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.

I have recently bought an ASUS P835 mobile phone that uses the Windows Mobile operating system. It has built-in Wi-Fi connectivity which makes it an all-in-one solution for quick mobile computing.

The Problem – Memory Low

After using the new phone for a few weeks, the phone started to complain about running low in memory. I have not installed any other programs on to the ROM yet and most applications and settings are defaults. I started to wonder why would the device complain.

The Memory Eater

As I recall, the first time the memory low message appeared was when I was using Opera to surf the web. So I started digging into the settings to see if there’s any clue. Right away, there is the cache settings where you can set how much memory allocated for caching website files and there’s the clear cache button. It is the same functions you would find on a notebook or desktop operating system. However, there is so much hard disk space on a desktop nowadays and you wouldn’t bother clearing the cache of your web browser. On the other hand, handheld devices have so little ROM space and it gets filled up easily. After clearing the cache, as well as the browsing history and cookies, I have reclaimed about 1/5 of my memory space.

You may not only have one web browser installed, as I also have Internet Explorer on my device (of course it’s there since it’s Windows). And I remember I have used it to view some web pages too. Clearing its temporary Internet files, my handheld device is back to 1/4 memory free.

Recently, one of the computer in my office has failed to boot into Windows. When booting into Windows XP and to the point where you see a scrolling bar running horizontally, it gave me a blue screen of death with the following error.

……

UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME

……

STOP 0X000000ED (0X86FC6900, 0XC0000006, 0X00000000, 0X00000000)

Two Possible Causes

After Googling about “unmountable_boot_volume”, I found the article 297185 from Microsoft’s knowledge base. It mentioned about two possible cause of this error. One has to do with the IDE cable that connects the hard drive to the IDE controller where a 80-wire cable should be used instead of 40-wire. However, I have quickly disregarded this because the computer has been running fine with the same cable since day one and in fact, it is a SATA hard drive.

The Real Cause

The second possible cause mentioned in the article is a damaged file system. It said that if the second parameter (0xbbbbbbbb) of the Stop error is 0xC00000032, then the cause would be the file system is damaged. However, in my Stop error message, the second parameter is 0XC0000006, not the same as what is mentioned in the article. Nonetheless, I followed the instructions to perform a check disk using the recovery console from the installation disc. After running “chkdsk /r” in the recovery console, I rebooted the computer. Upon the first reboot, the loading into Windows took a bit longer than usual but it was successful. When I reboot for the second time, Windows ran check disk on its own during startup and it was booting fine too. Upon the third reboot, everything is back to normal again.

It is always good to perform check disk on each system periodically even when you don’t see any problems at this moment. To do that in Windows XP, you can simply right click on the drive in My Computer, then Properties. On the Tools tab, you will find the error-checking tool there.

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.

From time to time, I have experienced some sort of corruptions to my Windows taskbar. Sometimes it is due to viruses messing it up while sometimes it is because I have played too much with it. Right now, my taskbar looks like this.

The most difficult part is adjusting it back to its default layout. How can I easily restore it to default look?

It is actually quite easy because I have found a script on the Internet that will do this for you in just a couple seconds. The script is written by Kelly Theriot and Doug Knox. You can find it on their website. On their website, you can download the script with the link that says “Restore Taskbar to Default Functionality”. After saving it to your computer, you can double-click it to run it. Right away, your taskbar is restored to default.

There are also many other useful scripts and registry tweaks on their website. You should bookmark their site as you will probably find other scripts that solves your other problems.