exchange for a book or CD. I may throw the rest of them on eBay at some point and see if they sell.

    iPad note-taking and password management apps

    I’ve been messing around with note-taking and password management apps on my iPad a bit today, so I thought I’d write up some notes.

    First, for note-taking, I have Evernote and Satchel. I use Backpack on the web to keep track of a bunch of stuff, so Satchel is a good thing. As mentioned in my last post, it works well. I really don’t need Evernote too, but it’s free, so I’ve been playing around with it. I like the fact that it’s got desktop clients for Mac and Windows, in addition to the web client and the iPad/iPhone apps. I don’t think I’d give up on Backpack and move everything over to Evernote though.

    I also use DEVONthink on my Mac and OneNote on my PC for note-taking. I should probably try to move away from both of those, and get all my info into Backpack and/or Evernote. Oh, and I use Google Docs too, though usually I’m using that for more structured documents rather than random notes.

    For password management, I use KeePass on the PC and KeePassX on the Mac. I keep a single database in sync across all my computers via Windows Live Sync. Alas, there doesn’t seem to be a good KeePass client for the iPad/iPhone. I tried iKeepass today, but I couldn’t get it to work. It could open my KeePass file, but it wouldn’t expand the main tree to show me my passwords. I might be able to get around that, but I’m not sure I want to spend a lot of time on it.

    There are a few good password managers for the iPad. I used SplashID on my Palm many years ago, and they have an iPad client now, so that might be a good choice. 1Password is pretty popular on the Mac. I’m not sure about their Windows client though. There are a few other programs, too, but I don’t know much about them.

    I’m hesitant to go with anything that isn’t compatible with KeePass database files, but there just doesn’t seem to be anything good that works with KeePass on the iPad. If I decide to go with a different program, I’ll have to decide whether I want to switch over completely to that program (on Windows, Mac, and iPad), or just use it as a supplement to KeePass, and keep copies of my most frequently used accounts in there.

    more iPad notes

    I’m home sick today, so I might as well write a blog post on some iPad stuff, following up on my last post.

    My Marware Evo-Vue case arrived in the mail yesterday. It’s well-made and fits the iPad well.

    I bought Satchel, and have used it to update my Backpack account a few times already. It works well. There are a few interface quirks, but nothing big. I wish it had the ability to detach a file from a Backpack page, and send it to GoodReader though. I’m really liking GoodReader. It’s easy to get files into it (from a computer via wifi, or from Google Docs, or GMail, or MobileMe…) and it works well as a PDF reader and file management tool.

    The one other app I’m thinking about buying is PrintCentral. I don’t really need to be able to print from the iPad, but it would be nice.