I admit it, I was jealous of someone's iPad. They were reading The Economist, for free, as they were a print subscriber. I'm a print subscriber too. However, I don't have an iPad or an iPhone, just an Android phone and a Kindle. As soon as I got the Kindle, I looked up how to get The Economist on it. £9.99 per month. Hmmm, twice as much again as my print subscription and I wanted to maintain the print subscription. No way Amazon. Fortunately some nice person wrote similar comments on The Economist ......

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Last Wednesday I was fortunate to be invited to a sneak preview of the next generation Three MiFi unit, the Huawei E585. Many thanks to all those who posted questions both via this blog or via @westleyl on Twitter. I think I made sure I asked every question posed to the MiFi product manager from Three UK, and so here's the answers you were after. What is a MiFi? For those who are wondering, a MiFi unit is a 3G broadband modem combined with a WiFi access point, providing 3G broadband data access to ......

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I've been invited to a preview of the next generation Three mobile Mi-Fi unit in their London offices this week. If you've got feedback on the current MiFi unit; niggles, wish list items or general feedback, or you've got any questions about what the next generation MiFi unit might be, drop me an e-mail or post a comment with your question on this blog. I'll be taking any questions from my blog or my twitter account @westleyl to Three, and if I get an answer I can publish, I'll add to this blog post ......

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Today, I received two Corsair Value Select 4Gb DDR SO-DIMMs (from overclock.co.uk) for my aging HP 6910p to give it the extra lease of life to keep it going until the end of 2010. And here is the proof that Windows 7 64-bit happily sees all 8Gb, There are no 4Gb modules are officially supported for the HP 6910p (they didn’t exist when it was first build). I was taking a bit of a gamble, and relying on the UK distance selling regulations which meant that even if they didn’t work I’d be able to send ......

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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 ......

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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 ......

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UPDATE 15 February 2010 : See Virtual PC Guy's Blog here for a crucial item of information about the Windows Startup repair not restoring the Hyper-V service as an automated service. Basically once you reboot, although the o/s loads, you cannot run any virtual machines. To resolve this you should remote login to the Hyper-V Server (or direct for Windows Sever 2008 R2) and execute the following command; bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype auto I had recently successfully used Gnome Partition Editor ......

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If you install Hyper-V Server it comes without the usual Windows Server UI. On a laptop this means there is no control panel applet or system tray battery icon available to adjust the power configuration. It's highly unlikely that the default option of Balanced is what you really want for hosting virtual machines, and you will ideally to set it to High Performance instead. No need to worry, you need the command line tool, powercfg. Run the command line with the option list and then use the -setactive ......

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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/mes... 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, ......

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I’ve previously described my reasoning for buying a business laptop like the HP 6910p, http://geekswithblogs.net/t... I’m now feeling even better about that decision after the latest ‘upgrade’ to my main laptop; adding a second internal hard drive to simplify my use of virtual machines. The problem I use virtual machines quite regularly. One major client has a legacy application that requires Visual Studio 2003, which in turn requires Windows XP Professional as ......

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June 12th 2010 - I headed over to Three's London offices to take a peak at the next generation MiFi unit on Wednesday, and here's the scoop on the next generation MiFi unit, the E585, http://geekswithblogs.net/t... I have been using a 3G Mobile Broadband dongle from Three [http://www.three.co.uk/Mob... ] for just over a year and have been very happy with the service. It helps that I am on a half price ......

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I recently bought a new Windows Mobile phone, Benq E72, and one reason it won over a Samsung model is the standard mini-USB connector for data and charging (hint, hint, Nokia). Why does this matter? Apart from charging off any laptop, and off an 4 x AA battery pack I already have for emergency charging, it can even charge off the weirdest devices. Here it is with a standard USB to mini USB lead charging from my Philips DVD recorder which has a USB port for displaying photos and playing MP3s. If you ......

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I was reinstalling my HP nc6000 laptop after putting in a new 100Gb drive and went through the process of installing the latest ATI Catalyst drivers for the standard Radeon series (v6.11 for Windows XP Pro, desktop version) and there are finally options to rotate displays, including proper support for rotating either one or both of my desktops. Handy, as you don't want to rotate the LCD panel on the laptop, but the rotating the external monitor is really handy. I love editing Word documents in A4 ......

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DisplayLink USB Last week I wrote a review of a Kensington USB docking station which included DisplayLink technology to allow an external display to be added to a laptop via a USB 2.0 port. I described how I used this docking station to enable the holy grail of three external screens on my laptop. You can read about it here, http://geekswithblogs.net/t... Declaring an interest On publishing, I promoted the blog post via Twitter where recently someone had bemoaned ......

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As a developer I’ve become used to multiple monitors to increase my productivity. Debugging applications is much easier when one monitor is running Visual Studio and a second monitor is displaying the application being debugged, or SQL Management Studio, or your Locals window. When I plugged my latest HP 6910p laptop into the docking station I was amazed to find that it supported dual external displays; both the DVI and analogue VGA ports can be active simultaneously. It’s a real advantage to get ......

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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 ......

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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. ......

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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 ......

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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. ......

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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 ......

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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 ......

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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 ......

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The problem I am moving my server and main development system out of a home office into rented office space. As I'm only going to be in the office two of three days a week, and being a hippy environmental type, I wanted to ensure my file server was not always switched on. Anything to reduce my carbon footprint a fraction. The solution WakeOnLan was the perfect solution I thought. I configured the server in the BIOS to start up on a Wake On LAN packet. With this I can turn on the server, and once ......

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Great article about updating your laptop, if it has an ATI graphics chip, to the latest drivers, http://www.theinquirer.net/... Basically you download and unpack the latest ATI drivers, run the free utility to add the relevant .INF file for your ATI mobile graphics chip, and then the setup runs as normal. So now my HP Compaq nc6000 business notebook is using the latest ATI Catalyst driver released in December 2005, instead of the HP latest driver released in July 2005 (which is actually ......

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A combination of the new smartphone and Christmas means a bit of a delay since my last post. But, hey, I now have a good perspective to draw some conclusions on my T-Mobile MDA Vario (HTC Wizard, Windows Mobile 2005 smartphone). The summary is based upon having been a long time Windows Mobile user. I started with a Casio E-100 (Windows CE 2.11), upgraded that to an iPaq 3630 (Pocket PC 2002, 2003), and then moved my mobile phone to a C500 (HTC Typhoon) Windows Mobile 2003 smartphone. I always found ......

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T-mobile have tempted me to change from Orange with a cracking special offer, with a 40Mb per month GPRS allowance, coupled with 200 minutes of cross network calls for a very cheap £16 per month for 12 months (and £35 for 6 months). And I was given a HTC Wizard handset free as part of the deal. So I have upgraded my mobile phone from the HTC Typhoon (sold as; I-mate SP3, Qtek 8010, Orange SPV C500/C500S, Audiovox SMT 5600, Dopod 565) to the HTC Wizard (sold as; Qtek 9100, I-mate K-Jam, ......

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