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Buying a laptop? Get 2 GB NOW -- here's why
Is a cheaper, smaller iPhone in the works?
Dude, you're getting a pink Dell
AT&T hires 2000 temps to deal with iPhone rush
Gateway is recalling some 14,000 notebook battery packs
Is now the time to dump your laptop hard drive for flash media?
A notebook PC is your best investment -- because people are crazy
Steven Rosenberg commented on Gateway is recalling some 14,000 notebook battery packs
MS Office 2008 for Macintosh will sync with the iPhone.
So you'll be able to do a PowerPoint presentation anywhere, anytime, on a teeny screen! OK ... you can plug the iPhone directly into the projector with the proper Apple AV cable.
Love or hate the iPhone, it's the future of computing. We'll all be carrying around something similar within the next 10 years.
"Memory is cheap." Not really. When the kind of memory you're using is currently being made in huge quantities, it can be cheap-er. Witness the great deals you can get at Tiger Direct or Newegg.
But when it comes to laptops -- and older ones especially, not getting enough memory when you buy the damn thing can bite you in the ass.
I'm in the process of fixing up the Free Laptop, a Gateway Solo 1450 with a busted power plug. I have the part ready, and I'm going to get power to the thing soon. I pulled the memory cover and found out it shipped with 128 MB of RAM -- a PC133 SODIMM.
128 MB? Were they high? This thing also shipped with Windows XP. (I pulled the drive and gave it to the laptop's owner -- I have another drive ready and waiting). How good can XP run in 128 MB?
The thing maxes out at 1 GB. How much could it be, I figured. I see 1 GB of RAM going for $40 to $50 all the time in the Fry's ads ... but that's for CURRENT memory, and usually desktop memory.
But PC133 SODIMM memory? I'll be lucky to get a GB for $75. 512 MB will run me about $40. Hold the f'n phone! That's too much. I'm at the horns of a RAM dilemma.
What I really want: A full GB for $40. Ain't gonna happen.
Rumour has it that Apple Inc. is planning on introducing a cheaper, smaller version of the iPhone later this year. The rumour gained momentum last Thursday when it was made public that Apple Inc. filed a patent application last November describing "a multifunctional handheld device with a circular touch pad displaying illuminated symbols that could change depending on the mode in use," which Apple enthusiasts are interpreting as an "iPhone Nano."
Computer maker Dell Inc. is trying to regain the lead in the
notebook computer world (HP is the current PC market leader)
by adding a splash of color to their notebooks - faster processors?
better graphics? who needs that!?
How about a "ruby red," "sunshine yellow" or "espresso brown" notebook?
The Universal Solar Charger from Brando is a God-sent for the gadget lover.
The device is small enough to carry around but don't let that fool you.
It also uses good ol' fashioned electricity to charge a variety of gizmos such
as cell phones and mp3 players
Anticipating an increase in service demand - thanks to Apple's much-hyped iPhone - AT&T has hired 2000 temporary employees and has trained them on how to sell Steve Jobs' latest gadget.
Considering that AT&T has some 1,800 stores nation-wide, the surge in available staff amounts to just one extra person per store.
One more thing - in case you were wondering - we are NOT (sadly) getting any kickbacks from Apple Inc., there's just plenty of iPhone-related news coming out regularly.
Gateway announced Tuesday a voluntary recall of some 14,000 notebook battery packs due to - surprise - overheating and scalding hazzard. The recall affects some, but not all Gateway 400VTX and 450ROG series notebooks sold between May 2003 and August 2003. The batteries were made by Samsung Electronics.
Check out Gateway's battery website for instructions on how to know if your notebook's battery pack needs to be replaced.
Back in the days before the Thin Puppy's CF card died, I was running my Maxspeed Maxterm thin client with flash memory instead of a conventional hard drive. And since Puppy Linux takes great care NOT to write to flash very often, the media is supposed to last virtually forever. Why mine died is a mystery, but it wasn't due to wear (more likely I killed it with static electricity).
Now that I'm running Puppy 2.16 (new to me this week!), I've been thinking about going back to flash for this thin-client box -- I'm booting from CD and also have a regular-sized 14 GB hard drive connected outside the box (yes, I truly am thinking outside the box -- or my PC is).
But the conventional wisdom is that for "normal" operating systems that don't use RAM disks, you'll kill flash quickly with the constant writes required by the OS.
But today on Low End Mac, that question didn't come up for these guys who are running their Mac laptops from flash memory. That link was to the letters about this original article, which, in turn, refers to this article about doing it with a Powerbook 1400 (one of which I have ... but which is too frustrating at this point to even contemplate using for my everyday computing for reasons that have nothing to do with flash). This final article -- filled with woe about flash cards that didn't work with the 1400 -- does address longevity of the flash media, saying it should work for "years and years."
I'm going to try it again (maybe even with Debian), but I'm also going to back up all my data ...
And again, if you want to boot from flash but are nervous, give the new Puppy 2.16 a try. I'm in my first full day of use, but so far all is going very, very well.
After going through my 10th or 13th eBay auction for old PC laptops that, if the world wasn't crazy, should be selling for $100 and often less, but usually sell for $150 to even $250. Even 233 MHz laptops with 5 GB hard drives, 64 MB RAM, Windows 95, no USB ports and no onboard Ethernet are bringing $150 to $200. THAT'S A DOORSTOP, PEOPLE. It's not worth more than $30. But the demand is out there, on Craigslist AND on eBay. You don't see anything older than a Pentium I, and barely even those. It's mostly Pentium II-class, and if it's running more than 400 MHz, look out -- it's going to cost you.
What's wrong with you people? You can get a freaking Dual Core notebook NEW for $500 if you wait for the right sale at Staples or Circuit City. An 8-year-old has-been piece of crap should NOT be selling for $150 to $200. Have you all lost your minds?
I got pissed enough to fire up This Old Mac -- the 117 MHz PowerPC-based Powerbook 1400, circa 1996, that forms the basis of my relationship to old computers.
Now don't get me wrong. Nobody's paying big money, on eBay or anywhere else, for PB 1400s -- and with good reason: They max out at 64 MB of RAM (I've got 48 MB stuffed in mine) and have a hell of a time running Mac System 8, let alone OS 9 -- and forget about OS X. That will never, ever in a million years happen. I'm running System 7.6.1, regarded by many as the perfect OS for this laptop. The only mail program that works with today's POP and IMAP services is Netscape 4.x. and it's damned slow. I always say you've got to use apps tuned to the system, apps which are processor-speed- and memory-appropriate. Well, that would be Claris E-Mailer, and it plain doesn't work. Same is true for MS Office 6.0, supposedly rewritten for PowerPC at the time of the 1400's release, but which takes forever to load. Again, ClarisWorks is a better fit, and WriteNow even better still. But neither offers credible Word-compatible formatting.
All I'm saying is that a PC-compatible laptop running at 300 MHz is better than the 1400, but not THAT much better. And if you skipped over that line -- NOBODY IS PAYING CRAZY PRICES OF ANY SORT FOR POWERBOOK 1400s. Now Pismo and Walstreet laptops still command crazy prices, and that holds true for other Powerbook G3s and G4s. But they all cost about $1K new. There's no new $400 or $500 Mac laptop ... so it takes them that much longer to get down below $200 ... or so goes the theory.
But the silver lining is ... if you either already own a laptop or are considering buying one, your investment is safe. Three to five years from now, or even longer, you can turn it around on eBay and get a chunk of money for your trouble. Capitalism, baby ...
Via a link from Low End Mac, I came across this great Wired roundup of tools for writers, electronic and not, which brings together some of the other gadgets I've meant to blog on, and introduced me to some new things I've got to check out.
I've already heard about the Alphasmart Neo, a $250 laptop-like device with a full-keyboard and smallish LCD screen. It's aimed at a pure writing experience, and the best thing is that it weighs less than 2 pounds and runs 700 hours on a set of three AA batteries. Yes, I didn't say 7 hours, but 700. It's already been blogged about by the O'Reilly people here and here.
The Wired people also discuss their favorite pens, laptops, and two writing programs that intrigue me enough to try them out:
RoughDraft for Windows and Scrivener for Mac OS X. The best news about these two programs is that RoughDraft is sold on a "donation" basis, and Scrivener, although needing OS X 10.4 to run, costs only $34.99 after a 30-day trial. I don't have 10.4 on the iBook at home, and I don't do much writing on it, either, but I will give RoughDraft a try and report back.
I'm running Puppy Linux on top of Windows XP with the help of the QEMU virtual machine -- and the hard work of Erik Veenstra. It's a lot slower than plain, pure Puppy, but since I can't spend all day in Puppy and must use XP to do real work, I can only snatch a few minutes here and there, and having Puppy ready and waiting in the QEMU window -- however slow it may be -- is better than no Puppy at all.
I say it's slow, and this is on a 3 GHz processor. I tried QEMU-Puppy -- the only QEMU-based version of any Linux I've been able to get working thus far, by the way -- on This Old PC at 333 MHz, and it was so slow as to be unusable. But on a fast machine running XP, you can get stuff done.
While in the QEMU Puppy, I changed the dark desktop background to the familiar Puppy blue (and now can see the names of the icons -- black on black never works, people).
I easily added the Ted word processor/text editor with Puppy Package Manager. I tried to add Open Office, but I didn't have enough space on my USB flash drive.
Ted is the word processor in Damn Small Linux. It doesn't save in .doc format, but uses .rtf (rich text format) instead -- a format still readable by Word, by the way. But I like Ted. That's one of the great things about using 10 or more different live-CD Linux distributions -- you get exposed to many different programs that you'd otherwise never see. And both Abiword and Ted have proven to be able writing programs. I like the way the characters look better in Ted, so if I can get away without using smart quotes or saving in .doc format, I will.
Those familiar with my smart-quote obsession might be interested in knowing that the smart-quote debate, while not exactly raging, is simmering in the Linux/open-source community. It seems that at one time, Abiword (which does save in .doc format, and which runs on Linux, Windows and OS X) had smart quotes added.
But in the geek world, smart quotes = Microsoft hegemony. Yes -- Microsoft is being blamed for smart quotes, and real geeks use straight quotes.
I will touch that last sentence no further. So the upshot is that of the leading word-processing programs in the Linux world, Abiword and Ted do NOT have smart quotes (I don't even know if you can drop them in manually), while the more bloated Open Office (not bloated compared to MS Office) offers them.
On the subject of working with Puppy ... there are so many ways to use Puppy. The easiest is the live CD. With that, you can save your session (and parameters) to the hard drive, to a USB flash drive, to an "open" CD or DVD ... or you can mount those drives, save the files you create (they are readable in by Windows apps, by the way -- a nice touch) there ... and do these in various combinations. You can even save multiple configurations (much like the multiple user accounts available in most Linuxes but not Puppy, in which you always work as root (if you don't know what that means, consider yourself lucky).
In fact, I'm going to try that now -- to make separate Puppy config files for running QEMU and the Live CD on two separate PCs.
Wish me luck.
Not that any of you have noticed, but I seem to be doing on geek project a month. First it was This Old PC, then This Old Mac. After that, it was the Palm handheld. And now I'm moving on to Knoppix, the Linux you can run from the CD-ROM drive.
I start with a problem/project, get to the level where it's working as well as it can, and then ... I move on.
For the moment, I'm geeking it up with Linux. I've always wanted to do it but never had a spare PC whose hard drive I could wipe or partition for the free, open-source OS. But Knoppix gets around that, since you boot from CD and continue running in that fashion. It's a great way to get your feet wet in Linux. And that CD also runs applications, including Open Office, Firefox (renamed Iceweasel, for reasons that elude me), the Gimp (which I'm already using on Windows to replace the Photoshop program I don't have) and much more. And there's even more available on the Knoppix DVD, should you have a DVD burner and the bandwidth to download a 4 GB file.
DataViz's Documents to Go, the Office-friendly office suite that comes with all Palm handhelds, will soon be available for Windows Mobile devices, according to Brighthand. As Brighthand has already reported, Docs to Go already does a better job on Microsoft Office files than Microsoft's own applications, so its availability -- currently offered as a preview from DataViz -- should be of great help to those who have a Windows Mobile PDA or smartphone.
I've been using Documents to Go on the Palm for a few weeks now, and I'm very, very happy with the way it generates and modifies Word files (I really don't care about Excel and Powerpoint, but Docs to Go handles them, too). Now with the suite ported over to Windows devices, it can only mean better things down the road for this exceptional DataViz product.
It just goes to show that a non-MS company can enter the office-suite space and, if offering MS compatability, do a better job than MS itself.
Look for my post on the Palm Addict blog about my experience with the Tungsten E, How to Lose 9 Pounds and Keep It Off. They're running a contest over there, and the way to enter is to send an e-mail with your Palm experience, which they subsequently publish on the blog. It's a great way to get posts from a wide variety of people.
If you do click over, I apologize for the grammatical lapses -- it was late in the day ... and, well, that's my excuse. Anyway, here's a sample:
Now can I write anywhere at just about any time -- using Palm's Memos program and Documents to Go -- and sync it to my PC at work or my Mac at home, or send it direct with VersaMail from the PC via the sync cable. The best part: It's so small, I don't need the keyboard (although I'm getting one anyway) and it is instantly available -- no waiting to boot or shut down. Great for writing in short bursts ...
Nothing revolutionary here -- but the Palm is a great tool for writers and bloggers. It's certainly easy on the arms.
(image from Palm -- but can you make the screen display the right way?)
While it might be nice to have a full-fledged laptop to lug around with me, the truth is that I don't think a laptop is the right tool for the job.
Sure I'd like to run the exact same applications, browse the Web wirelessly and be able to easily move my work around to where I need it. And while I can't expect This Old Mac, a 10-year-old Powerbook 1400 to do all this, the fact is that even a new laptop (which ain't about to fall into my ... er ... lap) is probably ill-suited to what I need to do anyway.
Since my main focus is writing -- and that writing must be in Microsoft Word format -- and perhaps handling e-mail (although it need not be "live" at the time), what I really need is something wickedly small that boots up in an instant, holds a charge for some time ... is fairly cheap -- and did I say it has to be small.
I might need a Palm handheld. We do have one lying around the house, a Palm Tungsten E. But I also need the keyboard that goes with it, and that we don't have. And it costs $69.99. Ouch. I've seen off-brand ones af Fry's, and they're no cheaper.
And I don't know of anybody who even uses a Palm (or PalmPilot, as they used to be called), let alone uses it for writing. Do they know something I don't? I've seen a few Palm Web sites, and they seem to harp on the unreliability of the devices. They are cheap (relatively), but are they that bad? The Palm comes with Documents to Go software, enabling the creation of Microsoft Office-compatible files.
I just need to find one Web site, from one person, who uses a Palm to write. Is the screen too small? The keyboard too hard to type on?
Palms are pretty much used for their calendar function. I'm not much for scheduling, but for what scheduling I do, I use Yahoo! Calendar
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