Windows 7 Impressions

Image by F687/s via FlickrLike a lot of people, I'm taking the Windows 7 Public Beta for a spin. I downloaded both the 32- and 64-bit versions, but since I have an old Pentium 4 Dell collecting dust, I figured that'd be a good test since everyone says that it works a lot better on older machines than Vista.

The test machine:

• Dell Dimension 4500 (circa 2002)
• Pentium 4 2.0 GHz
• 1GB RAM
• 200GB IDE hard drive
• 32MB ATI Rage 128 (AGP)
• Netgear WG311 v3 802.11g (PCI)
• NEC CD+RW & Lite-On DVD+RW drives (IDE)

Yep, ancient. Considering that it's about 5-6 years old, I wouldn't have been surprised if everything didn't work under Win7.

After burning the ISO to DVD, the OS was really easy to install. The first change is that the installation begins from a Windows GUI, not the DOS-like pre-installation environment that Windows installs have always begun with. It took literally less than 10 seconds to choose whether I wanted to upgrade or start fresh, followed by a quick format. All of the confusing crap about partitions and so forth are hidden behind an "Advanced" setting.

The installation as a whole took maybe 22 minutes, including reboots. The end result was an ancient machine starting up from cold boot to a usable desktop in under two minutes. I don't think a clean install of XP Home booted up faster. Conspicuously absent was the many minutes of hard drive grinding during startup. Impressive!

The most major hitch after installation was that it wasn't able to find drivers for the audio chipset and the Ethernet and 802.11g cards. Having no network adapters is a bit of a problem, so I went over to Netgear's site and downloaded the Vista drivers for the wireless card and sneaker-netted them over to the Win7 box via a USB thumb drive. Fortunately, the drivers installed and worked without a hitch. Can't say the same about the Ethernet drivers...none of the ones on the Dell site (nothing post-XP, some even mentioned Window ME!) worked.

I was pleasantly surprised that once the driver was installed, Win7 was able to detect and connect to my WPA2-secured wireless network with only the security key. No fiddling with settings or having to specify the SSID. It literally took a hour for me to get the damn thing working under XP and only after using Netgear's management program--versus less than a minute with the built-in connection wizard in Win7.

After the wireless was up, I was able to activate the beta copy of Windows, download and install the driver for the sound chipset, install AVG Free for anti-virus, Flash, Firefox, OpenOffice, the KMPlayer, Irfanview, and so forth. No issues, other than a possible bug where trying to Win-Tab during the Firefox installation caused the installer to hang.

My six-year old Dell isn't going to win any races with it's lofty 1.0 (on a scale from 1.0-7.9) Windows Experience benchmark--thanks to the obsolete ATI graphics. There are some uncomfortable pauses from time to time too...perhaps disk related or due to unoptimized code. But it does seem much more responsive in handling multiple apps at once.

I'm also happy to report that the beta seems to hibernate/resume and still manage to restore the wireless network connection. That's something that was practically impossible in my experience with a laptop on Vista before tweaking and/or the Service Pack. The copy and strange networking behaviors seem to be less obvious. In other words, we're probably back to where we were with XP SP2.

Overall, Win7 is obviously very much like a refined copy of Vista. I've been running Vista for nearly two years and aside from the performance gap, XP is getting worn around the edges. The Vista/7 UI is much more visually appealing, but it's really the changes under the hood that will make the difference--after all, if you can get the bells & whistles of Vista with the speed of XP, why would you stick with an OS that is going on seven years old? It's really too bad that Microsoft wasn't able to bring this new build as its Vista product, since it seems to address the performance and usability (*cough*UAC*cough) concerns that drove people to stick to XP.

It's such an improvement that I'm going to hold off on buying a new PC until there's a free upgrade offer bundled with Vista (probably later this summer). I don't know whether I'd be willing to pay for an upgrade from Vista to Win7, especially since most of the changes are cosmetic (like the new Taskbar, which I can get used to) or tweaks that should have been there from Day 1. But certainly, based on what I've seen so far in this beta build, it should put the nail in XP's coffin.

Read more...

I'm back, hopefully

In the very rare case that anyone found this blog, they'd probably conclude this is yet another one that was started and then abandoned. Actually, I had a long illness in the family, and updating a blog wasn't my top priority. But I'm back now, and we'll see how long I can keep it up!

Upgrading the Lenovo S10 Hard Drive using Clonezilla

While I love the prospect of using my Lenovo S10 as a portable media player, the 80GB hard drive that it ships is on the small side for a hard-drive based netbook. Not only is the drive small, but the crazy partitioning (basically split into system and data partitions, FAT and NTFS respectively) further limits how you can use the space. So I picked up a 320GB 2.5" hard drive (Hitachi 5K320 320GB 5400RPM) and went about upgrading the drive.

More about my upgrade experience and how to back up the drive image coming up next...

Laptop Magazine has a great, easy to follow feature on how to upgrade the S10's hard drive. However, since Lenovo doesn't ship recovery/reinstallation disks, you'll need to back up the drive yourself. While you might be able to use the bundled OneKey Recovery software to do that, without an external optical drive to boot the recovery CD for the restore, I didn't want to chance that.

In order to fully backup and recover the S10 without needing an external optical drive, you can use the open-source program Clonezilla to do the backup and restore of the original Lenovo image. You'll need:

• A 2.5" notebook SATA hard drive, hopefully larger than the one that the S10 ships with :)
• A FAT32-formatted USB hard drive or flash thumb drive with around 10GB free
• A flash thumb drive that you can erase for the Clonezilla Live boot image. I'm guessing at least 256MB capacity, though you might be able to get away with a 128MB drive. If you have a 16GB flash drive, you probably can store the S10 backup image on it as well.
• The zip archive of Clonezilla Live
• Live USB Helper (to make the flash drive bootable)
• Access to the Clonezilla Live how-to or a printout of those instructions. And these :)
  

Disclaimer: While I "ate my own dog food" here and was able to successfully upgrade my hard drive using these tools, I make no guarantees that nothing will go wrong with your upgrade. The act of replacing the hard drive might void your warranty, and I don't know how receptive Lenovo would be to reloading your system with the factory image if something should go wrong. Also, Clonezilla isn't the easiest or most-user friendly cloning software out there, but it's free. If you want easy and friendly, you'll have to pay for that.

The upgrade goes something like this:

• 1.) Insert the USB drive you want to boot Clonezilla off of. Make sure it doesn't contain any data you want to save.
• 2.) Install Live USB Helper (LUH). There's an option to install the source code, but unless that sort of thing interests you, you can leave it unchecked.
• 3.) When you run LUH, you'll probably get an error that vb6stkit.dll is missing. Follow the instructions in the Clonezilla Live how-to to get a copy of that DLL. It may require a reboot or manually registering the DLL with Windows (Google if you need help with that).
• 4.) Once LUH is running, it's fairly self-explanatory how to get your flash drive bootable.
• 5.) The next step is a bit confusing. To install Clonezilla Live on your newly-bootable flash drive, just unzip the archive onto the root of the drive, preserving the folder structure. So, if the flash drive is G:\, make sure the archive is unzipped into G:\.
• 6.) Feel free to prepare your system for imaging by deleting non-essential files, installing software or Windows updates. Basically, whatever you do to the system now will be replicated to the new hard drive.
• 7.) Shut down the S10, leaving the flash drive inserted. Make sure the USB drive where you will save your backup image is NOT inserted.
• 8.) Boot up the S10 and press F2 at the BIOS screen (best bet is to press F2 several times until you're sure you're entering the BIOS setup. Change the boot order so that your USB flash drive boots before the hard drive. Save and exit.
• 9.) Your S10 should now boot into Linux and you'll get to a screen similar to step 5 in the Clonezilla how-to. Be sure to select the 800x600 display option or else it will fail (the S10 only has a 600 pixel vertical resolution).
• 10.) Choose your language. Don't change the keymap. Start Clonezilla.
• 11.) Select "device-image disk/partition to/from image".
• 12.) Select "local_dev". If you are not saving the drive image on the same USB flash drive you booted from, insert the USB drive when prompted. Pay attention to the disk name that will scroll on the screen, since that's what you want to select on the next screen.
• 13.) Once you've selected the disk where you'll save your S10 backup image, select "savedisk". Note: this will replicate the partitions as Lenovo created them (including the strange partitioning and filesystem choices). If you feel especially ambitious and geeky, you can elect to save specific partitions and manually customize the partitioning on the new drive. I took the path of least resistance and just saved the whole thing.
• 14.) On the advanced extra parameters screen, just leave it at default.
• 15.) On the next screen, you might want to check "Remove page and hiberation files in Win if exists" to save some space on the image.
• 16.) Unless you're especially space-challenged on your backup target, keep the default compression option.
• 17.) If you want to later archive your backup image to CD/DVD, you can play around with the image file size. Just keep it under 4GB (the maximum file size supported by FAT32).
• 18.) Give the backup image a name, select the source drive, and confirm the backup job.
• 19.) Go get a cup of coffee. It took about 25 minutes to save backup the image to a 4200RPM USB 2.0 external drive.
• 20.) Assuming no errors, shut down Clonezilla live and turn off the S10.
• 21.) Follow the instructions on how to physically upgrade the S10's hard drive. Even though Laptop Mag says that the drive in their unit was a Western Digital Scorpio Blue, mine had a Hitachi 5K320 80GB drive, July 2008 vintage.
• 22.) Remove the USB drive the backup is stored on (if different from the bootable USB flash drive).
• 23.) Boot up to Clonezilla live, repeating steps 9-12 above.
• 24.) Once you've again selected the drive where you saved the S10 image backup to, select "restoredisk".
• 25.) Leave the advanced extra parameters alone.
• 26.) Again, if you want to monkey around with the partitions on your new drive, do so at your own risk. Otherwise, use the default "Use the partition table from the image" option.
• 27.) Select the backup image name, the target (i.e. the newly installed, unformatted drive), and confirm the restore job.
• 28.) Refill your cup of coffee. It took about 15 minutes to restore the image.
• 29.) Shutdown Clonezilla Live, remove all USB drives, and reboot the S10.
• 30.) Windows should boot normally. The only problem you may run into is with installed software who's licensing can detect a change in the hardware fingerprint of the system (i.e. the drive upgrade itself makes the software think it's installed on a different computer). That happened with me and my Avast! anti-virus license.
• 31.) I would recommend converting the system partition (C:) to NTFS using convert.exe.
• 32.) Finally, unless you manually tinkered with the partitions, the last step is to create a new partition for the remainder of the upgraded drive. Start > Run (or Win-R) -> diskmgmt.msc. Create a new extended partition on the S10's drive from the unpartitioned space. Format the space (I recommend using NTFS, but if you want FAT32 for whatever reason, go for it).
• 33.) Enjoy your new cavernous hard drive.

Even preserving Lenovo's partitioning, my new 320GB drive now has about a 220GB partition for media. Total cost for the upgrade: about $90. Read more...

Seiko Wrist Computer

Having been bit by the computer bug early, I was interested in tech gadgets all the way back in elementary school. I admit that I had one of those über-geeky Casio calculator/databank watches. But the ultimate object of affection was the Seiko Wrist Information System UC-2000. Dot matix heaven on a wriststrap!

Seeing it featured on the SportsCounters.com blog brought a lot of memories back, even if I never did get it from Santa.

Review: Lenovo IdeaPad S10 Netbook

So after an almost two-month wait, I finally got my $439-list ruby red Lenovo IdeaPad S10 netbook. After taking some obligatory unboxing photos, backing up the factory image, getting rid of the bloatware, and installing my normal software load, I've had a few days to get a good feel for it.

My review and a video of the S10 cold booting to a usable Windows desktop are after the jump.



First off, I'll save you from the customary review trappings like a spec sheet, detailed physical descriptions, comparisons between this and competitive netbooks, and an explanation of what a netbook is. I trust that you can get all that from doing a web search and by reading the trickle of professional reviews that will soon be a flood. Instead, I'll focus on my reactions as someone who bought this mini laptop over all of the others out there.

Initial Reactions

First reaction: As I unboxed it, I realized that pictures don't do justice to the design, build-quality, and aesthetics of the S10. It feels solid, with no thin, flexing plastic panels. The hinge feels as solid as a ThinkPad. There are rubber feet on the bottom that give it stability and bumpers on the inside of the lid that make the lid feel closed and solid without needing a latch.

I got the red version, and it's not a bright, Communist red like I was expecting, but a rich, ruby color with an automotive-like metallic paint feel. In fact, the lowercase lenovo logo is chromed and inlaid into the lid, not just glued or silkscreened on. I was also afraid that the white battery, power cords, and interior would look odd with the dominant red exterior, but it looks classy.

Second reaction: It's tiny. When you put your hand up against it, you realize that it's smaller (and although it's a bit heavier than I'd like, lighter) than a hardcover novel. This is something that you can take with you without having to even think about it. Of course, the small form factor translates into a microscopic keyboard, which seems even smaller than the 85% normal size that Lenovo claims. Maybe the alphanumeric keys are 85%, but keys like shift and tab are significantly smaller and placed awkwardly. Sadly some of the mainstay keys like Home and End are now Fn-combos. Thus, while it's not bad for occasional use, you'd be crazy to use this as a replacement for any laptop.

I'm really disappointed that Lenovo, who inherited TrackPoint technology from IBM, didn't use that here. I really prefer to use a pointing stick rather than a touchpad because it's much more comfortable (and less obvious that you're using the mouse to others since your hands never leave the home row of the keyboard. So we're left with a tiny touchpad with annoy mouse buttons that require a lot of pressure to click and make a loud clicking noise to boot.

So then I'm thinking how nice a travel mouse would be for extended use. Oh, but wait, no Bluetooth is included in the initial models. And only two USB 2.0 ports, so it's not even that practical to get a wireless mouse with a USB dongle. Bummer.

Cold Boot Video

One question I had was whether Windows (XP Home SP3, BTW) on a weak-spec'ed platform was functional compared to the solid-state disk-equipped, Linux based netbooks. Fortunately, the answer seems to be "yes." As you can see in the video below, my S10 booted from cold-off to a functional Windows desktop in about a minute (another 15 seconds or so for the disk activity to completely die down to idle), and that's with the default 512MB RAM. Using standby and hibernation closes the "instant on" gap between this machine and those using Linux-based netbooks.



From there, it's a mostly positive user experience. Unlike many notebooks I've used, the hard drive rarely runs, probably thanks to tweaking down the bloatware and unneeded services. For example, I went to turn off the Indexing Service and discovered that it wasn't installed. Very cool. Once I figured out that setting Lenovo's Energy Management utility to "Super Energy Saver" mode disables the wireless and wired network adapters, it was easy to get wireless working. I love that I can suspend or hibernate, or toggle the WiFi enable/disable button and wireless reconnects without a problem.

Given the weak integrated video chipset and the cramped 1024 x 600 screen resolution, you're not going to be playing any 3D games on it, but it did handle smooth playback of 720p-encoded WMV-HD and Divx video.

On the negative side, the S10 doesn't come with reinstallation discs but rather Lenovo's OneKey Recovery utility (apparently OEM'ed from CyberLink). Unfortunately, the printed documentation suggests that you can recover to the factory image via OneKey and a hidden partition, I couldn't figure out how to do that in OneKey. The only visible options are to backup the system partition to an image file and to create bootable recovery discs from the backup image. But there's no default image, so you have to create one before you do anything that you might want to recover from and then you have to burn it to...hmmm, no built-in or included CD/DVD burner. That's kind of messed up!

Then there's the funky drive partitioning. 80GB isn't a huge hard drive, but I was counting on XP being a fairly light install (and it is--like 7 GB or so). Unfortunately, Lenovo divided the drive into 3 partions: a small, hidden parition of a few GB (perhaps for the recovery feature that I can't access), a system partion of 30GB, and parition of 40GB that only has a directory of Lenovo drivers and installation software. But what takes the cake is that the system parition that Windows is installed on is formatted as FAT32 and the Lenovo partition is NTFS! Truly, WTF? If I wasn't afraid that I might have to re-install Windows and be unable to, I would try to dynamically resize the partitions and convert to NTFS.

And then there's the crappy selection of pre-installed software. While thankfully they didn't throw in a ton of useless, bloatware like most PC manufacturers do, they did include Norton Internet Security...on a 90-day trial. And seriously, who uses marketing literature to tout that they include Adobe Reader, a power management utility, and Windows Live Toolbar? Add OneKey and that's all that's included. Weak.

But overall, its performance seems pretty snappy, well-suited for basic web tasks and as a personal media player (though not by the built-in speakers--they're loud but they sound like the $10 radio I have on my desk at work).

That's about all of my initial reactions...here's my list of pros and cons in a less TL;DR format:

Likes

• Solid construction
• One of the best looking netbooks out there
• Quick bootup
• Long, long power cord (around 10' total)
  
• Decent price considering what you get (though specs do seem anemic compared to competitors)
  
• Fairly light considering its solid construction (2 lbs., 5 ozs. without battery; 3-cell battery adds another 6 ozs.)
  
• Good system responsiveness despite Windows, traditional hard disk, and Atom CPU
• Easy to upgrade the memory
• No trouble handling 720p-bitrate video
• Bright, crisp display
• Loud speakers
• ExpressCard slot for future 3G (or hopefully WiMAX) expansion
  
• Good WiFi signal strength
• Built-in SD/MMC/MS/MS Pro card reader
• WiFi toggle via a solid button rather than a sliding switch
  

Dislikes

• Tiny keyboard with oddly-placed keys
  
• Tiny trackpad with loud mouse buttons
• No TrackPoint (aka mouse pointer stick embedded in the keyboard)
• No volume mute button or key sequence
• Small hard drive, partitioned into two usable partitions (one FAT, one NTFS--why?!?)
  
• Lack of OEM or third-party accessories at launch
• Low-runtime battery (28 watt-hour, 3 cell battery)
• Cheap, cellphone-quality webcam
• Crappy crapware selection included
• No apparent way to do a factory restore & no included re-installation discs
• No cable management for power cord
• Multimedia cards stick out of reader (can't insert flush)
• Gets warm (though not as hot as some full-fledged notebooks I've used)
• Only two USB ports
• No Bluetooth included (yet)
• Clock-radio quality sound from speakers
• Scant screen real estate (obviously)

Verdict

Despite the long list of negatives to the S10, if you keep in mind the reason why you'd buy a netbook in the first place, this Lenovo is definitely a solid choice. While built-in WWAN and a more capacious battery would definitely help improve its coffeehouse usability, for a cheap travel companion it's a great choice. With its built-in card reader, light weight, and sturdy construction, I can see taking the S10 with me on vacation instead of a heavier, more delicate, and more expensive notebook. Although the initial config is light on hard drive capacity, it can serve as a good portable media player. And while I'd still cry if it was lost, damaged, or stolen, I'd rather lose a $400 netbook than the $1000+ ones that I normally travel with.

I can also see that it might be a decent choice as a laptop for a kid or teen, especially since the keyboard is too cramped for lengthy typing by adult hands. Searching eBay, I see plenty of sticker skins to personalize the S10 already, so it could be a good holiday gift for them.

As for me, understanding that this isn't going to be as good as an expensive ultraportable notebook, I'm happy with my decision to go with the Lenovo instead of an Eee or Wind. While some other models may offer more for the dollar, the attractiveness and build quality of the S10 is definitely on par with the well-designed shells from Dell and HP. Sure, there's no SSD or 6-cell battery, but considering it runs Windows XP decently, I'll take the bigger storage and more versatile OS of the S10 over the other Linux netbooks out there.

Questions? Leave a comment! Read more...

My Second Economic Stimulus Package

Thanks to the return of the Microsoft Live Cashback/eBay promotion, I pulled the trigger on a few pricey tech gadgets:

• A Samsung SyncMaster 22" monitor for Mrs. Turtle
• Also for the Mrs., a Dell Inspiron 530s slim desktop PC
• Two Western Digital WD10EACS 1TB hard drives (for my Drobo)

As an aside, I'm going to pick up my Lenovo IdeaPad S10 (from my first stimulus) tonight from UPS will-call. Can't wait!

Fragile DRM

I'm sick and tired of DRM.

Now, while some might be opposed to digital rights management under any circumstances, I'm willing to put up with reasonable controls...but only if they work.

Case in point: Netflix's Watch Instantly feature. It's one of the most attractive features of the service, and when coupled with something like the Roku Netflix Player, it's hard to see why this isn't the future of media delivery. One thing though: it uses Microsoft's DRM, and in practice, that's fragile at best.

I used to be able to Watch Instantly on my PC and our home theater PC, both running Vista. Aside from the annoyance of having DRM software updates every couple of months, it was a pain-free experience. Until we upgraded to Vista Service Pack 1--which promptly broke Watch Instantly. Following the Netflix and Microsoft instructions to reset the DRM (essentially creating new keys and throwing out the old ones...you didn't need those old keys for other, um, protected content, right?), nothing worked. Some even said that Netflix was telling people to downgrade from SP1!

I finally reloaded Vista on my PC, and lo and behold, Watch Instantly started working again even with SP1. But to this day, it doesn't work on our HTPC. And now, the self-service instructions that Netflix used to offer have been replaced by instructions to call their technical support to resolve the problem.

And I haven't even hit the other frequent problems of the hardware fingerprint changing (such as changing a hard drive or motherboard) or running out of unique machines that Watch Instantly can be used on before having to call Netflix to increase the count.

Firefox? Opera? Mac? Linux? None of them work because Microsoft's scheme uses Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer (maybe Mac support by year's end, but you get the point).

"Handle with care" is all I have to say... Read more...