Posts Tagged ‘laptops’

As an IT administrator in a previous life, I know that keeping data safe is key #1. It would have been nice to have this product on all the notebooks in the office. Especially one instance where the employee found a legal way around keeping their machine with all of our data on it.

LoJack for Laptops / Computrace creates a partnership with Intel for Anti-Theft Technology – Think of it like a Kill switch if your machine gets lost, stolen, or taken in any way possible. The laptop will be rendered useless until it comes back to the owner, in which they can then turn the machine back on. It litterally Bricks the machine.

Andy McCaskey talks with Stephen at CES about this “poison pill” technology. Best part is this option is incorporated in the laptop – Like a Dell laptop, in where you get a 1 year membership. Even a “wiped” hard drive can be detected and LoJack will load their software to brick the device.

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Are you ready to get 3-D on your Laptop? Well Cyberlink is working on it. Not only will it be in 3-D, but also Blu-Ray Disc. All in their PowerDVD program.

Andy McCaskey talks with Tom about 3-D Blu-Ray. Tom shows a pre-release version of the new drives. The best part is you can get 3-D in the shutter technology and the color displacement technology (red – blue glasses). It will be available on many newer laptops and desktops to get Blu-Ray – especially with 3-D video.

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10 years ago, if you had a computer, it was most likely a desktop. Notebooks – then called Laptops – were pretty expensive, but were also beginning to show that they could start to replace a desktop model. Fast forward to today: Event the Notebooks have been threatened as of late by Netbooks and smartphones. It leaves you to the question: What should your next purchase be?

My first Laptop was a Zenith Data Systems 386 laptop. It wasn’t cheap – and I even got it used. It had a very small hard drive, a trackball on the side connecting to the serial port and a monochrome monitor. It ran Windows 3.0, which was really great. I was able to run the Word processor and Lotus 1-2-3. I was happy.

The machine was about twice the size of my current laptop and most likely twice the weight. The battery life was almost nothing – maybe 5 minutes. Still, I thought at the time “This is the future of computing.”

I was right – kinda.

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It’s been a few weeks since I’ve posted a Bitstrips. Today I was inspired.

Me and my brother really enjoy going to breakfast every now and then. What was better – there was a restaurant that actually had Wi-Fi access. Therefore, we both would take our laptops and surf while eating.

That was two weeks ago.

Now we have smartphones that have wireless access. Of course, I have the iPhone 3GS and he has the Blackberry 8330. So why do we need the Notebooks? Heck – we can go to any place that serves breakfast because the Wi-Fi access selling point is null.

The only thing we cannot do is run any program that requires Flash. That means no Bitstripping while at breakfast with the phone. So we still need the computers and access at one point. That is, until we get netbooks with 3G access….

You might remember the products. You might remember the hype. Then, you are tooling down highway 41 years later and all of a sudden you think to yourself – “Hey, whatever happened to…”

Failed ideas. Maybe it was a great idea, but wasn’t made right, or design errors brought it down. Maybe it was just a bad product. Well, let’s take a stroll down memory lane and see if we cannot repeat these errors again.

Oh yeah, why 16? Well because we could.

The Computer Watch: Whether it was the Ruputer, the MSN Direct ‘Smart’ Watches, the Timex Data Link Watch or another gadget watch – BTW – I remember having a “Transformers watch”. It was awesome!

Still, the Dick Tracey style communication watches, the “Computer on a wrist”, never really hit it off. I even remember a watch that gave you directions. You would put in the paper tape and turn a little dial to indicate where you are and where you are going.

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David Pogue discusses manufacturer’s claims of the longevity of laptop batteries in the New York Times. The post is here. It’s worth a read.

He discusses how the “tests” of laptop battery life are in no way connected to how persons use laptops.

A sample:

Another problem: Unlike CIPA’s camera tests, the MobileMark test protocol doesn’t reflect real-world use. Consider, for example, the screen. It’s the most power-hungry component of a laptop, so specifying how bright it is during your test is extremely important.

Well, the MobileMark test specifies that you have the screen set to 60 nits (a brightness measurement).

Not to nitpick, but at full brightness, the screens on modern laptops put out 250 to 300 nits.

Read the whole thing to see the extent of the disconnect between how you and I use our laptops and how manufacturers “test” battery life.

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In my post on Tasting Linux, I mentioned Live CDs as a way of sticking your toe in the Linux pool to see whether it might be fun to dive in.

I thought it would be fun to show some pictures of what a Knoppix Live CD boot looks like. This is just an intro, not a detailed HOWTO.

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…For 2008 that is…

Finally feeling Normal – Las Vegas – New Years – More Panelists on the LIVE Show

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Wow. What a great LIVE Show to end out the year. We had 2 great guests that are both in the Podcast range, therefore we talked a lot about Podcasting. Rob Greenlee is the Podcast Content Director at Zune, and Gary Leland runs the website PodcastPickle.com.

We talked a lot about Podcasting, how Zune is running podcasts, associations of Podcasts to iTunes, if MP3 players are stepping aside for Smartphones, if a Zune Phone will be out and a lot more. We also talked about Twitter, Microsoft Home Server, Vista, Quad-core Laptops and a lot more.

Hour 1

Hour 2

Had to work on a laptop, so I thought I would show you all how you can remove a Hard drive from the laptop.