Finally, another Android manufacturer steps up (though they don’t want you to know yet).
Motorola is sending out invitations for an event on September 15th that are deliberately mysterious; “Unfortunately, we are not able to give you any more details at present”, says the email; “however, over the coming weeks we will be able to reveal more”. Given that the invitation has the Android robot log on, it’s a fair bet that this will mark the UK announcement of the Motorola ‘Morrison’ and ‘Scholes’ Android phones. The rumours say both will have keyboards and large screens; Morrison looks like an old HTC design with rounded corners (or, say, a much thicker iPhone with a slide-out keyboard) , Scholes looks more like a Sony Experia, with bevelled edges. Rather more important than the case are what the phones will offer over HTC’s Android range, what Android means for Motorola - and what Motorola means for Android.

Back in the day, with the StarTAC, Motorola invented the mobile phone, then watched Nokia take the market away. The RAZR was the definitive feature phone, back in 2004. As Motorola needs more than one successful handset a decade to stay in business, they’ve tried every phone operating system - including going back to Symbian after abandoning it. None of them have turned into signature devices that sell like the iPhone and the BlackBerry and those billions of Nokia handsets (not to mention all the million-selling Windows Mobile devices HTC has come up with). The Android phones come out of a project that was rumoured to pit Android, Windows Mobile and a couple of other smartphone operating systems head to head; Android - or the hype around Android - won that battle. Just as HTC has said half of its handsets next year will be Android devices (a plan that’s unlikely to get the company any more photo opportunities with senior Microsoft staff), Motorola thinks Android will put it back on top. Er, only if the phones are any good.

Good, for an Android phone, has to include running all the Android apps that are on the market for the HTC devices. The Australian company that planned to make the second Android phone ever dropped the idea when it realised the smaller screen it planned would mean problems with apps that expected the same screen size as the G1. Windows Mobile developers and handset makers have dealt with this for years, with multiple screen sizes and resolutions and it’s rare to find software with a button hanging off the bottom of the screen; iPhone developers will have to cope with it if the rumoured Apple tablet really does run iPhone apps on a bigger screen. Windows developers can get a nasty shock when they look at their apps on a netbook and discover key buttons are hidden by the Windows taskbar because they just don’t fit on screen. Part of being a platform is making it easy for developers to put their code on every device and form factor that runs the OS. If the Motorola devices don’t have the same screen resolution as HTC Android phones, we’ll see how well Android enables multiple screen sizes. If they do, that only postpones the question; with so many handset manufacturers dabbling with Android, competing with HTC is going to mean trying different device sizes and styles rather than just making cosmetic changes.

Of course, Motorola isn’t only competing with HTC’s Android phones; leaving aside all the other smartphones on the market, there are still those Windows Mobile devices HTC dabbles in, like the Touch Pro2. I’ve been waiting for this since February and using it for the last few weeks - and it was well worth the wait. It’s got a big screen and a beautiful keyboard and intuitive, easy to use touch gestures (and yes, that is the first time I’ve ever been complimentary about TouchFLO).  It’s fast - I think faster than the 1GHz Toshiba TG01 for a lot of what you actually do on a phone. And it’s clever; you get the phone equivalent of Reply All to email - you can pick and choose multiple people and make your own conference call. You get the PIN for a dial-in conference call up on screen ready to type in. And when you turn the phone over, it turns into a speakerphone with really good speakers - and a mute button for when the cat throws up in the middle of your call and you don’t want anyone to know you’re working from home.  If the Motorola handsets have anything half as useful or innovative, they’ll be well worth a look.

And actually, we don’t need to wait until the 15th to find out what Motorola has on offer; the US event is five days earlier, so the main news will be the price and the operator for the UK.
-Mary

But is the Booklet a page turner? Intel and Nokia’s much-vaunted partnership to create a new generation of what Kai Öistämö, Nokia’s executive Vice President of devices  called “the next wave of mobile technology” powered by Maemo or Moblin mobile Linux and Intel chips must be a pretty long-term venture. We’ve heard nothing more about it since June and the first Intel-powered Nokia device is a Windows netbook, probably designed to compete with Qualcomm’s promised Smartbook Snapdragon devices (lighter, thinner netbooks that really will run Linux), and with Android and Chrome OS netbooks when they come along.

Is it the convergence of phone and netbook that Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo (OPK for short) hinted at just a few days ago? The 12-hour battery life is good for a netbook (if you can get it without turning off the Wi-Fi and dimming the screen to illegibility); if you have to recharge a 3G phone every night, people complain. It does have 3G and GPS, so it will be interesting to see if the 12 hour battery life includes turning those on. Along with the HDMI output, that’s a similar spec to Qualcomm’s Smartbook, which also promises to be 2cm thick (and quite a bit lighter, at around 900g). Of course the Smartbook is an unproven concept, whereas cheap and cheerful netbooks are big sellers (though Nokia hasn’t put a price on the Booklet yet).

The Booklet name is probably just a play on being a smaller notebook without the ubiquitous netbook name rather than an attempt to evoke epaper and pre-empt whatever Apple might or might not one day launch as a tablet. Unless the Ovi apps that Nokia is promising take advantage of the power of the PC to do more than they could on a smartphone, it’s all a bit me-too.

Despite being just about the biggest phone manufacturer worldwide, Nokia has been struggling to match the success of the iPhone and the popularity of the App Store; according to the FT, it’s reminding employees of the new focus on apps and services by splashing the number of subscribers to Ovi services onto screens around its Espoo headquarters. And over in Silicon Valley, Henry Tirri, the head of the Nokia Research Center is looking at what kind of innovative services you can create using Nokia’s billions of existing handsets as sensors. Want to know if a road is jammed with traffic or a bar is full of people dancing or if the Starbucks you’re navigating to is probably closed? There are probably enough Nokia devices on the road, in the bar and in the coffee shop (during opening hours for comparison) for a smart service to tell you that the road is solid, the bar is jumping (60% chance it’s salsa dancing) and the Starbucks is dark.

That’s why Tirri sounds convincing when he pitches you a service Microsoft, Google, TomTom and dozens of other companies are working on: it’s about the phones. “Not deliberately but more by serendipity this has developed to be the electronic equipment that’s the closest and most personal, that’s with you most of the time; you really take care of it. This has evolved to be the device it is because of the first killer function, voice and communication. We are simply piggybacking on the fact that these are where people are and we can use them as context generators. We have the most of them on earth; a billion of them. By the law of large numbers we are simply in the best position of utilising context - like Google is on search.”

Context is whether the bar is busy or the shop is open - and it’s what makes services really useful. If there are 15 coffee shops ‘close’ to me, I want the one I can get to without getting stuck in traffic and I want the one that’s actually open, not the one that just says it should be open on its Web site. Is the user trying to VPN in from an Internet cafe already on the plane home? But it relies on those billions of phones acting as sensors and that means not getting in anyone’s way.

Tirri’s team has come up with a battery-friendly way of gathering location information that can generate context, without leaving GPS on all the time; virtual ‘trip lines’ that turn on the GPS sensor at a specific point (approximated from the cell location) to send an accurate position. This neatly avoids the worries of anonymising GPS data (In 2007, Microsoft Research was able to infer the home address of nearly every employee in an ‘anonymous’ location trial; researcher John Krumm only managed to find names for 5% of the employees using Live Search and he had to add false location information to really offer privacy to people offering ‘anonymous’ information about their travels).

If Ovi Maps on the Booklet starts to deliver context, it would be something really different. Until then, it sounds like just another shiny netbook.
-Mary

We live in an industry driven by the Darwinian evolution of buzzwords. Many start down the memestream to mainstream acceptance, but most die along the way. Some are weeded out early, others struggle to survive in the fringes of the blogosphere. It’s interesting to watch evolution in process.

One of the terms that’s making its way through that great filter is Infrastructure 2.0. It’s still struggling to drive the agenda, but it managed to make its way onto the schedule for last week’s Future In Review conference in San Diego. The question was still “Just what is it?”, and there were interesting definitions from all parts of the industry.

Mark Hurd, HP’s CEO, was quite clear in his thinking, noting that POCs, servers, storage and network hardware were all converging on the same basic set of components. The only thing that would differentiate them was the software, saving money and making it easier to maintain an infrastructure. That’s certainly an important piece of the Infrastructure 2.0 jigsaw, but it’s still only a small part of the picture.

Amazon’s AWS, VMware’s VSphere and Microsoft’s Azure are another piece. They’re attempts to build a univeral operating system for cloud and virtualised workloads, where workload migrates to and from on premise datacenters - making them what Amazon CTO Werner Vogel calls “more elastic”. The mix of in-cloud and on-premise is key to the flexibility that businesses need, but it’s also a new complexity that needs a lot of management, and deeper consideration of just where your data is at all times.
Here’s a scary thought: Infrastructure 2.0: it’s 12 am. Do you know where your data is?

Data protection regulations aren’t ready for data that flows to where the workload is - and those workloads need to be geolocked, able to keep information inside the appropriate data protection regime.

Then there’s the thorny question of user interface.

Is a PC screen what the next generation of applications and services need? There’s a lot to be said for the traditional application, mixing rich data and rich display. Tom Malloy’s research group at Adobe is looking at next generation run times that can speed up cross platform rich internet applications. Tools like Adobe’s AIR and Microsoft Silverlight simplify user interface development, and bring Web 2.0 user experiences to the desktop.

Perhaps the most telling piece of the puzzle was one simple phrase: “We need to stop treating IT pros like Victorian file clerks”. It’s a statement that hit home - we do treat our IT pros as glorified clerks, waiting for them to do things by rote. What we really need is an automated infrastructure that flexibly configures itself to deal with the tools, applications and workloads we need to use every day.

Pull apart all the different definitions from all the vendors out there and that’s what Infrastructure 2.0 boils down to. It’s a world we really need to build - if only to show the world just what value IT really brings to business.

–Simon

Last week saw the 6th birthday of AMD’s Opteron CPU, the core of its server product line. We were among a small group of journalists and analysts at AMD’s Sunnyvale campus for the event - which also included the launch of a new generation of silicon, and the unveiling of AMD’s Opteron roadmap for the next few years.

Pointing out that “the server market is very different”, AMD’s Nigel Dessau opened the even with a look at the way the server market has been changing over the last few years - with a move to throughput rather than clock speed with multicore systems, to virtualisation, and to designing for energy efficiency, all with the aim of changing the economics of the data centre. The result has been increaded server density and utilisation - more bang for your buck in less space!

So what happens next? Dessau suggests that “The way you assemble architectures is what makes the difference.” That’s why AMD puts so much into its CPUs, with much of what we’d normally consider to be the supporting chipset - including memory controllers - on the same silicon. It’s not quite a system on a chip, but it’s getting very close these days.

Pat Patla, the GM and VP of AMD’s Server Business Unit unveiled the new hardware. This was the roll out of the Istanbul product range, a six-core processor for existing two, four and eight socket systems with what he said was “30% more performance than the previous generation at the same power”. Istanbul also brings all of AMD’s power management technologies into one place as AMD-P.

Istanbul isn’t the end of the story - the next chapter is already being written in. AMD is already sampling its next generation processor, the 12-core “Magny-Cours”, which despite being a terrible pun, is a rather zippy piece of silicon - we watched a 48 core demo system much its way through several benchmarks. It’s not that far away, either, and should ship in 2010.

Virtualisation is a target market for the next generation of silicon, and it will add support for virtualised I/O. With I/O devices virtualised there’s a lot of scope for new application and new ways of working (as well as a chance to virtualise applications and servers that previously were locked into existing hardware). It’s all part of the Infrastructure 2.0 model, where management tools take advantage of hardware to deliver flexible self-managed virtualised data centres.

The other part of the AMD story is how it’s working on power management, with products available in different thermal bands - including a low power range intended for single and dual socket high density applications, ideal for cloud data centres. There’s a lot to be said for this approach, especially as all the features of the high end, high power CPUs are in the energy efficient versions. Dense deployments need greater efficiencies, as data centre costs are a huge proportion of the costs incurred in running a cloud service. With an average power of 40W, the EE series processors will help keep those cooling and power costs down.

Magny-Cours is only part of the AMD roadmap, and the company’s current architecture is a long term play (which is good for virtualisation, as it will allow asymmetric migrations, letting businesses use older hardware for disaster recovery purposes). The next generation will be 32nm devices in 2011, a 12 to 16 core device codenamed Interlagos and a 6 to 8 core device codenamed Valencia.

–Simon

How do you get a full day’s work out of a netbook? Make it bigger (and turn everything off).

The latest Eee PC, the 1000HE, has a hefty 8700mAh battery but because the Eee is quite chunky itself that doesn’t stick out much at the bottom. If you want a thinner netbook, the HP Mini and Mini-Note models are far slimmer than the Eee (and they weight rather less too, even with HP’s 6-cell extended battery); in fact, the 17″ MacBook Pro is thinner than the Eee 100HE, although the MacBook is obvious far less portable in other ways (I’d have to switch from the natty Cirque du Soleil handbag that my beloved HP EliteBook 2730p tablet fits in perfectly to a messenger bag, albeit a slim one).

But if you can put up with the less than slim casing of the 1000He, you get a very portable machine that you can take more seriously than many netbooks, although there are still compromises. Forget 16GB SSDs; you get 160GB of hard drive, which puts many 12″ notebooks to shame. The keyboard is a significant improvement over most netbooks; with a separate frame to avoid the bouncing and flexing that previous Eees were prone to, it’s more comfortable to type on, and while the keys are small they’re widely spaced apart, as on some Sony VAIOs and MacBooks, so you”re much less likely to hit the wrong key even if your finger is too big to hit just the key you’re aiming at. Even so, the HP Mini-Note keyboard remains the one to beat  - the Eee keyboard is good, but not that good.

The trackpad is the ElanTech SmartPad that Dell uses on the Mini 12, which has more multi-touch options than you can shake a fist at; two finger scroll, pinch zoom and rotation, drag and drop that you can’t drop by accident, a double-tap gesture for opening a magnifying glass window, and three-finger swipe (sideways for page up and page down, up and down for launching My Computer and opening Alt-Tab and switching windows by waggling your fingers around on the touchpad). You have to get used to the gestures, but they can speed you up, especially on a small keyboard like this.

Talking of speeding up, the 1.66GHz Atom N280 ought to be faster than the 1.6GHz N270 in  most netbooks; frankly we didn’t notice and when a Web site script went beserk and opened over 20 tabs while Word and Windows Media Player were running, things ground to a halt. Once you step down the processor speed to improve the battery life, it doesn’t matter what the top speed is.

No Atom system is going to be a patch on a Centrino 2 and they don’t pretend to be. But then the only way to get a 9 hour battery life on a Centrino 2 machine is to add an extended battery. The Samsung NC10 had the best battery life of last year’s netbooks with a battery that didn’t bulge out of the case and that was up to 7 hours 30 minutes without Wi-Fi and with a dim screen, or 6 hours 30 with Wi-Fi on and the screen comfortably bright. The HP Mini-Note 2140 has an optional 6-cell battery that does stick out (you may find it gives you a better typing angle because it lifts up the keyboard); that manages five hours in heavy use (streaming video and music) and well over seven hours for general use with Wi-Fi and good screen brightness.

The sticker on the Eee actually claims 9.5 hours; that’s if you’re in power-saving mode (and the button for that is now a tiny button above the keyboard, next to options for turning off the screen altogether, switching resolution and - oddly - launching Skype), with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and the Web cam turned off and the screen set to 40% brightness. The screen is noticeably dimmer than other netbooks and notebooks even at full brightness and 40% isn’t particularly comfortable for viewing. Advertising 9.5 hours most users will never see made me expect that the Eee 100HE would leave me disappointed (and hunting for a power socket), but it delivers very respectable battery life in normal use.

Turn on the Wi-Fi and the power icon promises 7 hours 15 minutes; this fluctuates up and down depending on what you’re using the PC for but after 5 hours of downloading software, browsing Web pages, streaming music and editing documents the battery still promised almost two more hours of use and we did indeed get just over 7 hours. You can play over 6 hours of video (which drives the processor and the screen harder than many apps) before the battery runs down.

In the real world, that really is a full working day. Combined with a keyboard normal adults can actually use, this makes the new Eee a significant advance on the recent stream of me-too netbooks and the kind of machine we hoped for when the first Eee came out. It finally gives the Mini-Note 2140 a competitor and because Asus has much better distribution than HP you can expect to find the 1000HE at increasingly low prices.
- Mary

We got back from the US earlier this week, and I immediately got to work - tweaking the network in the office. Our main server got a 1Gb hard disk upgrade, and while I was transferring files from our aging NAS to it, one of the two gigabit switches on out network failed. Luckily I had just bought a handful of patch ethernet cables at a Frys, and was able to switch all the devices from the failed SOHO 24-port switch onto a much heftier enterprise-grade 24-port that sits in another part of the office.

That done, it was time to dive into another experiment with Windows 7. We’ve got an Elonex Lumina media centre PC in the front room, and it was time to see just how the Windows 7  Media Center ran. The Lumina’s a decent piece of kit, that folds a PC into the innards of a 32″ LCD TV.  However Elonex as was is long gone, and drivers for the Lumina’s hardware are a little thin on the ground (along with the rumoured firmware upgrade that unlocks the LCD panel’s inputs). Even so,  we decided to give Windows 7 a shot.

Sadly there was one big problem - the ATI Radeon 9600 card that drove the big screen wasn’t supported.

Actually that’s not quite true, as I was able to get it to run at 1024×768, with full glass. The only problem was that the screen was actually a 1366×768 display, just right for HD TV, but not good enough for ATI’s minimal support for old cards under new OSes. That’s always been a problem for Windows OS updates, hardware manufacturers who see the upgrade as a point to instantly obsolete old kit. If it’s not HD and not PCI-E, then you’re not going to get much support from ATI for your old All-In-Ones and Radeons.

I spent some time trying to find the old old drivers, but to no avail. The only option was to replace the card. Of course that meant finding an appropriate AGP card that worked with Windows 7. The old graphics card from a dead PC was the first candidate, and it booted and (even) came up in the right resolution. Nvidia’s Windows 7 drivers were identifying and working with old cards quite happily. Then, disaster.

Suddenly the screen froze.

The old card’s fan wasn’t spinning, and the video card had overheated.

Still, we were somewhere on the right track at least, and I popped out this morning to buy an appropriate card. The Nvidia card I ended up with was passively cooled, and so ideal for a quiet machine in a lounge. It was also tiny - much smaller than the Radeon it was replacing. I hooked it up to the internal S-Video and DVI connectors, and turned the Lumina on.

Success.

Everything was working, and at the right screen resolution.

So now we have a television running Windows 7. The Media Center features are clean and clear, with pleasing transitions and plenty of features.

Now, I think it’s time to test it out. What shall it be? Chuck or Futurama?

Wouldn’t you want a netbook that turned on as fast as a phone, but could still run all your Windows programs? Of course it wouldn’t do both at once, but I was half-hoping that one of the HTC announcements at Mobile World Congress last week would be an update of the Advantage or the Shift: a netbook that could dual-boot into Windows. It’s not just impatience; using 3G on a netbook eats into the already low battery life (at a good five hours using Wi-Fi, the battery life of the 6-cell HP Mini 2140 is exceptional). If I could do the Web browsing on the lower-power, better optimised mobile OS, I’d have more battery life left for my meeting later.
I-mate’s Legionnaire/Warrior combo comes close - a Windows Mobile touchscreen phone that slides into a netbook case that’s just the screen and keyboard and battery; the phone drives the screen through its XGA connector and uses the external keyboard. Oh, and works as a huge touchpad as well. The prototype we saw needs some work - CEO Jim Morrison promises the keyboard will be bigger and better - but slap Internet Explorer Mobile 6 or Skyfire (or the Fennec project mobile version of Firefox) on there and you can use Outlook Web Access and Google Docs or remote desktop into your PC. If a call comes in while the phone is driving the screen and keyboard, it automatically switches to speakerphone. And the fully-loaded Warrior ‘jacket’ includes four batteries that give you over 50 hours of use (and your phone comes out charged at the end).
But I do want the power of a local PC as well; I want to use Windows Live Photo Gallery to make panoramas and upload them to Flickr, I want to run OneNote (because without it I’d be a day early or three hours late for a lot more meetings), I want the Semagic client for my personal blog over at LiveJournal, and the ClipMate software that means I never copy something, forget to paste it and have to go look for it again. And OWA is great, but SpeedFiler doesn’t work in it and if I don’t file messages as I reply to them my inbox is a mess (OK, more of a mess than usual). (Oh, and I want to be able to use a 3G dongle, and printers and scanners and all the other peripherals; drivers are the curse of any OS.) My list isn’t going to be your list, but to my mind, the much higher returns for Linux netbooks mean that people want their PC apps as much as they mean that Linux isn’t ready as a mass market user interface.
Pre-boot environments are another option. The consumer version of the excellent Lenovo S10 has a Quick Start Linux environment (it’s the same Splashtop system that Asus has developed as ExpressGate); you can browse and IM and use Skype. But when you’re done, it takes as long to boot as ever. Phonenix’s HyperSpace is a lot more powerful: the Hybrid version carries on booting Windows in the background so you can have a little fun and then get straight to work. But the Hybrid version needs VT, which means a powerful notebook to start with (with Atom you get the Hyperspace Dual, which gives you much the same features but you have to boot Windows from scratch afterwards).
And while these pre-boot environments all cope with Wi-Fi, only HyperSpace supports a 3G dongle and so far only the Option model that AT&T sells in the US (did I say drivers are the curse of any OS?). A netbook that could dual boot into, say Windows Mobile, would come with built-in connectivity. But when I pounced on Peter Chou, the CEO of HTC, between the launch of the Touch Diamond2 and Pro2 (which will be my next phone) and  the launch of the Vodafone Magic (I think the magic was persuading Google it didn’t have to look like the Sidekick) he said that the technology wasn’t advanced enough yet - and probably neither is the market. But if netbooks continue to dominate, dropping the price a few pounds and painting them different colours isn’t going to be enough to make a new netbook standout. Putting a phone in there, on the other hand… maybe next year?
-Mary
 

Usually I say the fastest way to speed up any PC is to stick some more memory in it, but with cheaper notebooks and netbooks it’s actually more likely that your hard drive is slowing you down.

Take the Toshiba R400 I use as a rather stylish but not very speedy bedroom browsing machine. In its time this PC has had everything from Web editing tools to databases to three different 3G connection tools to the unremovable Nokia PC Suite on it and the parade of utilities and apps has taken its toll. I’ve been having problems for a few months that I was pretty sure SP1 of Vista would fix - I just never seemed to have the time to do the update because the same issues that would stop Outlook and IE from launching had the  update failing when I tried to do it online. If I have to spend an hour downloading and running an offline update, I thought, it’s just as fast to spend half an hour upgrading to Windows 7; if it runs happily on a netbook then it should do just fine on the R400.
 
Apart from the size (12″ screen), the fact that it’s the slimmest convertible Tablet PC you can get and the price that those extra features put on it, I tend to think of the R400 as the first netbook. It looks lovely, it’s white and glossy, it’s very portable, it doesn’t have much battery life and the performance is limited. Not by the Centrino Duo chip, not by the memory (I’ve got 3GB in it) - but by the 4200RPM PATA drive. To fit in everything, Toshiba picked a 1.8″ drive and at the time that meant using the same hard drive that you’d find in an iPod. It’s still impossible to find anything beyond a 5600RPM 120GB SATA drive in the 1.8″ format; Toshiba has announced higher capacities but they’re not on the market for upgrades…

Many netbooks pull the same trick; by comparison the 5600RPM drive in the Lenovo S10 gives it the kind of performance you thought the Atom didn’t have the oomph to deliver.
 
Why does the drive speed make so much difference? Even 1GB of memory is enough for whatever you’re doing at the time to fit in memory but as soon as you switch to another program Windows does a ‘context switch’  - and pages out to hard drive for virtual memory.
 
Upgrading the R400 to Windows 7 beta went almost flawlessly; of course we had to stop and put SP1 on it first because you can’t upgrade without it, so it wasn’t actually a timesaver, but it’s the smoothest OS upgrade I’ve done in a long time. With Vista I’ve always recommended a clean install: 7 coped happily with the rash of apps, including Nokia PC Suite, and even recognises the 3G connection and shows it next to the list of Wi-Fi hotspots. But while things do feel a little nippier, and CPU usage was down around 1% with a couple of apps open in the background, I thought I’d run the Windows Experience Index to check how it rates the R400.

It gets a 2.0. not for the processor or the memory or the graphics; in fact this is the first time I’ve seen a notebook where the overall score is lower than the graphics result. It’s the hard drive transfer rate that brings the machine down - which now reflects exactly what I’ve seen in practice.
 
The Windows team has been talking about WEI and disk performance recently, including why they’ve changed the results from what the same configuration would have been rated as under Vista. It’s not that 7 has worse performance - it tends to be faster on the same hardware - or that your hard drive has magically got worse - it’s always been that bad; the WEI is just better at rating the performance you’ll actually see.
 
The same discussion reveals that a number of first-generation SSDs score very badly on performance under heavy load because they built up a backlog of data transfers and slow down to deal with them - scroll down for an excerpt with the details. Microsoft doesn’t feel that it can name names, which is a shame; unless all those drives are off the market by now, it would be nice to know what to avoid before you’ve bought a machine that gets a surprisingly low hard drive rating in WEI.
-Mary

“With respect to disk scores, as discussed in our recent post on Windows Performance, we’ve been developing a comprehensive performance feedback loop for quite some time. With that loop, we’ve been able to capture thousands of detailed traces covering periods of time where the computer’s current user indicated an application, or Windows, was experiencing severe responsiveness problems. In analyzing these traces we saw a connection to disk I/O and we often found typical 4KB disk reads to take longer than expected, much, much longer in fact (10x to 30x). Instead of taking 10s of milliseconds to complete, we’d often find sequences where individual disk reads took many hundreds of milliseconds to finish. When sequences of these accumulate, higher level application responsiveness can suffer dramatically.

With the problem recognized, we synthesized many of the I/O sequences and undertook a large study on many, many disk drives, including solid state drives. While we did find a good number of drives to be excellent, we unfortunately also found many to have significant challenges under this type of load, which based on telemetry is rather common. In particular, we found the first generation of solid state drives to be broadly challenged when confronted with these commonly seen client I/O sequences.

An example problematic sequence consists of a series of sequential and random I/Os intermixed with one or more flushes. During these sequences, many of the random writes complete in unrealistically short periods of time (say 500 microseconds). Very short I/O completion times indicate caching; the actual work of moving the bits to spinning media, or to flash cells, is postponed. After a period of returning success very quickly, a backlog of deferred work is built up. What happens next is different from drive to drive. Some drives continue to consistently respond to reads as expected, no matter the earlier issued and postponed writes/flushes, which yields good performance and no perceived problems for the person using the PC. Some drives, however, reads are often held off for very lengthy periods as the drives apparently attempt to clear their backlog of work and this results in a perceived “blocking” state or almost a “locked system”. To validate this, on some systems, we replaced poor performing disks with known good disks and observed dramatically improved performance. In a few cases, updating the drive’s firmware was sufficient to very noticeably improve responsiveness.”

Michael Fortin, Engineering the Windows 7 WEI

More and more of your users are chosing to work with laptops, notebooks and netbooks. That’s great - it gets them mobile and makes them productive in and out of the office. Even so, there’s a downside: there’s never enough screen real estate.

That might not be a problem for everyone, but if your users are developing code, producing publishing layouts or working with big Excel spreadsheets, the standard 12 inch widescreen displays just don’t cut it in the pixel department. The answer is obvious, use an external monitor, but you’re then stuck with cabling the monitors in, and providing enough hot desking space for everyone who wants to connect to a screen. Then comes the biggest problem - what do you use to connect the laptops to the screens? Some will have VGA, some DVI, some HDMI, and some DisplayPort.

Supporting all those standards isn’t easy. You’ll need to keep records of the ports on each machine you’re supporting, and have a sufficient stock of cables for all your possible combinations of users. There is an alternative - in the shape of a port that all your laptops will have, even the port-deprived Macintosh Air.

So what is it?

You might be surprised, as it’s the humble USB connector.

DisplayLink are one of those UK companies you’ll have never heard of, as they license their USB display technology to all and sundry. All you need to do is buy the appropriate adapter for the monitor (and increasingly it’s being built in to the hardware). Install the drivers on a laptop, plug in a USB cable and you’re able to drive up to six additional monitors with very little memory overhead. It’s an impressive technical feat that simplifies the IT pro’s life considerably. It’s not just monitors that use the DisplayLink hardware - InFocus has added it to a pair of projectors (so you don’t need to carry loads of cables to a meeting).

In some cases you don’t need to buy separate hardware - Toshiba and HP (among others) have built the hardware into their latest desktop docking stations, which only need a USB connection to give a laptop a range of ports it never had to start with. You don’t need to buy specific matching hardware, as these are USB-connected docks which work with all types of laptop (and with more than one OS).

We met up with the DisplayLink folk at CES, where they were demonstrating the latest version of their hardware - taking it up to an impressive 1920 x 1280 resolution (enough for the latest 24″ and 27″ displays). It was impossible to tell the difference between a USB connected display and one with a DVI connection all the way to the machine. DisplayLink wasn’t only using wired USB - wireless USB connections were used to drive a set of displays from a netbook, connecting a pocket-sized machine to a wall-filling LCD TV.

Big displays weren’t the only thing on show. One option was a USB connected (and powered) 7″ display. Perhaps best used as an auxiliary display for a desktop or a portable screen for a mobile user, the tiny display could be used to show email or IM windows, or to hold Photoshop pallettes. There was even a touch screen version with a built-in webcam - ideal for VOIP software like Skype. Sadly you can’t use them as a screen for a server (at least not until it’s booted). UEFI appears a promising solution, as it will allow DisplayLink to load drivers as a part of the boot process, but it’s going to be some time before USB screens become the primary screen…

With monitor manufacturers building in DisplayLink chips, along with the hardware in laptop docking stations, it appears that DisplayLink has finally reached the mainstream. It’s been a long haul for the Cambridge company, but it looks like the work has finally paid off.

Now we can start to get rid of all those bulky video cables…

Gamers seem to get it all.

Everywhere you went at CES this year, there were tools and toys for gamers.

They have the fastest, most powerful, best looking machines. Dell’s latest XPS Studio monster has all the looks of a classic US muscle car, while HP’s Firebird takes the F1R3FLY concept laptop and turns it into a sleek and powerful desktop PC. Then there are Logitech’s latest gaming keyboards, with a mass of programmable keys and tunable colours - as well as colour mini-displays.

It’s those programmable keys that make the G19 an ideal keyboard for an IT pro. There’s no reason why a gaming macro can’t actually be a stored snippet of PowerShell, or a set of keystrokes to quickly open up and log in to a remote desktop. There are twelve of what Logitech calls G-keys, and these can have three seperate macros attached to each key - so you can use them to store up to 36 different single keypresses or complex macros. There’s also a key to record new macros on-the-fly. Even the keyboard colour coding can be used to tell you if you’re writing code or managing systems.

If you’re happy with your existing keyboard (and I wouldn’t drop my ergonomic Wave for anything) you can still take advantage of macro keys using a gamer’s gameboard like the G13.

Gameboards are today’s take on the old plug-in numeric keypads. Like the G19 there are plenty of programmable keys, and a simple LCD display - as well as a thumb joystick. What might have been the key to a World of Warcraft session is also an ideal tool for someone working with Photoshop or a video editing application. You can take a tool like this and map in the key strokes and manipulations needed to quickly edit a podcast, or debug some code - or just scroll through and search your log files.

It’s easy to see just how gamer tools can be used by the IT pro. They can speed up tedious tasks, and can store commands you use often. The tricky bit is getting your boss to approve the purchase (and making sure you don’t use yours to thrash him in the office Unreal Tournament on a Friday night…).

–Simon

From CES 09 in Las Vegas