The only time I don’t want to hibernate my PC is if I’m walking from one meeting to another that’s two minutes away - like a conference where I use the ten minutes between sessions to catch up on my email before rushing off at the last minute to the next presentation. And with the much faster resume time on Windows 7 (15 to 30 seconds) I might remove my complicated hybrid sleep timer (3 minutes into sleep then 7 minutes into hibernate, in case I find a fascinating conversation and linger in the hall) and just hibernate all the time.

So many updates slipstream without forcing a reboot now that I can just keep going until I choose to restart (assuming Office 2010 sorts out its issues with making Word documents left open from the server during hibernation read only, which I’m working around by using Offline Files - although that has its own issue where the files can’t be saved when I’m actually offline; there’s always something with pre-release software).

But  when we first put the RTM code for Windows 7 on it, Simon’s HP EliteBook 2710p kept waking up like a child asking for a glass of water.  If you upgrade a machine from Vista to 7 and you find it won’t stay in hibernation, check the BIOS. Do you have Wake On LAN turned on? If not, check the disk partitions.

Like many OEMs, HP ships the 2710p with a recovery partition; it has a utility for fast booting and looking at email and contacts in a pre-boot environment and it has what you need to get the original version of Windows restored if you ever need it. That means it’s a system partition that the BIOS needs to know about and that means it ought to be marked as active, but then you wouldn’t be able to boot from the Windows 7 system partition. Sometimes that’s not a problem - but sometimes it means that when you try to hibernate, when the system hits a sufficiently deep ACPI power-off level, it all wakes up again because of the recovery partition - which puts you straight back into Windows. If you do an upgrade install to preserve your installed applications, that leaves the original - and now useless - recovery partition in place. You can remove that and add the disk space to the main partition; we’ve seen that fix some hibernation issues, and on a two-year-old notebook the 8-10GB disk space you get back is well worth it.

However, it didn’t fix the hibernation problem on the EliteBook. We had the same problem with our elderly Elonex media center, which has a new lease of life with Windows 7; with the Release Candidate it was so sprightly that about a minute after we hibernated the machine it would just start back up again, and that didn’t have a recovery partition. The EliteBook didn’t have the hibernation issue with RC, so it’s not a bug. In both cases, a clean install of the RTM code fixed the problem instantly - our suspicion is that it’s an interaction between a driver and an RC to RTM upgrade (which, although, possible, certainly isn’t recommended). In practice, you’re not likely to see this issue on any user machines when you roll out Windows 7, though you might find on your own test system. Bite the bullet and do the clean install; it’s going to give you a more reliable system.

BONUS HELP: if you have a completely different hibernation problem, and you’re looking on the Microsoft knowledge base, you might find a new tool called Fix It. When there’s a registry change that needs making, or some other simple-if-you-know-how fix that you wouldn’t want an end user to mess around in the system trying to implement, many KBs now give you a button to press to make the change for you. No copying keys into your own registry fixomatic scripts, no wondering if the advice site you’re getting a .REG file from is really safe to use. This has been quietly building up since last autumn and you can see all the fixes so far at the Fix It blog or keep them to hand for users with the Fixit sidebar gadget. Invaluable!
-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

My workhorse machine is an HP 2710P tablet. It goes pretty much everywhere I go, and so it was the first machine (aside from my test PC) that I set up as a clean Windows 7 install, using the RTM build from MSDN.

First, the good news: As with nearly every machine we’ve taken to Windows 7 virtually everything works straight out of the box. There are Windows 7 graphics drivers for the Intel card ready and waiting, as well as drivers for most of the machine’s hardware, even drivers for the fingerprint reader and the SD card slot.

But there is some not so good news: Some of HP’s built-in tweaks and speciality hardware aren’t supported yet, and there’s some question over whether they will ever get Windows 7 drivers. That’s always a risk when hardware pre-dates an OS. It’s certainly a little annoying when the screen won’t autorotate, and the slider volume control on the keyboard won’t work - but there are workarounds using OS features such as Windows 7’s Mobility Center (call it up with Windows-X) which gives you rotation and volume controls.

Not to worry though, as as Windows 7 builds on Windows Vista, you can get all those functions back using the latest versions of the Vista drivers from the HP web site.

So far I’ve been able to get back rotation and special keys (including the volume slider and mute button), the accelerometer-based hard drive shock protection

You’ll need the following SoftPaqs:

SP43616 - HP Quick Launch screen rotation and special keys
SP38424 - hard drive shock protection
SP39734 - WiFi and Bluetooth manager

These will give you most of what you need. Some set up guides suggest using earlier You’ll also find a couple of devices without drivers in Device Manager. These are part of the Intel AMT device management suite, and aren’t really necessary for most users.

You can find the drivers for these in these two SoftPaqs: SP38312 and SP38313

The installers for these drivers won’t run under Windows 7. However the files will unpack into folders under C:\swsetup. In Device Manager right-click on one of the two unsupported devices, and choose “Update Drivers”. Choose to install from a local folder (and make sure the “use subfolders” option is selected). Pick C:\swsetup and let Windows install the device driver. Do the same for the other AMT device driver.

And that’s everything you need for a fully configured Windows 7 machine.

Enjoy.

–Simon

I found this forum thread very useful when setting up my machine

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

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

If you work for a security company you wouldn’t normally leave your laptop and your BlackBerry with a journalist you’ve only just met when you go to fetch coffee. Feeling comfortable doing that says you’re confident in your security. Susan Callahan of Safend isn’t worried about leaving her laptop on a table, in a security tray, or anywhere. If she loses it, it’s just an inconvenience - not a security breach.

You probably know of Safend as a tool for protecting USB ports. That’s a big part of the security story today. Flash memory sticks are everywhere - they’re the new floppy disk that can carry all your information. Walking around the various memory companies at CES we found all shapes and sizes of memory stick, all united by being something that easily fits in a pocket. 1GB devices cost almost nothing, and the latest generation give you up to 64GB of storage. You’ll even find them built into Swiss Army knives.

64GB? That’s more than many laptop hard disks. It’s also more than 13 DVDs-worth of data.

With that amount of low cost storage available to all and sundry, it’s not surprising that businesses are seeing flash drives as a security risk. Two CD-ROMs worth of tax data caused one of the biggest data losses in the UK, so it’s easy to imagine just how much damage a tiny memory stick can do.

So how do you protect your data, when it can easily move onto a keyring?

We spent some time on a hot January afternoon at a Silicon Valley Starbucks with Susan, talking about how businesses can use endpoint security tools to protect their data. Securing USB sticks is just part of their story, as the Safend software lets you control exactly how you can use USB ports. You can set up policies for approved devices, and provide different levels of access for different classes of users. There are also rules for controlling just how DVD and CD writers can work, as well as tools for handling hard disk encryption.

That means that the CEO may get full access, while sales teams will only be able to read data sent to them by clients. Other teams might only be able to share data using encrypted memory sticks that are automatically encrypted as soon as they’re connected to a PC. Managing the rules is easy enough, with a central console and a single policy server that can handle up to 10,000 client devices. You can even set up geographic rules, to handle the differences between EU and US privacy requirements, or provide rules that work on specific file content or sizes. There’s even the option to set up rules based on content – so you could have rules that would allow staff to copy any document that doesn’t contain credit card numbers or any other identity information.

Data loss isn’t just about the network, and the Safend tools also help handle disk encryption (which is why the ThinkPad was safe on the cafe table). Lose a protected laptop and anyone who “acquires” it won’t be able to read the files – let alone copy them onto a CD or a flash disk.

There’s enough regulation out there to make device protection as important as your firewalls – so have you locked down your laptops yet?

–Simon (in Silicon Valley)

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…

Thinking about a netbook as a last-minute stocking filler for yourself? There are some very usable netbooks now, especially the Dell Mini 9 and the new Lenovo. But they’re still cheap and cheerful personal machines with consumer features, and many of them look it.

In an ideal world, the ultraportable you want for business needs a few more features. A fingerprint sensor and Vista with BitLocker encryption would be a good start, along with a keyboard you can actually type full documents and emails on. A battery that lasts a full day saves you starting every meeting by looking for a power socket. Built-in 3G is more efficient, giving you better bandwidth and using less power than a USB dongle. And while looks aren’t everything, it doesn’t hurt to carry something stylish that marks you out as a success. Many of the netbooks on the market have basic looks to match their basic price and basic features. Customers and partners will want to take a look at a netbook and may be impressed by how much you can get done on it despite the limitations, but they can go away with the impression that you can’t afford anything better.
 
You certainly won’t give that impression with the unfeasibly light Toshiba R600 or the slim, sleek Sony TT. At the launch, the Chinese  artist commissioned to produce signature chops for the journalists at the launch kept saying. TT. Like the Audi? That’s not a bad impression to leave people with.
 
After Steven Sinofsky flashed a Lenovo S10 around on stage at the Windows 7 announcement at PDC, Mike Nash did a little repositioning of the Windows 7 netbook story, telling a story about visiting a big-box store where the 20-year-old assistant insisted that the only people buying netbooks were “really old people!” Really old people? How old? “Old! 40 or 45!”

Leaving aside the way anyone over 21 looks old from a certain angle - like the New Yorker map of the world, where anything outside Manhattan might as well be in Australia - and whether white plastic looks more like a child’s toy than black metal, the real question is what can you achieve on a cheap machine. Hardly anyone wants a PC just for Web browsing, especially now the iPhone and the BlackBerry Bold and even Windows Mobile with Skyfire (http://get.skyfire.com) mean you can see real Web pages on a phone. There’s the ‘familiar applications from Windows’/'any application that does something similar so Linux is fine’ debate. And there’s can I run the applications I want, fast enough to do something useful and with enough battery life to make it worth carrying a netbook with me. Three hours doesn’t cut it for me, I want to be able to run five Office applications and a Web development tool, and I want a fingerprint sensor and a TPM while I’m at it.

It’s like the HTC Advantage, which I still think of as the first Mobile Internet Device by Intel’s definition; as soon as the screen was big enough and the processor fast enough I wanted all my usual PC applications instead of the cut-down Windows Mobile equivalents. I prefer Office to Google Docs because I like features like document reviewing and AutoCorrect and colour conditional formatting to show values visually as well as numerically. And I’d rather have an ultraportable than a cheaper netbook, because it does more. It’s nice if it looks as good as the Sony TT, but the Toshiba Portégé R600 isn’t any prettier than a netbook; but it is the thinnest, lightest machine I’ve ever picked up, which also has a DVD drive. Just as Apple products are undeniably desirable on a visceral level, netbooks are a hard to resist combination of cheap and cute. But if they don’t do what you really need, they’re no bargain.

-Mary

Apple’s switch from basing its laptops on Intel chipsets to NVIDIA’s new 9400M series has raised more than a few eyebrows. There’s a good reason for that switch, as I discovered when I had a conversation with NVIDIA’s Rene Haas last week.

In the past mobile graphics chips have been a poor cousin to their desktop relations. Some may have the same product numbers, but a fraction of the power. With the advent of technologies like OpenGL and the rise of General Purpose GPU computing (GPGPU), laptop GPUs looked like they were being left far behind. Popular software is starting to take advantage of GPU computing, with companies like Adobe taking advantage of GPU programming to accelerate and smooth operations in its latest version of the CS imaging and design suite. You couldn’t get the smooth rotations and zooms in Photoshop CS4 without OpenGL - and if your chipset doesn’t support it, you’ll just get an error message.

Apple’s new machines aren’t just using the 9400M for OpenGL. There’s a lot more to the chips than GPUs (though the 16 GPU cores take up most of the silicon). The chips also include much of the core system hardware you usually find as separate chips. The result brings the Northbridge and Southbridge into the same package, using much less real estate and allowing motherboards to be less than 1/2 the size, and at the same time giving increased graphics performance for the same power footprint. Laptops get better gaming performance, and applications get better user interface effects.

The MacBook’s improved video performance has been noticed, and it’s down to the 9400M’s built-in HD video support. There’s hardware support for the H.264 HD video codec Apple uses for its iTunes movies, as well as support for many of the decryption techniques needed to work with DVDs and BluRay. While Apple may not support BluRay yet, Windows will with Vista’s SP2 release, and NVIDIA’s chips handle the AES encryption used on BluRay discs, as well as handling high-end features like BD-Live.

The MacBook Pro shows off another of NVIDIA’s features, Hybrid SLI, which lets hardware developers add a second GPU for more processing power when it’s needed - turning it off when it’s additional boost is unnecessary. The Pro has an additional 9600MGT which can be used for gaming or intensive image processing - using more power than when a single GPU is used for word processing or web browsing

So why is NVIDIA producing this new chip? The main reason is the size of the laptop market. New laptops will outsell desktops by a large margin by 2012, and users want the same performance in their bags as well as on their desks. Only a small proportion of notebooks have discrete GPUs, with most using integrated graphics. GPUs need to compete with integrated chipsets on price, form factor and performance, so this is where a new single chip solution comes in to play.

There an interesting caveat to this story, too. NVIDIA’s CUDA GPGPU framework has become an interesting tool for developers who want to work with massively parallel application programming on GPUs. In the past it’s been resistant to talking about other GPGPU frameworks - but the Apple relationship is changing that. Apple has announced that it wil be supporting the OpenCL GPGPU APIs in the Snow Leopard release of OS X, and as a result, NVIDIA will be supporting OpenCL access to its CUDA frameworks. Supercomputer performance in a laptop will be a very interesting side effect of the 9400M chips.

This isn’t an exclusive deal with Apple, either. There will be more laptop manufacturers switching to this approach in future - so we can look forward to a much better laptop experience with Windows and Linux in the future.

–Simon