Ray!

Read this, especially the last point: http://pjmedia.com/blog/tips-for-not-appearing-crazy-on-the-internet/2/. Cheers Ray

Here's an interesting summary of an analysis of computer hardware failures on one million consumer PCs (the full report is available in the internal link): http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/131739-microsoft-analyzes-over-a-million-pc-failures-results-shatter-enthusiast-myths. Interesting reading and make of it what you will. Cheers Ray

Linux on laptops? Some further news: http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/dells_looking_few_good_cosmonauts_test_ubuntu-powered_sputnik_xps_13 It would seem that from a software developer's perspective, these machines are probably aimed more towards the development of apps and the like, rather than for enterprise system work. Cheers Ray

It seems that Samsung aren't the only manufacturer that doesn't apply on-the-fly garbage removal, which can slow down performance. By pure coincidence, I came upon this review of the OCZ Vertex 4, which appears to work in a similar way to the Samsung SSD and experiences similar issues (partly remedied by the firmware update that this article discusses): http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/vertex-4-firmware-benchmark,3245.html. Cheers Ray

Mandatory reading for one individual: http://pjmedia.com/b...n-the-internet/. This reminds me of something, but I just can't put my finger on it: Cheers Ray

It's all relative, the height of the fall doesn't matter, it's the sudden stop. The actual effect will still be whatever G forces result and the impact on the internals (hard drive or human body). The biggest issue with hard disk drives is the arm hitting the platter, which usually causes instant destruction; if it can avoid that happening during significant G forces, then it has a good survivability rate. At least the measurement system gives a repeatable and standard way of measuring shock resistance, rather than saying it will survive a rough road in a 4WD. Cheers Ray

I did read what was nothing but advertising fluff. And I would have thought that Power Users would have wanted something other than Ubuntu installed. And why would you be doing software development on a 13" screen laptop, rather than a decent desktop with multiple large monitors and fast hard drives? Also, what's with the constant insults and ad hominem attacks? Cheers Ray

That's interesting, but why does a Linux laptop need 4GB of RAM and a Core i7 processor? Also, 'computational freedom'? I think the issue of copyright and an open internet has nothing to do with Linux. Cory Doctorow is a great SciFi author and his comments have clearly been taken out of context in the article, implying Linux represents some sort of computer freedom. Cheers Ray

Thanks for the feedback. From what I've found, installing an SSD really does seem to be a lottery. I thought optimisation was what was lacking, but after checking everything, even ensuring that I was booting in AHCI, there was nothing more that I could do to enhance performance of the SSD or OS. It's been an exploration for me in the last five or so years trying to find an optimum system for backup, recovery etc and you have confirmed what I've discovered in that time. Mind you, I realised about 10 years ago that it was worse installing Symantec than having nothing whatsoever. It was easier to get rid of a virus than anything Symantec some years back. Trend Micro was the last AV that I used, for well over 5+ years, but I've been using Microsoft Security Essentials for the last year + and it's proven to be as good, if not better than Trend Micro. When Microsoft said they were bringing out their own AV program, it was loudly lambasted by AV companies, but it's actually proven to be very good. Some suggest that the options are overly simplistic, but the fact is that it works. Cheers Ray

That's what I anticipated with my tablet, but not what I actually achieved. There wasn't that 'Wow!' factor after installing the SSD and, as I said, I think there were many contributing factors. If I had a laptop with a fast processor and lots of RAM, and a fast graphics card, rather than an integrated one, then the SSD would probably have a much greater impact on performance. So I think you need to look at the entire setup before committing to an SSD in the hope that Clark Kent becomes Superman. I might also point out that hard drives are incredibly resilient, especially notebook/laptop ones, and I'd never be worried about damaging one through jolts, dropping etc. I've dropped notbooks, laptops and even my current tablet and never had one problem. The Seagate Momentus 5400 hard drive, for example, can survive up to 1000G of shock when not operating and 350G when operating. No human being could survive even a fraction of that. Cheers Ray

If you plan to use an SSD as an OS drive, get the Paragon Hard Disk Manager. With that, you'll then also be able to do a range of other useful things like backups etc, and it really is a very easy program to use. In fact, I'd recommend Paragon as a useful tool regardless. Cheers Ray

Who's bashing, this was quite funny. Well, for some at least. OK, just to bring a smile to your dial: Cheers Ray

I just wanted to relate how really good our Chinese/Hong Kong eBay retailers can be. It was over a month since I put in the order for the Nokia USB power cable and still hadn't received it, so I emailed the seller and asked if he knew what might be going on. They were very apologetic that it hadn't arrived and said they would refund the purchase price and asked that if it did arrive, would I make the payment. I said of course I would honour the agreement and the following day they refunded the $1. As things would always have it, the cable arrived the next day, so I let them know, gave a good review and reversed the payment on PayPal. I find the honesty and trust quite amazing, and not for a moment did I contemplate just keeping the cable for free. Cheers Ray

The similarities are even more frightening (a good summary): http://catallaxyfile...nd-high-stakes/ Cheers Ray

I think speed, reliability and longevity need to be considered together at the moment, mainly because of the cost of SSDs. All the reviews that I read gave a very big thumbs up for the Intel 520 series, for speed and reliability (longevity was more or less assumed) and hence probably why Intel gives them a five year warranty. I would have considered the Intel SSD, but the extra $50+ wasn't warranted, considering where it was going to be used. If I was considering one for my PC, I'd probably go for the Intel 520. This site gives some pretty comprehensive reviews of SSDs: http://www.anandtech.com. Cheers Ray

I’ve seen a bit of excitement lately about SSDs vs Hard Disk Drives on many of the tech sites/forums, especially since the price of SSDs have been falling and capacities have been increasing, though nowhere near the $/GB factor of traditional spinning platters. I've also been hinting at backup and recovery options in some recent posts and noted Linux as being a good option should things go wheels up on your PC. However, that only provides you with a way to recover data and not your operating system (OS) and programs that you may have installed on your PC. If your PC goes wheels up, you may be able to recover your OS, but you're usually going to have to re-install all of your programs from scratch. And if it's a complete hard disk failure, then it can be a painful process, one which I've experienced twice so far in 30 years, which is twice too many. So what can you do? The solution is actually quite easy and not all that expensive considering the pain that you can avoid. Hard disk drives are pretty cheap nowadays, so you can afford to have at least one spare, acting as nothing but an image of your working system. I did just that the other day with my PC hard drive, as I have several 1TB hard drives lying around, so rather than let them languish, I thought I'd use one of them to create and store a complete image of my main PC. There are many ways to do this and even Windows gives you an option, but they aren't quite the best. I also wanted to do the same with my Gigabyte tablet, as I'd hate to have to rebuild everything from scratch, but I didn't have a spare 7mm form-factor hard drive. To that end, a search through the local PC hardware sites (http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php, http://www.cplonline.com.au) gave me some options. I could get a suitable 500GB hard drive for $100, which was way overkill as far as capacity went or a 128 GB SSD for $130. So I thought I'd try out the SSD, since it was more than enough for what I needed and wasn't that much more than a regular hard drive, but what to get? By the way, I did a search on eBay and no one had prices that could match the two stores. A lot of research narrowed down the selection to three options, an Intel 520 120GB, an Intel 330 120GB or a Samsung 830 128GB SSD. The Intel 520 was reportedly the best SSD on the market at the moment, ie speed and reliability etc; with the Intel 330 close behind, but with performance hobbled to some degree to keep the price down. The Samsung 830 wasn't as fast as the Intel SSDs, but not far behind the Intel 330 and all reports I could find gave it a very high score as far as reliability. The Intel 520 was about $50 more than the Intel 330 and Samsung 830. One thing I found from my research is that consumers SSDs, then cheapest variety, have tended to have quite a record of failure compared to regular hard drives; surprising really, considering that there are no moving parts. What apparently is the Achilles ’ Heel of SSDs is the controller and most SSDs use a SandForce controller, Intel included with the 520 and 330, and the controller can cause all sorts of issues causing the dreaded BSOD and even complete SSD failure. The SandForce controller is a generic controller sold to many SSD manufacturers and it's up to them to make sure it works properly with their SSDs. But these manufacturers don't necessarily work closely with SandForce, so their efforts at solving issues aren't always effective. But what Intel has done is work very closely with SandForce and modified aspects of the controller to improve the reliability so that they are confident about its long term performance; only Intel has access to these modifications. Samsung, on the other hand, make all their own components and so they all work in concert and don't rely on third parties. Another aspect of SSDs is the need to regularly ‘clean’ the drive of ‘garbage’ that accumulates during read/write operations. With the Intel SSDs, and just about all the others that use SandForce controllers, this cleaning is done on the fly, which may reduce the overall performance of the SSD, but keeps performance consistent all the time. With the Samsung, the cleaning is done during quiet periods, which means that in intensive operations, the performance can drop significantly if cleaning is not able to be done. This can be a concern in data centres and where you are really making the SSD work for long periods of time on intensive tasks; something to consider when choosing an SSD. However, since my tablet was not going to be used in intensive tasks, I decided to go with the Samsung 830 128GB SSD for some reason. Maybe I was just a bit worried that despite the work that Intel had done with their latest SSDs, and favourable reports, they haven’t really proved themselves regarding long-term reliability. Anyway, the SSD arrived yesterday and it was time to clone the OS. In order to clone a drive, you need to be able to connect the drive to the main PC and what I used was a SATA docking station that I’ve had for some time. This device enables you to insert a 2.5” or 3.5” SATA hard drive and connect it via a USB cable to any PC, a simple and elegant solution. The cloning process is actually quite easy, depending on what you use and my recommendation is to use software designed for this purpose. The Samsung came with an option to download Norton Ghost, which I had some reservations about, but decided to try anyway, since it was what Samsung offered. I thought that Norton Ghost would be on the disk provided, but it was actually available as a download, which I accessed through the Samsung SSD Magician software that I’d installed (more on that later). After downloading and installing Norton Ghost, I started the cloning process only to discover that what I’d downloaded was a 30 day trial version, but with the ability to do the clone. Also, as soon as I opened the program, it wanted to make all sorts of changes to my tablet. My suspicions had been vindicated. So I did a complete system restore to get rid of Norton Ghost. That fully confirms all of my previous views that anything that comes out of Symantec should go straight into the bin. Anyway, I had a program already installed called Paragon Hard Disk Manager (http://www.paragon-s...me/hdm-personal), which allows for the migration of everything from one hard drive to another, as well as many other functions, and is what I’d used to clone my PC hard drive. I should have used this from the outset, but then I wouldn’t have had my confirmation of the Symantec rubbish. I also have another similar product, Acronis, which came with a laptop that I’d bought years ago, but I never became wedded to Acronis, as it had what I thought was a very obtuse interface. A lot of people swear by it, I just swore at it. Anyway, I discovered Paragon and when I bought it in 2010, it was pretty inexpensive and even the latest version is reasonably priced. When cloning an SSD, using a dedicated program designed for this can be important, as an SSD works differently to a regular hard drive so it’s important apparently to match everything from one device to the other, including sectors or whatever from one drive to the other (Google cloning hard drives to SSDs and you’ll find out). There are differences in how both work devices work and if they aren’t matched properly, you can get all sorts of problems. Anyway, the cloning worked flawlessly and when I swapped the two drives in the tablet, it fired up as if nothing had changed. And that’s exactly what made me wonder what was going on, things should have been blistering fast for start-up etc, but they seemed to be much the same as with the normal hard drive. So once everything was confirmed to work, I opened the SSD Magician software to see what it would do. The SSD Magician offers a range of disk and OS management and optimisation functions, so I went through all of these and selected the recommended options. I also did another Windows performance test and all that increased was hard drive data transfer rate figure from 5.7 to 7.7, everything else obviously stayed the same. So with further testing by opening and closing programs, shutting down the tablet and restarting once again, I can say that the SSD hasn’t measurably sped up many of the functions on the tablet. Some programs do open faster, such as Lightroom and Photoshop, but these are really are the most intensive of programs one can use and are usually quoted when SSDs are compared to regular hard drives. One program that does work a lot faster is Memory Map, not so much when opening, but loading maps is significantly faster, so I guess in these types of operations you can see the improvements. Why doesn’t the SSD significantly improve performance like you so often hear? Well, I think it’s due to several factors. Firstly, the tablet isn’t a speed demon from the outset, so the hard drive isn’t the performance limiting factor that it can be on very high performance desktop PCs. Secondly, the original hard drive wasn’t a complete slug and by using Ready Boost, I was able to get pretty good performance out of the drive and associated operations. Thirdly, some things simply won’t work faster with an SSD, as they are dependent on accessing stuff on the net or network. So is an SSD worthwhile? In a desktop environment, all the indicators are that SSDs can be very beneficial, especially if you put your OS and programs on the SSD and data elsewhere, but in my example and similar situations, you’re not going to get mind blowing results by installing an SSD. Power consumption, ie improved battery performance may improve, but I haven’t had a chance to measure this. If you need a lot of hard disk space, then a regular hard drive is, in my view, the better way to go, especially if you have space in your device for only one hard drive. I certainly wouldn’t have contemplated this even a year ago, as SSD prices were incredibly high compared to regular hard drives, but in this case it was worth a try. Cheers Ray

That's about a four year old model laptop. Cheers Ray

http://applefiedads.blogspot.com.au/ Cheers Ray

And the similarities continue: We are us. Cheers Ray

I wish I had the link to where these units can be bought, but they were around $1500 each, a bloody great buy. Apparently they crop up often enough, as it it wasn't just a one-off buy, the company bought one and then several weeks, or months, later bought another. I think, this is where they got their units from: http://www1.ap.dell....?refid=df&s=dfo. They're out of Alienware, but the XPS don't look too bad. Cheers Ray

Dell certainly provide 17" and bigger laptops. On one of the projects I was working on before I retired, the company working for us had bought two Dell Alienware laptops through the Dell refurb system and these units were about half price or less than new models and simply screamed. They were used to for some very serious graphics processing tasks, and were taken on board a warship for a week and performed flawlessly. Cheers Ray

This talking about the US, but it might as well be Australia for the scary similarities: . Cheers Ray

I'm not suggesting that Windows is perfect by any means; but that it suits, and works for, the vast majority of people and their needs. When you start doing what you're doing, then you are upping the ante regarding complexity and potential issues. The fact that you've had things working fine before, indicates that the system is capable of doing what you want, you just need to narrow down what's different, or what you're doing differently this time. Cheers Ray

And as with the GFC handouts, more unintended consequences: http://www.news.com.au/business/worklife/carbon-tax-compo-being-gambled-away/story-e6frfm9r-1226428729094. Cheers Ray

I thought it odd that this has never been followed up with the investigation results and solutions. Possibly because there are no more eagles left and too embarassed to say so? Cheers Ray