Laptops Replacing Traditional Notebooks in Schools?
Back in my university days, laptops weren’t as prevalent as they are today. Laptops back then (about eight years ago) were thick, bulky and expensive. If you wanted a slim, sleek ultraportable you can carry around in your backpack or messenger bag to school, you had to be prepared to spend. And battery life was dismal, which was not very ideal for situations like long classes–you’ll probably run out of juice in one class alone!
Today, however, laptops seem to be the “notebook” of choice for college students. At the Bowling Green State University in Ohio, a big majority of the student body consists of laptop owners. According to the BG News,
[I]t appears laptop usage in classrooms at the University isn’t very prevalent. Seventy-two percent of students on campus have laptop computers, according to Information Technology Services.
This is an increase of 19 percent from last year. Even though there are no figures available on the number of students who type notes while in class, computers are essential tools when it comes to education in this modern world, according to Mike Hachtel, assistant director for information technology in the Office of Residence Life.
72% looks like a good enough figure for laptops to be considered prevalent. Even if not all of these students use their notebook computers for taking notes during class, it’s still a big jump from simply having a desktop computer in one’s dorm room or using public-access terminals at the library or an internet café.
While some professors are not so happy with their students having their laptops open and in use during class hours, most appreciate the value of technology, and understand the advantages of using laptops for note taking–and perhaps doing other work–during class.
I believe it’s an added factor if a university supports wireless access in the campus. My alma mater started installing hotspots in libraries and other communal areas on campus last year. Some schools have wired LAN ports and power outlets at each student desk, to facilitate connectivity during class.
Going on a Trip: Protect Your Laptop
Over on PC World, they have a great article up on protecting your laptop when bringing it on a trip, and their biggest point, which I try to remind people all the time is to back up your machine. At least get your data off your machine and onto some media or something so that it is safe if you lose your laptop, the hard drive gets broken, or whatever other unfortunate thing.
They also mention putting it in a rugged case, and making sure you have insurance to cover the laptop as good measures. But honestly, if you do nothing else, please back up your machine.
Too Detached: No Internet Options
So this week, I had to move from Ottawa to London, Ontario, and to say it was uneventful would be laughable. So many problems popped up, including not getting my Internet on time. Waiting for my access made me think about a few things. I would love to get a cellular card for my laptop, so that I could go ahead and connect from anywhere I need to. I went to Telus, to see what options they had, and there is no such thing as cheap data access when using the cellular networks.
The card alone would cost me nearly $300 Canadian, plus an access fee of $60 a month for a whole thirty megabytes a month. If you know anything about sizes of digital information, thirty megabytes is not much at all. Almost every day I use more than that, so spreading it over a month would be difficult to say the least.
The next thing was dealing with the different Internet companies in the new area, do I go with Rogers, or Bell, or Cogeco? Some are through DSL, and others through coaxial cable, like cable television.
The prices on each of them are pretty similar, but Rogers was the company I had in Ottawa, and so I transferred my service to my new apartment in London. Unfortunately, you have to give them plenty of notice, and so I have to wait until October 3rd before I can get back on the information superhighway.
It is one thing to chose to not be connected, but completely another to be forced off the Internet. I find myself almost craving a fix. Like a drug, being disconnected from a service I have spent more than eight hours a day on for the last few years, is almost like a form of punishment, much like being in prisoned in my own little local world.
I will be very happy to get back on line, and next time, I am going to plan things out a little better so that there is no service interruption. Here is hoping everything goes well tomorrow.
Update: Everything went well, and I am on my laptop via wireless from my new connection at home, but I still wish that I had a cellular wireless data card so that I could have kept up on my e-mails. Thankfully, I did not miss anything important.
Has anyone out there tried a cell phone connection for their laptop? Was it any good?
Living with my ThinkPad T43
I have had my laptop for a while now, and it has been mostly a positive experience. I had many reasons behind my choice to get a Lenovo/IBM machine, but now I am wondering if I should have just waited to see what Apple did (they released an Intel series of machines that can run both OS X and Windows).
Some things I am noticing about my ThinkPad T43 are worth mentioning though, so if you are considering purchasing one, you will know all of the pitfalls I have noticed.
The first thing I have noticed is that its battery life still seems too short, while that is very subjective, since it gets around three and half hours per battery, getting me seven hours for the two batteries I received. I still hope to see a real all day laptop sometime soon, but it seems like every time there is an increase in battery technology, they increase the size of the screen on the machine or something.
Another thing I notice is that the fan noise gets a bit high sometimes when the computer needs to cool down. The fan, hard drive, and optical drive make a fair bit of noise. The cooling fan leads me to the next point of contention with my laptop, it gets hot. I don’t mean like battery exploding hot. Thankfully neither of my batteries are part of the exploding battery recall. But it still gets to the point where I don’t want to put my laptop on my lap.
Also, when playing wide screen movies, you can really notice a while bar near the bottom of the screen, you don’t notice these brightness inconsistencies when doing other tasks, but it can be a bit distracting sometimes.
Lastly, the speakers are a disappointment. I sometimes wonder why laptop makers even put speakers on the machines when they are really so useless in all but the quietest of areas. Sometimes the optical drive is louder than the highest volume setting. This can be very frustrating.
Despite all the negatives of owning my ThinkPad T43, I still recommend it. It is fast, easy to use, and for the most part, very reliable. I can’t say I would not trade it in for the world, but I can say that most laptops don’t even come close.
Living with a 20-inch Notebook
Over at Laptop Magazine, the crazy editor decided it would be a fun idea to send a reporter out with an 18.3 pound system with a 20.1 inch LCD monitor. I don’t even have that big of an LCD on my desktop computer.
Since we happened to have a Dell XPS M2010 lying around the office, we figured it an opportune time to take the 20.1-inch system for a spin in the crowded streets of midtown Manhattan. Despite its prominent handle, the 18.3-pound system isn’t designed for carrying around crowded city streets. It’s also not designed for tiny coffee shop tables, nor the human lap-even as a 5′11″ male, I had a fair bit of trouble keeping the thing steady on mine, a situation not improved by the fact that the keyboard detaches automatically. Here’s a recap of my big-screen-machine adventure.
The adventure he has is pretty funny as he goes to various places like the subway where he sets up his 20.1 inch beast getting reactions from excited to unimpressed.
Check out Digital Advisor for Dell laptops.
Wi-Fi Alliance Starts Testing 802.11n Interoperability
Those of you that have bought pre-n wireless technology are going to be in for a shock, it probably won’t work with the 802.11n standard that the IEEE is drafting up. The Wi-Fi Alliance though, has grown impatient while waiting for the IEEE to ratify its technical standards, and so they have started testing the technology to see if the different brands actually worth with each other.
The IEEE has announced that it won’t be finished with Draft 2.0, the ratified standard that covers 802.11n until March of 2008, but products that claim compatibility with the new standard are already hitting the market.
Therefore, the Wi-Fi Alliance has said that it will offer preliminary certification for 802.11n based on interoperability of current products on the market.
The concern with 802.11n networks is that they interrupt coverage of older 802.11a/b/g networks and cause performance to suffer, and working out the problems has taken more time than expected.
I can’t wait for a new and better wireless standard, but unfortunately, I have already invested in G, and it is doing more or less what I need. I don’t see myself going to the next level for quite some time. And with new wireless technologies already coming down the pipe, will anyone but the uninformed consumer buy 802.11n products by the time its ratified by the IEEE?
Source: Pocket-lint
Do You Shutdown Your Laptop?
Perhaps we can also apply the question to your other computers, too–do you shutdown your desktop computer?
Today’s busy lifestyles usually necessitate computer users’ not shutting down their machines completely. Some would leave their computers powered on the entire time. But if you’re energy conscious, you would opt for Hibernating instead.
For example, I’ve always had the habit of switching off my work desktop computer using Hibernate rather than a complete shutdown, so the next morning I can always just get back to doing whatever tasks or processes I left undone the night before. This was the same at home. I never really shut down my home PC, but also just used Hibernate, so the apps I have running would still be there, saving me the few minutes or seconds wait having to open them up after boot up.
I only restart or shut down a few times in a month, when I install software that absolutely needs rebooting (such as Windows updates) or when I feel my system is getting so bogged down that I need a fresh start.
The same goes with my laptop. Being a mobile device, I’m fond of just transporting my laptop from one place to another, and it’s great to be able to pick up from where I left. And this is why I usually configure my Power button to put my computer to Hibernate instead of shutdown.
I loved it even better when I started using a PowerBook as an additional work machine–the sleep feature was great. It consumed practically zero power whenever the laptop was in sleep state. And this wasn’t even the safe sleep feature of newer powerbooks that actually saved RAM data onto hard disc and killed off all power running through the computer (which is the equivalent of Hibernate in Windows).
Hibernation gripes
Hibernation doesn’t come without its disadvantages, however. First, with the increasing amount of RAM we put into our computers these days, it’s taking longer and longer to resume from hibernation (since the computer reads the RAM contents that had been saved into the hard drive). Also, hibernation takes as much space on your hard drive as your total RAM size. So if you have 2 Gigs of RAM loaded on your laptop, then Hibernate (at least in Windows) eats up that same amount.
Of course, this wait is non-existent with the Mac’s sleep function, although it’s not really a true “hibernate” or save-memory-to-disk operation.
And then there’s the risk of losing all your unsaved data or work if the hibernate file gets corrupted, forcing you to do a fresh reboot.
It’s the workflow!
The biggest disadvantage, however, is that the Hibernate feature encourages people to be procrastinators!
Imagine that instead of trying to finish a task at hand–say, an article you’re planning to publish on your blog–right now, you would choose to leave that hanging and return to writing later. Or perhaps you’re doing some number crunching with several Excel spreadsheets open. Chances are, you’ve already lost your flow. You’ve probably lost a lot of writing ideas you could have otherwise put into black and white. Or you’ve probably already been confused which spreadsheet, and which particular set of cells or functions you were working on.
Is it practical?
So the shutdown versus hibernate question is more complicated than you think. It might be practical to keep your apps open and to keep startup times quick. However, it might also be tempting to just procrastinate and set aside things for next time.
In the long run, I would think the best way to go is to finish up all work (or other tasks) and close all your applications before hitting that Hibernate button. This way, you get the benefit of keeping your essential programs running, but you’re still able to finish what you’re supposed to.
And if you’re like me, transferring from my home office to Starbucks for some fresh scenery could mean Hibernating and then forgetting what I was supposed to be doing. The best way to deal with it? I usually write a note to myself about my pending tasks I wanted done in the first place.
Bringing Out the Inner MacHead in Me
I used to use the office eMac back when I was working the corporate grind. While my main computers were a Linux box and a Windows-based ThinkPad (several, actually), I would often prefer to work on the eMac–which is shared among designers–either by transferring to its location or accessing my OS X desktop remotely via VNC. I just love the clean OS X interface which I found really intuitive.
To sum it up, it just works. I’ve been working with PCs all my life and I pretty much know the ins and outs of Windows (having explored even the obscurest of versions, including NT 3.51 and also NT 4 Server), and it was always quite a cluttered and complicated affair. I can say that simplicity is one virtue of the Mac OS X, and even my three-year old daughter can navigate her way around the Mac’s UI.
So when I quit the corporate world and turned to freelancing and problogging, I had to be content with the equipment that I could buy with my own money. No more office-provided computers and broadband (along with free-flowing coffee and unlimited access to programming and design books). Most of all, no more Mac. These days, my work equipment usually consist of my laptop and the home PC desktop, which I have since relegated to gaming, and which my wife uses as her main computer.
Enter the Resurrected PowerBook
This was the case until recently, that is, when I got my hands on an old but working PowerBook G3 “Pismo.” If you ask me how much I got it for, you’d be surprised–it was practically free. It was actually just gathering dust in some laptop storage room corner when its original owner offered me a great deal (no money changed hands). To make the long story short, my Compaq V2000 just got itself a big brother to play (and work) with.
The specs are not really impressive. The Pismo has a 500 MHz PowerPC G3 processor, a 20 GB hard drive, a 14-inch 1024×768 display and 256MB of RAM, which I bumped up to 512 with a spare 100MHz SDRAM stick I had lying around at home. Battery life was originally 5 hours, but being old, this powerbook could only give me about 1.5 hours before dying (or sleeping, actually).
What’s so Great About It?
The Pismo is the last G3-based portable that Apple has official OS X Tiger support for. It also seems to be a favorite among the folks at LowEndMac (serious MacHeads, if you ask me), because of its expandability (two expansion bays!), style (black is teh cool!), and durability (sturdier than ding- and dent-prone TiBooks). You could even upgrade the Pismo to a 550 MHz PowerPC G4! And battery life could be extended to 10 hours if you load up both bays with battery packs.
Also, the Pismo was among the first PowerBooks that offered wireless Internet thru an optional internal AirPort card. But let’s face it, the AirPort was–and still is–expensive and it’s slow, being limited to WiFi B (as opposed to the AirPort Extreme, which is essentially WiFi G). Luckily, these days you can get all sorts of PC Card or even USB WLAN adaptors from third-party providers, as long as there is an available OS X driver for their chipset. For instance, I used an MSI cardbus adaptor (~$30) running on a RALink RT2500 chipset, and it works perfectly with Tiger along with the driver I downloaded. Heck, even the cheapo ZyDAS-based USB WLAN adaptor I got as spare for my desktop a while back (bought for less than 20 bucks) works. I read Broadcom-based chips work outright, as they’re compatible with the Mac’s AirPort drivers. Macs are not as isolated as I used to think.
Hey, the Pismo even got much exposure on TV, being the laptop that Carrie Bradshaw, Sarah Jessica Parker’s character on HBO’s Sex and the City often used. (Okay, I’m a guy but I kind of liked the show, especially because my wife was fond of it.)
The Pismo is a classic and can still be a workhorse, particularly for people like me who are more into documents, writing, Web surfing and some image manipulation, rather than gaming, design and other things that require higher-end processing. Right now, I have OS X 10.4.7 installed (the latest version of Tiger) and it’s still pretty zippy. It’s not as fast as my 1.5 GHz Celeron-M V2000, but come to think of it, I’m somehow more productive when I work on the Mac.
Changes in the Workflow
I can say it’s all about the workflow and computing preferences. With my Windows laptop, there’s the temptation to install and use each and every popular application made available online, hence the tendency to clutter my desktop. There are also the MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games, to the uninitiated), which, even if great for reviewing and writing about, do take time to play.
And of course, with the V2000’s wide screen, I tend to keep too many windows open and in clear view, and these tend to distract me. I’ve grown fond of those widget-type gadgets that give me all sorts of information at a press of a button. Not that OS X doesn’t have Dashboard, but Google Gadgets’ presentation is really such that I get to see all the information in one single display, particularly with the widescreen.
So as I would say again and again, productivity may not always be directly proportional to how fast your machine is. It’s more about how you use your equipment, and how organized you can get. I could list hundreds of reasons why people who love the Mac tend to be loyal. There are a lot of advantages, and they might be simple and subtle, ranging from better security, to a more robust operating system under the hood (it’s UNIX!).
I just turned into a MacHead!
On The Go? Get Connected and Stay Secure With Simple, Free VPN Tools!
What you will read here will change the way you use your laptop while on the road. Okay, that’s probably too optimistic of me, but being an avid laptop user, I try to keep abreast of technologies and trends, especially when it comes to being connected while on the go. I should–I write about laptops, and I often find myself at public WiFi hotspots doing some work or just catching up on email.
Two things keep popping up in my list of needs when connecting on the go: security and connectivity with the home front.
Security. Public hotspots are usually open access points that do not offer any level of security at all. Not WPA. No, not even WEP. The idea is for the hotspot to be as accessible to as many people as possible. So this means the lowest common denominator in terms of security–no encryption.
Also, even commercial hotspots tend to be unsecured, so they can support as many clients as possible, most of whom wouldn’t know a thing about even entering a short piece of code onto their WiFi managers in order to connect.
Problem: You turn on your email client and chances are, your email username and password are being sent over the network in clear, unencrypted text everytime you poll for messages. Anyone with a packet sniffer running on the network can get your password in less than thirty seconds. And even if you’re using secure http (https, say, in Gmail), not all of the sites you are browsing are using a secure connection. The websites you’re reading are available for someone else on the network to read, with the right tools.
Connectivity. Don’t you just love the fact that on your home or office network, you can store all your files on one computer and then you can share them across your different computers? I mean, I certainly wouldn’t want to have duplicate copies of all the documents I’m currently working on, especially if I constantly shift from working on the desktop, to my main laptop, and then sometimes to another laptop.
Problem: You’ve just arrived at a meeting venue when you realize you left some important presentation documents at your office desktop. You end up having to call someone from the office (or mom, the wifey, or the kids back at home) to email over the files you forgot to copy on your laptop.
The Solutions: Virtual Private Networking
Setting up a VPN might sound daunting at first, but it doesn’t have to be. A VPN doesn’t have to be an expensive enterprise solution installed and maintained by an office IT department. It can be as simple as installing two small pieces of free software, tweaking some configurations, and voila! You’re all set to conquer the mobile realms!
My picks: iPIG and Hamachi.
Advertising on Laptop Lids
Sacha Chua seems to like the way her laptop sticker grabs attention in public.
Want to meet interesting but don’t want to have to make the first move? Use the back of your laptop to get people to talk to you.
Stickers are a great way to do that. My laptop reads “The geek shall inherit the earth.” I can’t count the smiles, chuckles, and conversations I’ve gotten out of it–and all I have to do is open my laptop!
She’s even tempted to rent out space for advertising! And this seems like a good idea to earn extra revenues, if you frequently use your laptop in public. It’s much like the way Chris Pirillo rented out his chest for ad space. Stowe Boyd, who rented out rights to his T-shirt messages seems to welcome the idea, too.
There’s actually a business plan in there somewhere. People register with the company, get sent a new sticker every month that covers the lid, and take pictures to show they’ve put in on at the start and that its still there at the end of the month, and they get sent a small check. Fun!
It’s like renting out ad space on buses, taxis and even airplanes, only on a smaller scale.
Hey, if someone will sponsor my coffee, snacks, WiFi connection and fare/gas every day just to get me to spend a few hours at Starbucks or Seattle’s Best, I would be all right with slapping some stickers on my V2000. I’ll be able to get some work done, get my daily caffeine fix, satisfy my sweet tooth, and probably earn some extra dough.
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