Hardware

3G Mobile broadband - it's here and it's good

Liam Westley — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 21:04:16 GMT

Some months back I bought a HP 6910p laptop which included a HSDPA card, and it even came with a Vodafone SIM. I did look at the data plan from Vodafone; £15 per month for 3Gb of data, with no minimum contract.

I liked the idea of a larger data allowance than the 40Mb I currently have with my T-Mobile contract. I’ve never upgraded this original Web’n’Walk contract; I get 200 minutes, free answer phone collection and 40Mb of data for £16.50 per month. If I upgraded to get 1Gb of data (with laptop use) it would be closer to £40 per month.

I also was interested in having a backup method for Internet access. The BT Broadband in my office has suffered intermittent outages over the past month or so. A cheap, emergency backup connection which could handle substantial data transfers was tempting.

Then an e-mail arrived in my inbox which included a special offer for a 3G broadband deal from 3. When bought via Quidco (a cashback, co-operative web site) you could get a free Huawei E160G USB HSDPA dongle on an 18 month contract at half price monthly fees. That meant a 3Gb monthly contract was only £5. However, my sweet spot was a 5Gb monthly contract for £7.50. If you included the £12.50 cashback, even after a £5 annual membership fee for Quidco, the overall cost was £7.08 per month for that 5Gb of data.

Well, the dongle arrived last week. The first thing I did was to ignore the dongle and try the SIM card in the 3G built in to my HP laptop. With the HP Wireless Assistant I enabled the WWAN (3G) card and up popped the HP Connection manager application you use to connect to a WWAN. It came with configurations for all the major global network operators. I selected ‘Three UK’ as my network and clicked on connect. Then it was straight onto http://www.speedtest.net. It concluded I had a download speed of 1.3Mb/s and upload of around 350kb/s.

It turns out that my 3G wireless broadband was three times faster than my first ever broadband (cable broadband at 512kb/s, 128 kb/s). Even more astonishing it has an upload speed equal to my wired ADSL2 Sky Broadband Max connection.

Of course, that’s the first floor in my home in West London. In my first floor office near Kew Gardens station, which is a mobile signal dead spot, the speeds dropped; 750kb/s download and 300kb/s upload.

In the office, the HP laptop and dongle varied in performance much more than at my home. The HP laptop built in card suffered compared to the dongle. I found this surprising because I would have assumed the laptop, with 3G aerials built into the chassis, would come out on top, but it seemed the dongle obtains a better signal and therefore better performance. I suspect the laptop lid, being in a docking station beneath a monitor stand is shielded more than the dongle sticking out the side of the laptop.

In conclusion I’m very impressed by 3G mobile broadband. The dongle included drivers embedded as a USB mass storage device, and they worked first time (with a reboot) under Windows Vista 64-bit. Even better it works with the built in 3G card.

Never can I now claim not to be able to receive e-mails because I’m out of WiFi coverage. 3 even allow Skype usage – they encourage it, with a €1.02 coupon in the starter pack.

Even more interesting the inclusive 5Gb data plan is usable on any of the 3 networks globally. That includes Austria, Australia, Denmark, Hong Kong, Italy, Ireland and Sweden. Now, if isn’t that an excuse to arrange that holiday ...

Benchmarking my external 2.5" drive (laptop) - USB 2.0 versus eSATA

Liam Westley — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 08:12:00 GMT

When I bought a new laptop, I immediately replaced the hard drive with something bigger, and not wanting to see a SATA notebook drive go to waste I bought an Akasa ENP2NES P2 series external enclosure. I've used their 3.5" enclosures for some time, but this was the first 2.5" version.

Even better, the enclosure had both eSATA and USB 2.0 ports. My Shuttle SD37-P2 barebones desktop includes an eSATA port, although combined with Intel Matrix RAID on that box, the 3.5" enclosures never got on with it. However, I decided to have a go with the 2.5" version.

Importantly I decided to use a disk drive benchmark program from www.datamarck.com to compare the USB 2.0 and eSATA performance. All these are for read access only.

USB 2.0 - 28 Mb/s average read, ranging from 30 Mb/s to 23 Mb/s

eSATA - 37 Mb/s average read, ranging from 48 Mb/s to 23 Mb/s

Only rough figures from a couple of runs on each, but that seals it - Virtual PC images on the external drive run on my Shuttle PC from now on. They will get faster disc access and hardware virtualisation which my Windows Server 2003 box (Shuttle SB51G) doesn't have.

Buying a new laptop - HP 6910p, accessories and Vista 64-bit

Liam Westley — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:59:12 GMT

After a month of owning my new laptop I've written up a series of posts 'Liam buys a new laptop' about how I made the choice of a HP 6910p laptop, what accessories I bought and my initial impressions of Vista 64-bit as an operating system.

Part 1 – Which one to buy?

Part 2 – Laptop inflation, accessories add another 50% - oops!

Part 3 – First impressions of my new Vista 64-bit development platform.

Liam buys a new laptop (Part 3) – First impressions

Liam Westley — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:48:38 GMT

Operating system installation

The first thing with any new PC is to configure the hard disc partitions, update the device drivers and get on with installing the rest of your software.

The HP backup and recovery wizard happily burnt my recovery DVDs which were tested on the upgraded 320Gb hard drive. The recovery process created a recovery partition, an o/s tools partition (quickly deleted) and installed Vista Business (32-bit) complete with all the HP drivers on a single huge 300Gb C: partition. A quick installation of Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8.5 Special Edition that came free with PC Pro magazine and I had resized the C: drive to 100Gb, and created two new 95Gb partitions for D: and E: drives.

The next step was to download all the 64-bit Vista drivers from the HP website, around five pages of downloads, around 70 file downloads. Good news, all the built in hardware is supported, so on went an MSDN licence of Vista Ultimate 64-bit. It all went very well even down to the SD card reader (normally a nightmare 64-bit driver area) and logging in with the finger print reader.

Other software

The great resource I had for the installation is the audit of software installations from my other PCs. I have a single Excel spreadsheet for every PC. This lists every item of software installed on each PC, including a download location (if free) and licence codes where relevant. A ‘shared’ spreadsheet keeps track of the multiple licence usage of software from my Microsoft Action Pack and Kaspersky Internet Security bundles.

It was easy to take the spreadsheet of installations from my 32 bit Vista development desktop, weed out the ‘old’ software I don’t use any more. Old software includes items such as Visual Studio 2005 now that 2008 is out and can compile to the .NET 2.0 framework.

The joy of virtualisation

The first software I installed (after drivers and Kaspersky) was Virtual PC 2007 and a 16Gb VHD disk image for my Windows XP/SQL Server 2000/Visual Studio 2003 development environment I use for my main client (don’t start me on spending most of my time in VS2003). That meant I had a working development environment for my main client up and running within 15 minutes. This is definitely the quickest that a new laptop I have owned has been ready for real development.

64-bit goodness and badness

I was ready for various software not to work under 64-bit Vista, but the only two real casualties are Firefox (shame on you guys, no 64-bit version of Firefox 3, and no plans for Firefox 4 either) and open source PDF Creator, the PDF printer driver I normally use to create PDF files. Fortunately IE7 has nearly caught up with Firefox, with tabbed browsing and opening multiple tabs from a favourite folder. I would rather have had Firefox, but let's hope they catch up soon.

The real surprise was explorer shell extensions like 7-Zip and TortoiseSVN come in 64-bit versions. Given the machine main purpose is for software development, the lack of TortoiseSVN would have been a showstopper. I’m just not a command line programmer, too lazy, so relying solely on SVN.EXE wouldn’t have been an option.

Of course the real advantage of Vista 64-bit is that I can finally have a 4Gb machine where I get to use all of the installed memory. My Vista 32-bit desktop only recognises 2Gb of the 4Gb of installed memory which is a crying shame when I want to use a virtual machine. With 4Gb available, I can now run my VS2003 virtual machine with 1.5Gb of dedicated RAM and still leave 2.5Gb for the host operating system. Hopefully the 4Gb should give me plenty of room to run Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008, IIS apps, and still have one or two virtual machines running Windows Server 2008.

Summary

For just under £800 I think I’ve got a bargain power user laptop. The screen isn’t the biggest, but it’s a laptop I can carry in a standard briefcase or carry on flight bag, and the travel battery gives me around 5 hours heavy use and nearer 10 on standard office tasks. It’s got a very good keyboard, a 3G card ready for activation and a built in SD reader that can handle SDHC cards so I can use the 8Gb microSD from my phone without a dongle.

Liam buys a new laptop;

Liam buys a new laptop (Part 2) – Laptop inflation, accessories add another 50% - oops!

Liam Westley — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:41:58 GMT

In Part 1 of my blog series, I described the partisan decision process that led me to buy a new HP 6910p laptop. Having decided on teh laptop to buy, the only question, how much will it eventually cost?

There were always going to be immediate upgrades; the 120Gb hard drive was always going to be too small (it was replaced by a 320Gb model) and I was always going to replace the 2Gb of RAM with a 2 x 2Gb dual channel matched pair.

The unexpected bonus I had was managing to get hold of a model with a build in 3G HSPDA card. I haven’t activated the Vodafone SIM card, but at £15 per month with no contract (3Gb monthly limit) I’ll be sorely tempted if I end up working at a client which restricts my internet access.

So here is my BOM - a laptop including the accessories I arbitrarily deemed necessary in spite of the frown from my accountant (all prices include VAT and delivery charges);

HP 6910p Core2Duo 2.2Ghz,120Gb,2Gb,DVD+/-,14.1",3G Wifi	eBay	£507.50
Western Digital 320GB 2.5" Laptop Hard Drive SATAII 5400rpm 8MB - upgrade 120Gb hard drive	eBuyer	£79.97
2 x 2GB Corsair KIT DDR2 667MHz non-ECC (dual channel) Akasa AK-ENP2NES-SL eSata/USB 2.0 external drive caddy (for 120Gb drive	scan.co.uk	£78.69

HP basic docking station PA286A (for use at client site)	eBay	£20.49
HP advanced docking station PA287A (for home)	eBay	£31.00
HP advanced docking station PA287A (for Kew office)	eBay	£32.50

HP travel battery, extra 3.5 hours	eBay	£27.00

HP laptop hard drive caddy with screws	eBay	£4.20
TransFlash microSD Mini SD to SD & Mini SD - make that SD card slot take all SD formats as it is SDHC compatible	eBay (Hong Kong)	£2.00

	GRAND TOTAL	£783.35

I have to say, the HP hard drive caddy is a terribly frivolous purchase. This is a tiny amount of metal cladding to wrap a standard notebook drive that just makes it easy to swap the hard drive in the laptop. These can be hard to get hold off, so it’s a nice to have at what is quite a low price for something so esoteric.

The advanced docking station includes an ExpressCards slot, DVI video out, a multibay II drive bay (at home I added a spare DVD-ROM I had already had), the USB port with extra power pin (that means I can use my nc4010 DVD/CDRW external caddy in the office at Kew). Also, all the docking stations can use the DVI out and analog VGA simultaneously for dual screen use on two external monitors.

Even better, HP have reworked the concept of a second battery. No longer does it replace the DVD drive, but instead it clips onto the bottom of the laptop, very much like my travel battery for my old nc4010 ultraportable laptop. Where it improves on the nc4010 is that you can have the travel battery attached even when the notebook is in the docking station. This means the docking station can happily recharge both batteries.

Finally, I also reused a compact flash to PCCard adapter which I had from a Xircom CF network card bought for the very first HP iPaq, when CF was the only memory card standard around.

So I now have a 2.2GHz Core Duo, 1280 x 800 14.1” laptop with 4Gb RAM, 320GB hard drive, gigabit networking, WiFi a/b/g, Bluetooth, 3G data, an array of docking stations and a travel battery. A real road warrior work horse.

Liam buys a new laptop;

Liam buys a new laptop (Part 1) – Which one to buy?

Liam Westley — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:26:05 GMT

Just over month ago I finally upgraded from my aging HP nc6000 laptop. Equipped with a Pentium 1.6M and 1.5Gb it wasn’t an ideal platform for Windows Vista, Visual Studio 2008 or virtualisation engines. I was also really feeling the lack of dual core CPU oomph compared to my desktop setup.

I had been tracking a candidate for a replacement laptop for some months, a HP 6910, although I nearly bought a Dell Latitude D630 (but a waiting time of more than 60 days put me off). I knew I was in for a world of pain, as my nc6000 and nc4010 laptops all use the same power supplies and docking stations, all of which would be rendered obsolete by buying a newer model 6910p. Not only would I have to factor in the cost of the actual laptop, but all the 'bits' which I consider **essential** additions...

Why a HP 6910p? I have had nothing but good experiences with my previous HP laptops. I wanted one of the corporate models as they have longer warranties, more robust screen protection and can use docking stations. I like docking stations, at home, at the office; I even like them so much I drop spare ones at client sites, even if I only visit one day a fortnight. It's such a relief not to have to take a power supply with me everywhere I go, never mind the grief of connecting all the various network/monitor cables.

Corporate notebooks also tend to include a trackpoint as well as a trackpad. It’s a very subjective issue, but I can't get on with trackpads. As a touch typist you can tap them really easily with your thumbs, which means random cursor madness in Word. Not fun.

My other requirement is that the laptop should by under 2.5Kg in weight and fit my standard leather briefcase which is only about 5cm wide. I care about that more than having a large screen.

Finally, the HP scores on a few other points

The parts are easy to get and relatively cheap (compared to, say, Sony or Apple)
They support a wide range of drivers for your o/s (unbelievably this includes Windows 2000 Pro)
They are bulk bought by corporates with more money than sense, so there are lots of cheap spares available on eBay*

So that’s a decision - a HP 6910p laptop. It has some good reviews from various sites, while not managing a ‘best buy’ or ‘A-list’ award, it generally gets a solid ‘recommended’. Very HP, worthy rather than exciting.

Liam buys a new laptop;

Virtual PC on two monitors without additional software

Liam Westley — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:21:06 GMT

I've finally moved my main development environment on my desktop to Vista, and had the issue that I still do quite a bit of work for one client in Visual Studio 2003 which is not supported. No problem - run up a Virtual PC 2007 image running XP Pro SP2 with just VS2003 and SQL Server 2000 and I have a perfect solution. On a dual core processer with virtualisation support and lots of memory it runs fine.

However I also run on dual monitors and I'm very used to developing with VS on one screen, and my SQL tools on another. Also I like Virtual PC in full screen mode. Unfortunately you cannot maximise, or even resize the Virtual PC screen across both monitors.

But the saviour is the hard to find span option for Remote Desktop, not available via the dialogue but as a command line switch (needs both monitors to have the same resolution);

C:\Windows\System32\mstsc.exe /span

So, configure your Virtual PC image to allow remote connections, start it up, but don't login. Then use remote desktop to connect over your two monitors. It all is one big display, 2560 x 1024 in my case, so dialogs get split and you can' maximise code windows but it really works nicely. The best bonus, running a source code diff in TortoiseSVN over two windows means the original code is one screen and the changed code is on the other - cool.

Wot, no serial port on my main dev PC - time for virtualisation!

Liam Westley — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 01:10:01 GMT

I've just been porting some old .NET 1.1 code to .NET 2.0. I started work on a Windows service which communicates via an RS232 serial port (remember those?); a common interface standard for broadcast television equipment. I started up my Windows service which I'd just ported to .NET 2.0 and it hung when trying to send the second command to the serial port.

I suspected the RS232 library and Win32 API calls, but then the light went on - I only have an RS232 port due to a bluetooth dongle, and it doesn't really work like a pukka RS232 port. This was even with a Windows service that 'fires and forgets', not waiting for a response from the serial port and just keeps sending data regardless of any acknowledgement.

Thanks to the guys at http://www.hw-group.com it is not a problem. One very quick (and free - thanks guys!) download later, my machine has a completely configurable virtual serial port which points at a TCP/IP address and port, and I have a working Windows service again.

Goodbye DVD-R backups, hello HDD backups

Liam Westley — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 02:08:51 GMT

Finally, I had enough with my weekly backup to DVD-R discs. 3 x 4.5Gb DVD-Rs every Monday. Even with the burning spread across three PCs (server, workstation and a laptop) it was a good 90 minutes for burning and verification to complete. There was the occasional duff burn in there too, and while it's burning you can't modify the files you are backing up either. Grrrr.

I didn't want to automate the backups overnight. As I am environmentally minded, when I'm not in the office I don't like my PCs being switched on. I could have set my burn software to switch the PC off after burning, but it's all too much work.

So I bought two external USB/eSATA enclosures from Akasa (www.akasa.com.tw), product code for the UK, AK-ENP2SATA-BKUK. Inside each enclosure is a Samsung Spinpoint 400Gb SATA II drive.

The enclosures are great, if you put a SATA drive in them, you can flip a switch to go between USB 2.0 or eSATA (IDE is USB 2.0 only). As my development PC is a modern Shuttle XPC I can hook them into the eSata port and have full drive speed externally. It's almost like the SCSI drives I used 10 years ago.

The price was around £150 for the lot. It will take a year to fill up the drives. That will compares to £30 in DVD-R media costs but more importantly, about 1 hour of my time per week. Now that costs a lot more than £150. I will be using robocopy.exe and will be alternating each weekly backup, to a new folder on a different drive. This is proper weekly backups, not just disaster recovery.

Recovery of files will be a breeze, and I can use the drives for Virtual PC as well - eSata is wonderful for full speed access to Virtual PC image files.

Technorati tags: eSata, Backup strategy

ActiveSync 4.5 - fixes synchronisation of contacts with Notes

Liam Westley — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 13:25:00 GMT

When I upgraded the ROM some time ago on my MDA Vario (Windows Mobile 5.0, Phone) it became a lot more stable, but suddenly any contact with additional notes disappeared from the synchronisation process. It's a known issue (see http://hardware.mcse.ms/message301089.html)

I had thought of buying third party synchronisation software, but I installed the latest ActiveSync 4.5 two days ago, and it now all works again, just like before. What a relief.

Now to get rid of those duplicate entries I created, copies of important contacts with the notes removed ...