Battery life? Performance? No, the important test Intel’s new SSD passes is known internally as P*ssmark…

That’s the nickname for the way Intel tests how much of a difference SSD makes to user experience. It’s not just about how much extra battery life, although I’d like the expected 14 hours batter life I could get from the HP 2730p, the next version of my tablet, with SSD and the thin slab battery I already get 8 or 9 hours from.

The improved performance isn’t just for looking good in benchmarks or running video editing apps most people don’t use, it’s for stopping you sitting at the screen hollering “what are you doing!” as the hard drive light flashes on and off and Outlook sits there staring blankly. Not that it’s always Outlook; Acrobat is pretty good at sitting on its thumb, as are plenty of other applications. And as notebooks get smaller and lighter and 5400rpm is seen as something to aspire to, you can be left waiting far too often.

According to Intel’s cheekily named and possibly unscientific internal benchmark, you’ll be gnashing your teeth ten times less with an Intel SSD than a hard drive. They worked this out by asking a group of Intel employees to mark on a log sheet how often they got fed up enough with their computer to remember that they were keeping score. After two weeks they swapped them over to SSDs. And then after another two weeks, they made them go back to hard drives instead, sticking to show their frustration.

That frustration - and the tick marks - went down significantly Intel’s Principle Enginner for NAND Stephen Wells told me. “Not to zero; I’d still get annoyed if Windows blue-screened or something,” he said. But ten times less frustration was very noticeable. “And oh, the moaning and whining you got when we made people go back to the hard drive. I know - I was one of them. Do you want to get rid of your mouse? No.  Do you want to go back to DOS? No. In a few years will you want to get rid of your SSD? Absolutely not.”

 Not only is flash faster than hard drive, it’s more consistent. The 34 seconds it took to run through the photo and video tasks in one of Intel’s benchmarks always came out somewhere between 30 and 35 seconds, no matter how often the team ran it. But with the 5400rpm hard drive, Intel’s Chris Saleski told me the day before, the results were anywhere from one and a half minutes to two and a half minutes. 

Wells puts that down to the fact that data can be scattered anywhere around the disk and there’s an unknown latency in getting to it and getting it back that you don’t see with SSD - and he expects that to mean a more deterministic battery life with SSD as well. That way, when Windows says you have an hour of battery life left, you won’t find the machine hibernating to save your data fifteen minutes later. And that’s another thing I’d be ticking the frustration mark for…
-Mary
 

Imagine a second, simpler operating system on your PC with fixed features, so it’s more secure - after all, if you can’t add more programs you can’t add a virus either. It would have to start up quickly, so that Windows wasn’t waiting for it, so it would be ideal for listening to music and watching video. I’m not thinking about virtualization per se, although that’s one way to achieve something similar; this is two operating systems side by side, both with access to the PC hardware, but one of them does much more limited and circumscribed things.

Can you tell what it is yet?

No, actually, I’m not talking about Palladium - sorry, Microsoft Next Generation Secure Computing Base. That grew out of an attempt to reassure Sony that it would be OK to allow DVD movies to play on a PC without piracy becoming endemic and turned into a much more useful and visionary idea about using public key cryptography not to identify people but to secure machines. It would have been a good way to implement the DRM it was associated with in the public eye, though wouldn’t have forced it on anyone who didn’t want to run it. Palladium loaded a secure piece of software called the TOR that acted as a secure area that could only run trusted code (written to public APIs), where the apps would be invisible to the main OS - all secured by the machine-specific key in your TPM and some new technology from Intel. 

Ironically, trust was the issue with Palladium; nobody trusted Microsoft to either be building a secure system that didn’t impact on a very robust interpretation of free speech or if it was, to do it right. The smallest part of the concept made it in a couple of versions of Vista as BitLocker; whole disk encryption secured by the TPM.
But the Palladium concepts are showing up in a lot of other places, including the NSA’s Security Enhanced Linux and Citrix’s Security Enhanced Xen - a small OS that runs as a secure virtual machine with isolated applications, using the TPM and Intel’s new hardware virtualization technology …

Intel even uses the words Trusted Computing Base, which might be a hostage to fortune given the fate of Palladium. The DRM discussion hasn’t started yet, but there’s a trusted channel to the keyboard, mouse, memory - and the graphics subsystem, which is what some thought would allow copy-protected DVDs to be watched in the secure area of Palladium, without the option to copy them. This time around it’s more likely to be copy-protected downloads: killing off HD DVD has actually made Blu-Ray less likely to get mass adoption,  as player and disc prices stay high.

There are far more benefits to Palladium-style secure computing than protecting the movie industry or saving the banking industry from having to upgrade anti-fraud backends. You may keep your AV up to date and your company documents secure, but one in six of all PCs that touch the Google site has a bot and they’re all sending you spam.

And while the systems that look so much like Palladium that I get déjà vu are still a little way off, Asus is already selling machines with Express Gate. Granted, this is more like the embedded operating systems you see on a lot of media notebooks; it boots up in eight seconds and lets you see your photos and play your music. It has an Internet connection, so you can browse the Web without waiting for Windows. But it also uses the TPM in Montevina and you can treat it as an isolated operating system, says the press release: “Friends and family can use your notebook to nip online, use IM, listen to music, play and view without having access to your data, the system or the Windows environment.” Very Palladian.
-Mary

I wouldn’t be surprised to open a packet of cornflakes  and have a 3G USB dongle fall out, they’re getting so common. They may be convenient but they’re not the most efficient way to get a 3G connection on a laptop. A notebook with a built-in antenna gets 25% better bandwidth (because the better the signal, the more data throughput you get). And given that most 3G cells have only a 1Mbps pipe connecting them to the Internet , you need all the throughput you can get. 

The rumblings about EU regulation of SMS and mobile data costs carry on in the background along with OFCOM’s proposals for a voluntary code of conduct for ISPs to make sure your DSL line gives you the speed you’ve paid for, and OFCOM has also been making noises about checking out what speeds mobile broadband really offers. It’s a nice idea and it might concentrate the attention of the operators on the issue, but the speed you get depends on a mix of your handset, the Internet backhaul of the base station, how many other people are using data on the same base station - and the weather, so it’s hard to be precise.

I was impressed by the independent tests that Vodafone was trumpeting last month claiming they have the fastest HSDPA network. They’re claiming up to ten seconds faster to download a 2MB MP3 file (13.54 seconds) and four times faster to open a Web page (6.7 seconds). Anecdotally, Vodafone does feel faster than T-Mobile and Orange in the areas of London we visit, on EDGE and on HSDPA. With BT’s announcement today that it’s dropping backhaul pricing, if the mobile operators put in connections from the base stations to the Internet that are as fast as your connection from your phone to the base station, we’ll start to see which side of the network really needs to speed up.

I expect better battery life is also going to be better when you’re using built-in 3G than when you’re going through a USB port. The voltage won’t be much different but you can have much more sophisticated power management - and of course if you have a better signal, you don’t have to keep turning the radio up to try and improve things.

So Lenovo’s Centrino 2 announcements caught my eye today. Either the growth in the dongle market means Ericsson has dropped the prices of its 3G modules (scale, competition or a mix of the two) or Lenovo has decided that 3G is the best way to fight off the buzz around ultra-cheap machines like the Eee PC and Aspire One that cut features along with the price. Whichever it is, Lenovo is dropping the price premium for built-in 3G from around £100 to around nothing: from August 4th notebooks with a mobile broadband module will cost, and I quote, ”approximately the same price as those without”.

Although BT is now referring to the still-in-draft 802.11n proposal as a standard and putting it in the shiny new BT Home Hub (the rotating ten foot model of it at the BT event last night was a little scary), the n debacle drags on. At this rate, we might have HSDPA built into more laptops than 802.11n…
-Mary

Where has 32GB of disk space gone and how do I make Vista give it back, or there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

When we’re on the road at conferences I take a fair few photographs, and I copy a lot of PowerPoints and PDFs onto my notebook, not to mention photographing products I’m reviewing, and then there’s recordings of interviews… It all takes up space, so when I got an 8 megapixel camera the day we drove into Death Valley I did wonder if disk space on my notebook might be a problem.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been kicking along with only a few gigabytes of my 84GB disk free. Simon, who has the same laptop and takes just as many photos, had already removed the recovery partition to get 8GB back. And last week at TechEd I got down to just 1GB free,. I grabbed the biggest USB stick I have, which at 32GB is a sizable proportion of my hard drive space, and started looking for files to move, using the excellent WinDirStat to see a treemap and size-sorted folder list. Recordings and photos were the obvious place to start and after I transferred a few gigabytes of those I had enough room to download more PowerPoints and worry later. The figures didn’t seem quite right, but I was spending more time thinking about how soon we could move the server to Windows Server 2008 to get faster network file copying with SMB 2: I want to know if the 30-40x Microsoft is claiming will work for us.

Yesterday I sat down to copy the photos and recordings still on my tablet PC onto the server and after removing 3GB of recordings I had - about the same space I’d started with. I’d get up to 2.2GB and then go back down to 1.9GB or right back to 800MB free. I ran disk cleanup and deleted two 500MB files of crash reports that were hanging around waiting to upload, and felt I was rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. I ran WinDirStat and wondered why Windows needs 13GB of disk space, 6GB of which is in the WinSxS directory - ’side by side’ versions of files to avoid DLL hell. I kept coming back to the 8GB of photos that I wanted to keep on my notebook, the 11GB I use for OneNote and Outlook caches (recordings and attachments again), the fact that the conference files I was worrying about where only 2GB because the XML PowerPoint format is so compact…  and finally I looked at the summary at the top of WinDirStat that was telling me I only had 46GB of files on my hard drive.

Oh no, I thought; finally an application I care about that doesn’t run properly under Vista. Maybe every folder is just bigger. WinDirStat says it’s 20.9GB for the Users folder tree but Explorer says- well Explorer said 20.9GB as well. It’s not the swap and hibernation files; I can see 3GB for each of them in WinDirStat and besides, 84.2GB-46.5GB is some 32GB of disk space that’s missing. I cleared everything except the last system restore point: no difference. If I had 32GB of bad sectors, the hard drive ought to have raised the white flag in surrender by now. Where else would Vista be hiding disk space?

There’s a great new feature that Apple put into the Leopard release of Mac OS X called Time Machine, that takes a copy of all your files as you edit them, creating continuous backup so you can find files you’ve deleted and undo changes you made long after you’ve saved a document and moved on. Apart from the starry backdrop and the timeline scrollbar this is exactly the same as the Volume Shadow copy that Microsoft put into Windows Server 2003, which powers the Previous Versions feature in Vista, as well as System Restore. Shadow because you have to copy the ’shadow’ a file casts if it’s open or you can’t copy it at all, volume because it can get any or all files on that drive and Volume Shadow because, let’s face it, Microsoft has no clue about good product and feature names.

The interface is much less sexy too; you right-click on a file or folder and choose Restore previous versions. And how do you see how much space this really useful feature is using?

First you have to open a command prompt as an administrator; I run as a standard user because I don’t mind clicking on a dialog that confirms it’s me and not a virus mucking with the internals of Windows, so I hit the Start button, type CMD and right-click on the Command Prompt icon that appears to choose Run as Admin.  The command for working with Volume Shadow Services is VSSAdmin and the command to find out how much space it has its shadowy fingers on is:

VSSAdmin List ShadowStorage

By default, Vista gives 15% of total disk space or 30% of free disk space to System Restore and Volume Shadow Services, whichever is smaller. There’s no slider to adjust as there was in XP and the space doesn’t change unless you turn System Restore on and off - which deletes all the previous versions and restore points, so while it’s easy it’s not really a good idea. But you’re going to want to check and probably change the setting because a lot of PCs seem to think 15% isn’t enough and set the upper limit to - well, all the free disk space you have.  In my case Vista had used 15GB of space for previous versions, it had allocated itself 16GB of space and the maximum space was UNBOUNDED. Yes, all my free disk space. I could have gone back to the day I turned on the notebook and got the files I was editing - but that’s not much use if I can’t create any new files.

Put some limits on VSS by typing:
VSSAdmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=C: /On=C: /MaxSize=15GB
I was feeling parsimonious, and I keep most of the files on the SBS 2003 server which also runs VSS, so I gave it 5GB to play with. It allocated just over 2GB and filled 700MB immediately, so I suspect I get the changes on my files yesterday and nothing more. But I also get 39GB of free disk space, so I’m not complaining. 

I’m not sure if my notebook came from HP with VSS set to UNBOUNDED in first place or if SP1 might have changed this, so I don’t know who to name and shame. I have seen a lot of Vista users reporting that they’ve been losing disk space the same way, with UNBOUNDED set on machines from Dell, Lenovo and other big-name PC companies. But Microsoft gets a share of the blame, for adding a great feature with no way to control it except from the command line. Worried users will make the VSS space too small? Don’t take the slider away all together; just don’t let it go down below, say, 5GB. I can stop certain file types from getting shadowed by adding them to the HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\BackupRestore\FilesNotToSnapshot registry key. Temporary files are there by default; I’ll probably add MP3 files as I tend not to be editing these… but I’d rather do it without delving into the registry.

And if you’re running Vista Basic or Home Premium, VSS is running for System Restore and backing up your documents, but you can’t right-click to see and retrieve previous versions of a file even though they’re taking up space. Get a copy of ShadowExplorer  (only at version 0.2 but also free) from www.shadowexplorer.com and you can make the most of the disk space you agree to give up. 
-Mary

No battery ever lasts long enough. The extended battery on the HP 2710 tablets Simon and I carry give us a full day of work, nine to ten hours or less if we turn on Wi-Fi. I’ve been typing since 8am this morning and online a few times and it’s now 1pm and I have four hours left. That’s just about acceptable, but it’s never enough - I’m wondering where the nearest power socket is. Two technologies we saw at the Future in Review conference this week could produce much longer battery life - if they ever make it to market.

Lithium ion batteries work by packing as much lithium as possible into the positive and negative electrodes inside the battery and them moving ions from them, through the electrolyte fluid and out to your device. The more lithium you can get into the electrode, the more ions you can get out of it. That’s how Yi Cui of Stanford is hoping to get a battery that lasts ten times longer. He’s replacing the usual copper electrodes with silicon, which can store ten times as many lithium ions .

That’s not news; we’ve known for 30 years that silicon stores more lithium, but it also swells up more than copper because of that - and when it swells up, the electrode breaks. Yi Cui’s breakthrough was using silicon nanowires that are much more supple; each wire is only 100 nanometres wide, but they’re very long. Silicon is also more stable than copper, so increasing the energy density doesn’t make it more likely for batteries to explode the way it does with current batteries. It doesn’t make it hotter either, because it’s the internal resistance of the battery that causes the heat, not the capacity.

Ten times as many lithium ions doesn’t mean ten times the battery life; by the time you add in the rest of the battery system, including the electrolytes and the packaging around it all, and some further developments that are still under wraps, you could get double the battery life of lithium ion today.

Startup Seeo is starting with the other half of the battery, replacing the electrolyte fluid with a plastic film that’s very like the polymers used to make motorcycle helmets. For one thing that means it’s much safer - no matter how hot the battery gets it won’t catch fire. But it also works with other battery chemistries than lithium; according to Seeo, some of the lithium replacements they’re looking at could give you 50 to 70 times the energy density of lithium, so you get a choice between smaller devices or longer battery life in the same size we lug around today.

We’ve seen a lot of new battery technologies over the years and few of them have made it to market. One promising zinc battery might finally show up in notebooks PCs this year, maybe, possibly - four years after I first saw it running a laptop. It’s not just that the chemistry might turn out not to work as well as it did in the lab. At the moment you can only charge a silicon lithium battery 100 times before it won’t charge enough to be worth using; that has to go up to 500 times before you’d think about putting it in a mobile phone you’d keep for two years and more like 1,000 for a notebook. Both Seeo and Yi Cui are aiming to charge as quickly as lithium ion, but they’re not there yet - silicon lithium batteries could take an hour to charge.

And hardware manufacturers have to see enough of a demand to change the power supply and charging system in a laptop or phone. Seeo’s lithium battery might fit into an existing device but that’s more about safety than longer battery life; a different chemistry will need a different charger. Silicon lithium batteries run at a slightly different wattage and the value that tells the system the battery is fully charged and doesn’t need more power is also different.

So are these new technologies going to languish the way others have? Maybe not. For one thing, people will pay more for longer battery life, so manufacturers have an incentive to switch. And for another, with the price of oil and petrol still rising, electric cars are looking more likely and both these technologies promise to scale up enough to power cars. When you can do that, a smaller battery for a phone or a PC almost comes for free.
-Mary

My phone knows where I am, and when I flew to Geneva the other week it knew what time it was; the operator pushed a time signal and Windows Mobile 6 happily picked it up. It confused me when I took the phone out to change the time - but it also meant the appointment with the contact number for the taxi driver was up on screen where I needed it. I connected my PC to the Orange World Wi-Fi in the hotel (at the fifth time of asking; if you’re using a mix of numbers and letters as your username and password, please use a font that allows the user to distinguish 6 and G ). My PC sat there stubbornly believing it was on UK time, even though it had a French IP number.

I’m not expecting every PC to have a GPS in, and it doesn’t need to. Never mind battery life, it’s useless inside anything bigger than a garden shed and even in a city canyon it’s impractical; it took my O2 XDA Stellar 15 minutes to get a GPS fix in Covent Garden this week. What I’m after is a utility that uses the location services like Spotigo, Aruba, Navizon, PlaceSite, Skyhook and all the rest that give you location based on your IP address/what wireless access points you can see and when it gets a location that’s different from the time zone Windows is set to, up pops a prompt asking if you want to change it. If you want to be all social networking about it, the utility could upload my location to services like Facebook - or preferably just my timezone, as I’m sure burglars read Facebook too. I could have a widget in the Sidebar showing who’s in the same timezone as me or get an alert if someone I know is in the next street.

I’ve used Navizon on Windows Mobile for the last year to get locations and I like it but the desktop version is a Java applet and although the API supports time as part of the location info I haven’t found a timezone utility for it.

Skyhook’s Loki will do the locating and publishing bit. It’s pretty good at locating too; this is the service used by Google Maps on Windows Mobile and the iPhone and it knows where we live. Skyhook can use a combination of GPS, IP address, Wi-Fi and cell tower to cope with a range of environments.

Navizon uses user-contributed data for Wi-FI and cell tower and is either very accurate or about 2 miles out; Loki (and Google Maps Mobile) are either very accurate or not working at all.

Loki s obsessed with search; that’s because ads you click on make money. Personally, results in the same town as me may or may not be more relevant to be depending on how far ahead I’m planning and I don’t actually want any more browser plugins, thank you. But digging through the options - yes, it will change my timezone for me, or ask if I want to in case it’s wrong.

This would be a good service for tools like Xobni to use; this handy Outlook plugin shows a ‘heat map’ of the times of day a particular person sends and replies to email. That’s pretty useful already - it tells you that you have a much better chance of getting a reply from me between 10.30 am and 7pm or between 11pm and 1am than at any other time. Assuming I’m in the office; the location timezone service could tell you if I’m in California - and if Xobni was really smart and I said it was OK for you to know where I am (cue my usual call for an identity abstraction layer for the Internet), it could shift the heat map to California time. Or better still, it could calculate a different heat map for when I’m in California, when you’ll reach me between 9am and 11am, 2pm and 6pm and 9pm to midnight most days.

At the moment you can look at my Dopplr trips, or my Facebook status, or my most recent personal blog post or the last photo I posted on flickr to work out where I might be - if I’ve remembered to update them and you remember to check them (a friend assumed I’d be in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress this week, and ended up having a night in instead of coming round for dinner). That’s both of us doing extra work that the computer should be taking care of and I’m sure that’s the wrong way round. 

There’s two halves to this. One is that location is a really useful service (see my 2008 Technology Resolutions), especially as more of us work from home, travel around more and run out of time to arrange meetings with friends. And that’s the really big thing. I want computers to start saving me time and getting more done for me, not by making it faster to get my accounts done or by letting me try 90 versions of my Web site in the time it used to take to write one, but by working out the context and giving me opportunities. If my To Do list says I need to get something from the Lurgashall Winery for a friend and I get a message from a friend in Billingshurst needing help with something and a mail from a client in Horsham wanting to talk about work, having my PC suggest that I’m in Guildford on Monday is handy (and we think it’s why Microsoft wants Yahoo!); having it know I’m actually in Guildford today even though I didn’t update my calendar and give me an itinerary for the afternoon is even more useful. And it’s the computer doing the running around, not me. For that, I’ll put up with another browser plugin.
-Mary

I had to revert to typing in a password on my notebook the other day.

I usually brush my finger over the fingerprint scanner and as I let the security software store passwords and login details for as many sites as possible I don’t have to remember many passwords at all now. Roll on CardSpace - when I can store my details on an InfoCard and present that instead of typing in whatever random selection of information a site demands to let me download trial software or white papers, I shall feel a lot more productive.

I always scan at least two fingers when I set up a biometric system, because the software insists. I usually scan a thumb as well but with a minimum of three scans to do per finger and me in a hurry to try out a new system, that’s usually enough. Perhaps I won’t mention which fingers I usually scan, just in case, but I scan a thumb  so that I can log on in tablet mode without having to twist - a well placed fingerprint scanner is convenient for both modes but you do need different fingers.

But come Boxing Day, none of my fingers or thumbs were getting me in. Turns out this was because they were all on my right hand - and I’d been preparing Christmas lunch with someone else’s knives. It’s not that they’re bad knives, just that they have a different weight and angle and they’re not as sharp as I’m used to. It’s like using a US keyboard - mostly it’s fine but the odd thing trips you up. In this case, slicing the potatoes and carrots and parsnips and sprouts and cutting the onion in half for bread sauce and shoving cloves into it, and cutting the lemon in half to go inside the turkey and even scraping ribbon with a scissor blade to make it curl had left me with very fine cuts on the pads of both fingers and the thumb that were in the system. Not enough for me to notice, certainly not enough to bleed but enough to stop the system recognising my fingerprint.

I hope the fingerprint scanner at US immigration in Las Vegas can cope with the marks better than this notebook!

Mary

I narrowly avoided having an argument with a friend about touch screens the other night. We were talking about the new OQO model e2, an adorably small and functional ultra-mobile PC. It’s available with the ordinary version of XP, the tablet version or with Vista Ultimate (which the CEO Dennis Moore tells me he prefers because he’s getting more battery life). All versions have the active digitizer touch screen, but only the ones with tablet software come with the active pen you need to use it.

If you’re not writing on screen, the mini joystick on the slide-out keyboard and the finger-sensitive strips beside and blow the screen let you scroll and move the mouse pointer as normal. My colleague hadn’t realized there was a touch screen at all until I lent him the pen from my HP 2710p tablet to try with it and then he started telling me he’d rather have it work with the standard stylus from his Palm PDA. Yes, but…

For a start, Windows - XP or Vista  - isn’t geared up for finger touch.

Try doing anything apart from opening the Start menu and selecting an icon with your finger? Radio buttons, checkboxes, even menu items are designed to be selected with a mouse pointer - your finger is going to press three or four of them at once. The Media Center interface is a good size for fingers because it’s designed to be driven by a remote control, but I use my PC for a lot more than viewing media. The Origami pack for UMPCs gives you nice finger-sized buttons - but it’s like the interface on the HTC touch, barely skin deep. As soon as you open an application, you’re back to needing the fine resolution of a mouse or pen. HP does rather better with the finger interface on the TouchSmart PC, which I miss hugely now it’s no longer in our kitchen, because there are apps and tools in it to do a lot more - including a family calendar and sticky notes. But eventually, I’m browsing a Web site and ticking boxes and with a finger it’s frustrating.

The TouchSmart is the only finger-touch device that gives you the hints you get with a mouse or an active pen - hover behavior that changes icons, lights up menus and generally lets you know that yes, you do have the pointer in the right place. That’s because it uses four cameras to detect where your finger is. Active digitisers do need a special pen; passive touch screens put more of the workings as a layer over the screen - which means a passive touch screen will never be as bright or clear as an active screen. The sampling resolution is higher too; so writing on an active touch screen can be as fluid as writing with a real ink pen. And while most tablet pens are like a cheap biro, Cross makes a line of tablet pens that feel like a fountain pen.

And then there’s being able to write on the screen with the pen without having the side of your hand writing right alongside it. There’s a technique called blunt touch blocking that it supposed to stop that - ignoring the blunt touch of your hand in favour of the precise touch of the pen. Usually it means you have to press harder with the stylus and you’ll still get some random scribbles. I’ve only ever used one passive touch screen that got the blunt touch blocking right, the Tablet Kiosk UMPC.

Vista improves on the handwriting recognition of XP significantly, and it learns when you correct the recognition - you don’t sit around training the PC. It also introduces pen flicks - gestures that let you copy, paste, delete, scroll or do any eight things you fancy by flicking the pen up, down, sideways and to the four quarters. That only works with an active pen.

My friend might have been saying he wanted a screen he could touch with his finger for pushing the few buttons that are the right size. There are dual-touch screens that work with both finger and active pen and they would give him what he wants - the ability to write with a pen or tap with your finger. This would increase an already high price - but if you think the Eee PC is a bargain and the OQO is overpriced, you’re not the customers OQO is building for (adding an expensive array microphone wouldn’t put off the people who need the functionality it will deliver, Dennis pointed out). But what he was really saying was that he hasn’t seen the point of an active pen because there have been so few successful tablet PCs for the mass market. The OQO e2 still isn’t for the mass market - but if you do get the point of an active pen you’ll love it.

Mary

I’m not entirely sure if I should be angry at or grateful to with the gentleman in seat 24E on last Thursday night’s JetBlue flight from New York to Seattle.

There’s one bit of airline etiquette that too many people forget. If you’re going to recline your seat, please remember to turn around and see if the person behind you is working or not. If you suddenly drop to as near horizontal as possible there’s a good chance you’re going to hit your neighbour’s laptop’s screen with the back of your chair. That’s not good for the laptop. The shock can loosen vital components - and even crack LCD panels. A quick check can save a lot of grief - aftwer all, the person behind you may well be wanting an excuse to stop working!

I’m pretty sure it was the gentleman in seat 24E forgetting basic economy class politeness and doing just that which caused the screen on my trusty tablet to start malfunctioning in the middle of a day of meetings with Microsoft Research. As much as I like my old notebook and pen, they’re no substitute for a copy of OneNote and a hard disk full of voice recordings. With a few more weeks on this US trip to go, and those potentially laptopless, I’d resigned myself to living with pen, paper and mobile phone, when the folk at HP came up trumps.

Instead of repairing my tablet  (that’ll wait until I get back to the UK), they’ve loaned me a shiny 2710p tablet PC for a couple of weeks. It’s a gorgeous piece of kit - with smooth good looks, and a spec to match. I’ll be blogging about it more over the next few weeks, as it’s an excellent example of how good industrial design can make the business PC experience more than a hefty slab of dull grey laptop and beige desktop PC. There are lots of little features that immedialtely impress, from the built-in keyboard light, to the bar graph charge display on the battery.

There’s one feature about this and many others of the current generation of business laptops that makes them less prone to the airline related issues of my trusty tablet. It’s the difference between a wide screen and a standard screen. A widescreen display gives you all the resolution (and more) of a standard laptop display - and it’s also a couple of inches smaller.

That’s the difference between a crunched screen and several more pages of copy when an unruly neighbour forgets that he’s not in a private jet…

–Simon (in Seattle)

I have a shiny new tablet PC to try out; the Portégé R400, which I’ve been excited about since the launch at CES in January. I may become a bit of a bore about the widescreen, lightweight, tablet goodness (unless the new ultraportable HP Tablet turns out to be a return to the glory days of the TC1000).

I love the light-touch Portégé keyboard and the way the slightest touch on the touchpad sends my cursor flying across the screen to where I want it and the Page Up, Page Down and Delete keys are all in the right place. Plus Toshiba has listened to reason (or at least to Microsoft) and there’s a Windows key where there ought to be. Even the biometric swipe actually works; on some models I start to feel like a criminal when my fingerprints don’t match three times in four.

I’m less excited about setting up a new laptop; Outlook doesn’t save enough settings so I have to type my signatures in my hand again (or copy from an outgoing message). I have to export AutoCorrect options(the macro at http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customization/ExportAutocorrect.htm saves a lot of retyping) and my custom spelling dictionry (easy to find at C:\Users\Mary\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Uproof
plus the 2007 Office Quick Access Toolbars (the QAT files lurk over at C:\Users\Mary\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office), install SpeedFiler and ClipMate, install my blogging software and the Flickr uploader, install the Foxit PDF preview for Outlook and the certificate for getting mail on the road, map my network drives, pin my favourite apps and documents to the Start menu - and take off the shovelware that comes with almost every new PC.

I’m all in favour of new PCs coming with security software; you need protection straight off the bat, in case you’re a junk mail opener, button clicker, file downloader or just plain unlucky. But I’m not a fan of Norton. For anti-virus I like AVG or Sophos, for spyware I’m happy with Windows Defender and for a firewall I’m happy with Windows Firewall (because I’m either behind a NAT or telling Vista I’m on a public suspect-everything network). My experience of Norton is that it’s intrusive and that it slows the system down dramatically.

It’s also a pig to get off your system. Like a fool I start by running the uninstaller. Silly me; of course I should have closed Outlook first - this is for a copy of Norton that has been pre-installed but never configured so of course it has its hooks in my mail client. I close Outlook - and everything else as Norton will insist on rebooting. I run the uninstaller; as this takes quite some time I go away and eventually I go to bed.

In the morning I find my PC has crashed rather than rebooted. Norton is still there and now it’s complaining that it’s out of date. But now when I close all my apps and run the uninstaller - it crashes, tells me it’s crashed and will collect some information about the problem and sits there engaging me in a staring match.

After my howls of frustration get too annoying, Simon takes the tablet away from me and tracks down the Remove Everything And Nuke From Orbit utility on the Symantec site (aka the Norton Removal Tool at http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/tsgeninfo.nsf/docid/2005033108162039) which scrubs away all traces, leaving a shiny and -subjectively at least - faster machine.  This beats hours of deleting registry keys and drivers by hand in between repeated reboots so I’m grateful it exists.

But why isn’t it built right into the uninstaller? Making it hard to get your software off my system does not make me more likely to keep it around; it just makes me associate you with pain and view your next release with suspicion.
-Mary