I have been searching for a new laptop for the past few months. I always wanted to get a 12″-13″, light weight model and longer battery life. I was looking at Lenovo’s U350 series as they were the first to have DDR3 laptops in the 13″ form factor. But I have waited for a long time and it is still not available in Canada. So I kept searching until couple weeks ago.

ASUS = Expensive?

ASUS have always been my brand when choosing a laptop because of their innovations and quality. My first laptop was customized with an ASUS barebone in 2002. It is still working perfectly fine today in my dad’s office. The only factor that would hold me back from getting another ASUS laptop was its price. Most of ASUS’ laptops are over $1000, especially for the 12″ – 13″ models.

ASUS != Expensive

Finally, 2 weeks ago I bought the ASUS UL30A-2A laptop for less than a thousand dollar. Its configuration is this:

• Intel® Core 2 Duo ULV SU7300 processor
• Windows7® Home Premium 64
• 4GB DDR3 memory
• 500GB hard drive
• 13.3″ HD (1366×768) screen
• Built-in Wireless N
• HDMI output

I have waited for Windows 7 to be officially released so that I can get this laptop with the new OS pre-installed. The large hard drive and 4GB of memory is more than enough for me to virtualize another operation system such as Ubuntu Linux using VirtualBox. It is also nice to have HDMI output along with the stand VGA port. The LCD screen is bright and sharp and it’s perfect for watching movies.

Substitute of MacBook Air

However, the features attracted me the most about this laptop are its physical size and battery life. It is under 1 inch thick and it weighs a little bit more than 3 pounds, which gives me a feeling of a MacBook Air. Due to this light weight design, it dosen’t have an optical drive but that’s fine to me because I can easily store CD/DVD images on the spacious hard drive.

10 Hours Up Time

Regarding the battery life, it just amazed me. The ASUS website claims that it can run for 12-hours but I never believe in any manufacturer’s claim about battery life. However, I was able to get at least 7-8 hours with normal usage. I also had a practice in which I like to remote control my laptop from my desktop at work so that I can use a larger screen and only one set of keyboard and mouse among 2 computers. With this practice, I can turn off the screen of the laptop and the ASUS UL30A is able to last for 10 hours before I need to plug in the power.

Other features worth mentioning are:

• SmartLogon – ASUS developed facial recognition technology where it utilizes the built-in webcam to recognize your face and automatically logs you on to Windows.
• Speaters – It uses Altec Lansing speakers which are much better than other brand’s low budget laptops.
• Express Gate – This model incorporates the Express Gate in which you can boot into a stripped Linux operating system within 8 seconds. It gives you a web browser, music player, online gaming, photo manager, chat, and Skype functions.

Nothing is Perfect

Well, nothing is perfect in reality and there are some downside of this laptop. The touchpad is not working very well as it is very difficult to make very precise move with the pointer. The pointer seems to be “skipping” on the screen. This is probably due to the “too smooth” surface of the track pad. Another weakness is that it doesn’t come with bluetooth, which seems to be a standard for today’s laptops. But it is also a standard that I don’t really need and good to trade it off for a lower price tag.

Reminder

If you are looking for mobility and affordability, then this ASUS UL30A would be a very good choice with up-to-date technologies. And if you are getting an ASUS laptop, you should not forget to register it with ASUS within 60 date to activate the 1 year Accidental Warranty. Just in case you “accidentally” dropped your laptop.

In my previous post, “IT Breakdown – Real Life Example”, I have told you how I got into trouble with some outdated technologies and unthoughtful IT structure. I have identified three factors that have contributed to the disaster. For the matter of not having real-time data redundancy, I would like to show you how to improve the situation with just a little budget.

The Hardware

Backing up data doesn’t involve much data processing and therefore you don’t really need a high end server for the job. The most important is having a high capacity hard drive. With the price of SATA hard drives being so cheap today, I bought a 1TB hard drive for less than $100 CAD and installed it on a spare desktop PC in my office.

The other hardware I looked at is the network card. It is better if it supports Gigabit LAN because this machine is going to connect up with all other servers on the network and backs up their data. 100Mb would be acceptable but 10Mb would be too slow. Fortunately, the spare desktop I got in my office does support Gigabit network.

The Backup Software

With the hardware ready, I needed a software that can backup all the data on all servers on to my backup system and it needs to be done serveral times a day. However, it would be stupid to copy all files and folders every time because not all of them is modified between each backup intervals. Hence, the software should support differential or incremental backup methods in which only backing up files that have been modified. With these requirements, I have came across with a software called SyncBackSE.

SyncBackSE is developed by 2BrightSparks. The program supports different types of backups including synchronization and mirroring. It also supports backing up to and backing up from a FTP server. With SyncBackSE, you can create different profiles for backing up different set of data and each of them can run on a different schedule. After each backup runs, you get a thorough report of what files have been copied or deleted, and explanations of each error that has occured.

I downloaded their trial version for testing on serveral servers that are running Windows 2000 and 2003. I scheduled 10 profiles on one of the testing server and tried backing up all critical data on the network. Each profile would run in every hour. All of them finished without problems. The reports showed some errors and explained to me that some files were locked up because it was opened by other program. Also, some files are missing probably they were deleted between the time it was scanned and the time SyncBackSE tried to copy them. These seems to be very reasonable cases and doesn’t really concern me. After testing for a few days, it was not a hard decision to purchase a couple licenses for the program.

One license is only $30, along with the 1TB hard drive, the data redundancy solution costs less than $200. Now we get almost real-time data redundancy. In case of a break down of a critical server, we can immediately switch over to the backup system by remapping all the network drives temporarily on the workstations. Users will only lost one hour of work which is not too difficult to recover. The $200 is well spent and within budget.

Today, I went to Staples to check out some stuff. Right at the entrance, they have put large ASUS banners. I was surprised and rushed into the store to see what ASUS products they are selling. I saw that they have the ASUS F8SN-X1, M51SN-X1, as well as the Eee PC 4G version available for display.

The F8SN-X1is a 14″ laptop with 3GB of RAM, 320GB of hard drive, running with Intel Core 2 Duo T5450 CPU. It is selling for $1079 at Staples. The M51SN-X1 has a very similar specification as F8SN-X1, it’s just that it is 15″ wide screen and selling for $1097. The Eee PC is selling at the stand price at $399.

Marketing Strategy

With Staples selling ASUS branded laptops, I can see that ASUS is really pushing its brand to fight for the market share against other big brands such as HP, Dell and Acer. The prices of the systems above are very competitive. When I was having my own computer retail business, ASUS has been always the most aggressive company to promote their products. Every month, we received their promotional materials such as catalogues, banners, stickers, display boxes,and so on. From time to time, their sales representative would come to our store to explain their newest products and help us in promoting ASUS products. No other companies have done such marketing strategy with us.

I still remember over a year ago that ASUS was talking with Gigabyte about the possibility of a merge. The outcome of that would be the lost of the ASUS brand. However, it now doesn’t seem that ASUS is thinking merging again.

Why ASUS?

Why do I like ASUS so much? You may want to check out my reasons here. Another reason I want to add is that ASUS is now providing one-year accidental damage warranty. So if you have spilled your coffee on your ASUS laptop, or dropped it on the ground, ASUS will replace a new one for you.

More ASUS

I can foresee that ASUS will be a major laptop brand in the next couple years. We maybe able to see more ASUS branded products selling in large electronic stores in Canada such as Staples and Futureshop. Another possibility is that we may have an ASUS store in the near future, just like the Sony store.

My client has an external hard drive and it has 2 partitions, one is FAT32 and the other one is NTFS. My client pulled the USB plug before the drive was finished writing data. The NTFS partition was then corrupted. When plugging the hard drive to a computer, Windows could detect both partitions and assign a drive letter to them. However, the NTFS drive could not be opened to view its files. The size of the drive was reported as -1MB.

I tried to perform a scan disk on the corrupted drive but Windows reported an error saying that the drive could not be scanned. Then I tried to use the Pandora Recovery, which I have discussed about it here. However, because the drive was not accessible, Pandora Recovery was not able to scan it for deleted files.

GetDataBack

After doing some research on the Internet, I have came across with GetDataBack for NTFS from Runtime Software. It says it can

“recover your data if the hard drive’s partition table, boot record, FAT/MFT or root directory are lost or damaged, data was lost due to a virus attack, the drive was formatted, fdisk has been run, a power failure has caused a system crash, files were lost due to a software failure, files were accidentally deleted…”

I downloaded its demo and installed it. Then I used it to scan the damaged drive. It took a couple hours to scan but the result is brilliant. The lost files were found, so I paid $79 USD for the software to recover all the files for my client. After confirming with my client, most of the files were recovered successfully.

GetDataBack is quite easy to use. With just 3 steps, it will be able to recover your data. However, as you may have already noticed, the version I used is for NTFS only. If you are recovering a FAT drive, then you will have to purchase GetDataBack for FAT which is $69 USD. Maybe because of this specialization, the rate of successfully recovering data is higher than the competitors. If the data is critical, then it is worth to pay for it if the free software doesn’t work for you.

Today, I am going to show you how to install VirtualBox on Ubuntu. VirtualBox is an open source virtualization product that works very similar to VMware Server. It allows you to run an operating system on top of another operating system. This allows you to have access to multiple operating systems at the same time. For computer technicians, virtualization gives you the flexibility to provide support for different platforms.

I am using Ubuntu 7.10 as my host OS. You can use other Linux, Windows, Macintosh and OpenSolaris operating systems as your host OS. For supported guest operating systems, you may want to check out the list in this link – http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Guest_OSes.

It is quite easy to install VirtualBox on Ubuntu. All you need to do is use the Add/Remove program.

1. Click on Applications in the top bar.
2. Click on Add/Remove…
3. Enter “Virtualbox” in the search bar.
4. You should see “InnoTek VirtualBox” in the search results. Click the check box.
5. Click the “Apply changes” button at the lower right hand corner and wait for the installation to complete.

After the installation, you should find “InnoTek VirtualBox” listed under “System Tools” in the Applications menu. However, if you launch it and start creating a virtual machine, you will soon realize some errors when booting the virtual machine. Before you work with your VirtualBox, you should also complete the following steps.

1. In a terminal, type “gksudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst” without the quotes. Enter your password. A text editor will open up.
2. Add “nmi_watchdog=0″ to the “kernel” line. Save the change and exit gedit.
3. Reboot your computer.
4. In a terminal, type “sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup” without the quotes. Enter your password and let it build the module.
5. Then go to “System” -> “Administration” -> “Users and Groups”.
6. Click on “Manage Groups”.
7. Select “vboxusers” and click “Properties”.
8. Check your username and click “OK”. Then click “Close”.
9. Logout and login again.

Basically, the steps above were to build the kernel module required by VirtualBox and give your user account the permissions to access the module. You should now be able to use VirtualBox without problems. Next week, I will be show you how to install a guest operating system with VirtualBox. If you have any questions, feel free to let me know.