A short while ago I had a minor problem Tablet Hinge popped and since then I’ve been suffering Missing my tablet. But the good news is its back. In seven days, including a delay while they gathered parts. I’m very impressed and very happy.
My tablet PC is being fixed at the moment and boy am I missing it, but strangely for all the wrong reasons.
Keyboards
You never realise just how used to a keyboard until you use a different one. Now I normally use two a day, one on the work PC and that on my tablet. Since my tablet has a US keyboard and everything else is UK I already have to do things differently, but today I'm struggling. The big reason is that I borrowed Melissa's Dell XPS M1330 and the keyboard on that is just not right.
The first difference is that the keyboard has keys in very different places, and I've been coding all day. Home, End, Page up, just aren't in the same place as anything I've used before. That includes Toshiba, IBM/Lenovo and normal desktop. Worse the key width is just a little bit bigger than a normal keyboard such as the one I'm using right now. The number of times today I've type *( instead of ().
However the greatest problem I've had is with the Shift and Ctrl keys. These keys are a bit wider than most other keys and unless you hit them in the centre, they don't go down. I've typed and corrected [ more times than I've typed {.
Widescreen
I bought the last non-Widescreen laptop that Lenovo make, and with Visual Studio as my primary application I have my windows docked just where I want them. I go for a two column, with an extra row across the main window [At this point I would scribble a little diagram to show you I mean if I had my tablet]. It just doesn't fit on a Widescreen machine. Maybe I've got spoiled by 1400x1050, but 1280x800 just doesn't allow enough vertical space to have the errors or a callstack showing at the bottom while still seeing a useful amount of code above. Strange really since my previous laptop was 1024x768.
Weight and Balance
The nice thing about a tablet is that the unit is a single flat piece of technology and so (convertibles in tablet mode, slates all the time) the balance is much easier than using an opened laptop on your knee. I've got so used to relaxing in the evening with my tablet on my knee, I'd forgotten that the screen helps those normal laptops topple backwards. Fortunately I didn't drop it though.
Tablet
Yes I miss the pen for pointing, clicking and hand writing, but it these other factors that caught me by surprise. Hurry up Lenovo. I really love my Tablet.
Unfortunately the hinge has popped on my tablet, when I came to close it up last night. It felt very loose wobbling horizontally and looking at the case it tablet mode I can see that the top is separating from the bottom, allowing the hinge to wobble. Will be contacting Lenovo/IBM today to see what will happen.
Hard drives these days seem ridiculously large, and yet I've run out of disk space! So where does 120Gb go on an installation of Vista these days?
Manufacturer losses
Firstly its not 120Gb. Its actually 120,000,000,000 bytes or 7.3% less. Disk manufacturers conveniently believe users cannot multiply by 1024 and so they round it down for us.
OS reinstallation partition. No shiny Windows Vista DVD with your laptop? That's because they've saved some money by eating up your drive space. I loose a whopping 5.15Gb of mine to the ServiceV002 partition.
So really I only have 106Gb.
Total loss 14Gb
Windows losses
So how much memory have you got on your machine? Bigger is better right? Well sort of? As soon as you hibernate that laptop that you need at least the same amount of space to swap the memory out to. Lose another 2Gb
Page files, event with a 2Gb machine I somehow need a whopping 6.1Gb of swap.
Finally remember that annoying Disk Cleanup tool from XP, well it's actually useful now. It managed to root out another 4.3Gb of disk space. Mainly from our old friend the temp folder 3Gb, but also from Windows Error reporting, Office cached installation files, and lots of Windows update patch folders.
Total loss 12.4Gb
Stuff I really want
That leaves me with three parts I should have left. Windows itself, Programs and of course data.
Total 44Gb
So where is the rest?
Now I have to take some of the blame here. I've been trying to get Windows Seven working on a VHD. The VHD was 6Gb and the copy that I took and recycled was another 5Gb. So 11Gb was in the recycle bin.
The one thing I've noticed since Vista is that the world has gone backup crazy. My hardware provider, Lenovo, provide a tool to do it. Windows itself does. Most annoyingly my Anti-Virus does too.
Now I can turn off Windows backup without any annoying nags, but if I try to do the same with OneCare I cannot get a green icon. Fortunately I can tell OneCare to backup to a network drive.
That unfortunately leaves the Lenovo backup. As much as I am a great believer in system images it can't really take up 40Gb can it. Actually yes it can. It took a full backup after I built the machine at about 15Gb, and then a couple of incrementals at 11Gb, mainly due to the VHD.
So what can I do?
Strangely enough I'm going to say goodbye to the Lenovo backup and restore. I have a plan. I have already used the service partition to export myself a couple of DVDs that I can use to the rebuild the system, and should I have to do that I'll have a whole 111Gb drive to write to. Next I am turning off Lenovo Backup for good, and should I ever rebuild my machine again I'll use the options to remove it from the machine install.
Next I am going to rebuild myself a modest partition of 20Gb and install Windows Seven. Partly because I want to try it out, but also because I get to install a clean Windows without any hardware manufacturer enhancements. I'll still have to track down drivers but I'm looking forwards to picking my build again, just as I did on XP.
Finally I am going to save my pennies, I want an SSD and they don't come in big sizes yet (at least without a lot of pennies). When I get that I am going to take an image and slap it on another drive. The image will be neat and clean and have no local backups enabled. Maybe its living on the edge but if I really have a problem that I can't reboot from, I'll have an old hard drive sitting around ready to go.
Its been a while since I looked at Reliability and Performance monitor, but saw somebody else doing the same recently. Now I am not sure if using laptop affects reliability over a normal machine, but compared to others, my Vista experience is more varied. On the whole I am very happy, I just get annoyed when like today my machine fails to come back from hibernation. So on with a quick review of the last three months
September
September shows the highest recorded reliability with 9.17 but then drops rapidly
Initially I see 3x Disruptive shutdown, 2x OS Stopped Working, 2x Outlook.exe stopped responding, 1x WinWord stopped responding, 1x TSMService.exe stopped responding, and 1x iexplore.exe stopped responding. The cliff highlighted is due to KHost.exe, Kservice.exe and 4x MSIExec.exe so I can safely blame BBC iPlayer for that.
October
October is pretty flat going from 7.12 on the 30th Sept to 7.52 on the 21st Oct. In between there are fails in PresentationDirector.exe, 3x Disruptive Shutdown, OneNote.exe, 1x DevEnv (VS 2005), OS Stopped working, BITS.exe, 2x TSMService.exe, 3x My own programs and 2x TabTip.exe (both on the 22nd)
November
November has ten Disruptive shutdowns but overall reliability gets better.
December
December sees a move to IE8 Beta, which is great but brings instability with it. IE8's 'reopen tabs if I crashed' feature is well worth putting up with any other issues it brings with it. Otherwise I get 5 disruptive shutdowns and a couple more iPlayer issues.
January so far
Well today's Disruptive shutdown, along with three IE crashes, 1x explorer.exe and an msnmgr.exe, drops me from a peak of 8.15 down to 6.83.
Conclusion
As I said before I am very happy with Vista on the whole, and I am looking forwards to Windows 7. However somewhere between Windows and my Hardware, I really ought to be seeing a lot less disruptive shutdowns. In this case I have to blame Lenovo. My hardware is less than 20 months old, being a Thinkpad X61 Tablet. The install seems a very customised Vista build with more time spent on the Lenovo pieces that the Vista install. I would personally love to flatten it and install plain Windows, no OEM components and compare how that goes.
Technorati Tags: Tablet, Tablet PC, Pen
When I first thought about buying a tablet, I always thought it might just be a gimmick. I can do everything with a keyboard, why would I want to use a pen. My previous experiences with PDAs left me less than enthralled, but I reasoned that I would at least end up using a pen to browse the web one handed while relaxing on the sofa in the evening so it would be worth it.
How wrong I was! What I am actually finding is that keyboard has become the input method to be used only when I had nothing else. I use pen to write text of course but some of the things I've also done with a pen in preference to a keyboard surprise me. For example,
One line code changes in Visual Studio - even down to the semi-colon ;
FTP - more text that you must get right and without a dictionary to help
Copying and Pasting (flicks)
Screen grabs (Snipping Tool)
Draw some notes and expose my handwriting to the world!
In fact the most surprising thing is that my wife even uses it with a pen, although to quote "I only like making the cursor follow it round, it bugs me if I want to do some work"
Technorati Tags: Tablet PC, TabletPC, Vista, BM, Lenovo X61 tablet After all the speculating I've finally gone out and purchased a Tablet PC. It's a Lenovo X61 Tablet and ignoring the hassle of getting the machine, I do like it a lot so far. There was the initial disappointment of a single broken pixel, but it is only one and that's the way they sell them these days. Its only one in 1,470,000. Infact only one in 4,410,000 as there are 3 LCD sub pixels per pixel. I am left with many questions Will I actually use the pen long term? What is Vista like? Can it survive 5 years of daily humping around in a rucksack, at least as well as my old Toshiba? Hardware - speed and build First the good points. It really does fly. Well at least it passes the acid test for me, which is that Visual Studio is faster them it used to be on my old machine. In fact it is not just faster. The first time that I did a build I had to run it again to check hadn't missed it. That was what I call fast. Admittedly it was only a dozen files in a single project but it was literally instantaneous so I am pleased. The build is rock solid. It has no flex like my Toshiba had from new which I hope means it will survive at least as long. It is heavier than I would have expected with the big battery on it, but it is definitely much lighter than my old two battery solution. Stability There is quite a lot of noise on the web about the stability of the X61 with Turbo memory, I have seen multiple blue screens, which I can live with as I'm sure the much vaunted Vista SP1 will go some way towards resolving those. However what's far more annoying is the hanging lock up. I can re-create these any time I wish by trying to log on a second user using Fast-User switching. Since I no longer have an option to run Internet Explorer as another user and have that screen on the same desktop, then logging on as that same user is now the only option. Shame I have to log off my High privilege user first. Handwriting is a revelation Here I am on the train, feeling very tired this morning and therefore suffering with a little RSI. So just after the 3rd paragraph I switched to using the pen. Now anyone who has seen my handwriting especially that produced on a moving train will held you lam not an ideal candidate for pen-based computing. Yet, it works perfectly. Well nearly but the editing tools are first rate. So even when you make a small mistake, its just a quick tap to get the list of alternate words up again. I am currently finding I have to correct only about once every other sentence, so that's a huge improvement over any other pen interface I have ever used before. Vista I am still coming to terms with vista. Some things are great. For instance any Nokia phone just works as a modem via Bluetooth. We don't even need to download and install Nokia's hideous software (sorry guys but I like integration with the OS, I don't want another systray application always running just because marketing think nobody can use windows to connect). On the other hand I the entire way that network connections works is completely different. I think I am about half way through the learning curve here, i.e. I am at the acceptance stage. I don't know how long before the luddite in me starts to see the benefits. I can say the same for the new start menu too. I still don't see the benefit particularly when using the pen, as we get no auto-suggest. Integrated search is nice but I haven't found it useful yet, although making the menu bigger does help. I mention this because I usually tend to embrace change. I have friends who never managed to move away the classic Windows 3.1 style start menu, and in fact I remember one of them who when seeing XP's start button for the first time, took only long enough to utter "What is that?" before turning it off. Maybe I'll mellow with time. The resource monitor off Task Manager is great for watching things like which application is using how much Network, great for working out whether Visual studio is still publishing to a website or just crashed. Sync centre is a good idea but doesn't seem there yet. I was expecting it to take over from Sync Toy and yet I end up using them both. In Summary I love it. Good job really
Technorati Tags: Tablet, Tablet PC, Lenovo, Bad Service After all the time I've taken to do the research, weigh up this machine over that machine, the purchase was deceptively simple. It all started 6 weeks ago... Like all good researched purchases, it started with an evenings web research. Not even froogle, sorry google products, can give you a comprehensive list in the UK, so you have to perform the same search on Dabs, MicroWarehouse, Insight, PCWorld (actually their business site can be competitive) and all to discover that nobody in the UK can come up with a machine close to the specification I want. Admittedly it was the high end specification I was after so I was very surprised to find it wasn't available. Why does Lenovo think that nobody in the UK will want an X61 tablet with SXGA screen, 7200rpm drive and bluetooth? Are we not allowed to lust after exactly the same spec that our cousins over the pond get to review? Bad service In fact that was a good idea. Maybe I could get the US custom build website to deliver me one over here? Well in short no. First we contact Lenovo US and ask them. The first email I got back wasn't a good sign. Not one to be easily put off, I took on the challenge. First some phone calls to Lenovo UK and then a follow up email with the US. Then things started to lookup a little, well eventually. My thanks go to Chetan for the first useful email response of this saga. Out of the blue (sorry couldn't resist) came ever more good news. Now this is starting to look promising. It should just be a case of chasing the re-seller to get hold of a machine. The good news I had a great wedding in New York, but no 'come and give us your money' phone calls or emails. However I am still writing most of this using my pen on my X61. I've had to compromise and get a lower spec machine off the shelf. At least I only ended up with a slower hard drive but I will always wonder if this machine could have been faster. Hmmm... When will SSDs become affordable?