Andrew Nosenko: computing and more...

Samsung Series 9 N900X3A-B05AU

2012-01-23T11:14:00.000+10:30

NP900X3A

I've got my Samsung Series 9 N900X3A-B05AU ultrabook from JB Hi-Fi two weeks ago for under $1.5K AUD. The machine was on sale and that price included a 3yrs extended warranty from the store (which I had to bargain for).You can find a lot of different reviews of N900X3A on the web. Here I'm going to write about the features which concerned me as a buyer personally; particularly, I came across some negative feedback on its wireless caps and its touchpad.Note, the model-specific prefix (i.e. B05AU) does matter, and the only way to know for sure what's inside the laptop is to look in the device manager yourself, or wait until a fellow buyer shares the details of his or her configuration. I could not find any detailed info, so I spent about an hour playing with a store display machine before I made the final decision. By all means, I suggest you to do the same if you're thinking about buying it.Wireless. The B05AU model uses Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 chip (3 antennas, up to 450 mbps). I guess that's how Samsung tried to solve the issue of the "shielding" effect the duraluminium body had on the wireless, and it seems to work. I'm using the latest v15.0.0.75 of Intel drivers from Station Drivers and I’m getting ~140-300 mbps (indicative speed) across in the house with my Asus RT-N16 router.Touchpad. Initially I did have issues with the touchpad (the hardware is a Synaptics ClickPad v8.0). Sporadically after a click, the touchpad used to go "sticky" with no reaction to further clicks and inhibited cursor movement. The animated Synaptics icon in the taskbar behaved like there still was a firm tap despite all fingers were off the touchpad. That did not happen often but when it did, it was quite frustrating. To revive the touchpad, I’d have to press firmly on its left edge.

I almost decided to return the latop because of that problem, but then I discovered the v15.3.33 of Synaptics drivers and the problem seems to have been gone! In fact, now I like the touchpad experience, even the Apple-ish way of doing right-clicks (clicking anywhere on the touchpad with two fingers).Bluetooth 3.0. I've found it’s a Broadcom BCM2070 chip using the device manager back in the store. It means arguably the best Bluetooth software stack implementation with regular updates, so it's a plus.USB 3.0. It’s a NEC/Renesas uPD720200a-based chip. To me, it was also a plus as I prefer Renesas’s USB 3.0 implementations to others for its stability. Station Drivers provide the latest version of USB 3.0 drivers.Battery. I’ve calibrated the battery using the stock BIOS utility and I’m getting ~6 hrs of light usage (mostly coding and surfing), which I think is not bad at all for an i5-based machine.SSD. It's a Samsung MZMPA128HMFU-000 SSD which does not suffer from any stutter issues, supports TRIM and is very fast indeed. The only downside is its low capacity (128GB), but I can live with that.Overall, I'm quite happy with the purchase. It’s possible to install an extra 4GB of memory, but right now I don’t need that for what I use this machine for, and I don’t want to void my warranty (although I'm not even sure if it's against the warranty terms).Am I missing a 3G modem inside this laptop? Not anymore, as I use a nifty unlocked Pocket WiFi 2 device when I need Internet access on the go. It's really handy, compact and has ~4 hrs of the battery life. I can also tether via Bluetooth, the data cap on my mobile plan is now quite generous compared to what it used to be a even a year ago.Below are the snapshot of Device Manager and Experience Index.

NP900X3A-B05AU Windows 7 Device Manager

NP900X3A-B05AU Windows 7 Experience Index

Nokia Booklet 3G and SSD

2010-10-08T10:32:00.010+10:30

I can't live without a lightweight netbook. My most recent pick was Nokia Booklet 3G. It's not perfect, but it offers 8 hrs of the battery life, 1280 x 720 screen resolution and HSPA mobile connectivity. Having that, I can connect to my 'mothership' machine and get the work done remotely, if needed.

Naturally I decided to replace the stock 1.8" hard drive with an SSD, so the netbook would not have any movable parts and the battery life would be even longer. I skimmed through this valuable thread on the subject, realized it should not be hard to do, and ordered the Crucial RealSSD C300 64GB SSD drive. I thought any 1.8" SATA SSD would work, and Crucial looked like a reasonably priced option.

So I replaced the SSD (many thanks to the author of this) and created a single NTFS prtition. I aligned it on 64MB (sector # 128520), which is the least common multiple for 4096KB (the SSD block unit), 255 (the number of virtual heads) and 63 (the number of virtual sectors). Not sure if the alignment is really important but it should not hurt anyway.

Then I installed Windows 7 Pro from scratch, just to find out how horribly slow it now runs. Some googling revealed that Booklet 3G has an old chipset that converts SATA to PATA (shame on you, Nokia). The Crucial SSD supports the modern TRIM feature and so does Windows 7, but for Booklet 3G it turns to be evil causing the system to freeze and lag all the time. I decided to return the SSD to NewEgg and get a Samsung or Intel model in exchange. Alas, NewEgg doesn't have a return policy for this item. So after some more googling I've found a way to switch the TRIM off, it's done with the following command:

fsutil behavior set disabledeletenotify 1

I was hopeless but that really worked. The SSD performance is now superb, and the netbook has become really usable. Thanks to everybody who shared their personal experience on the subject on Nokia forums.

Nokia E72 firmware update v051-018

2010-09-06T15:03:00.008+09:30

My primary phone is Nokia E72 and it's a great piece of hardware, but as usual with Nokia, the software lags behind it. A few days ago Nokia released a major upgrade, v051-018. Traditionally, the update is not available for my product code 0591928 ("RM-529 North America US Black - MR", bought from NewEgg). I changed the product code to 0573646 (NAM_QW_BLACK) and managed to get the upgrade with NSU, but at that point I had lost the access to the Call Log (main menu), the recent calls (via Answer key), and Silent/Normal profile switching with Ctrl key.

I googled if I could downgrade the firmware (a smart thought afterwards :) and found it would not be possible without special gears. So I felt like I got nothing to loose and tried a few more E72-2 (WCDMA 850Mhz) product codes with NSU. Surprisingly, 0587848 (NEW_ZEALAND_QW_BLACK) worked perfectly, I got lucky without bricking my phone :)

So far my experience with this firmware release is quite positive. The UI is much more responsive, the built-in SIP client is quite stable, Skype calls over WiFi go without breaking up. The overall stability has been greatly improved. I only wish Nokia would make their updates available for all product codes at once.

Formatting the Visual Studio debug ouput

2010-03-14T20:11:00.002+10:30

Using the below C# code will print a formatted message to the Visual Studio Output window, the way you can double-click on it, and the VS editor will jump to the source file and the line containing the DebugLog call. It's likely I'm not the first one who invented this little handy technique.


DebugLog("This is a key point in the code");

...

/// 
/// Format debug output the way VS likes
/// 

[Conditional("DEBUG")]
protected static void DebugLog(String format, params object[] args)
{

   StackTrace st = new StackTrace(true);
   StackFrame sf = st.GetFrame(1);
   Debug.Print("{0}({1},{2}): msg: {3}", sf.GetFileName(), sf.GetFileLineNumber(), sf.GetFileColumnNumber(), String.Format(format, args));
}

Remoting to a Windows 7 laptop

2010-03-02T23:44:00.000+10:30

Sometimes I remote from my netbook into my primary work laptop that stays on the desk most of the time. The netbook runs Windows XP. The laptop recently got upgraded to Windows 7. Soon I discovered I could no longer remote into it. I was able to get to the remote login screen and enter the user name and the password of my admin account. At that point the login screen was hanging while still trying to connect. I assumed the problem should have been related to the networking; it felt like the network of the remote laptop was going down during the login stage.

The remote laptop is connected to the router wirelessly. So I checked the Manage Wireless Network place and the answer was there. The stored wireless connections need to be available for all users, not only for my admin account. By default it was per user. Obviously, this behavior has changed compared to XP and Visa. With Windows 7, when an RDC session is trying to connect, albeit using the same user name, a per user wireless connection gets terminated first, and that's where the login screen hangs.

I suppose this issue is not happening when the wired connection is in use (I haven't checked that). Hope this post helps someone. Happy remoting!

My Dell XPS Studio 13 and Computrace lojack

2010-02-24T02:12:00.000+10:30

I've been using dells for about 8 years and I promised myself to never buy Dell again many times. I always fail on that promise.

My current laptop is Dell XPS Studio 13 (Dell XPS M1340). I impulsively bought it at some BestBuy store in Feb 2009. Surprisingly it's a good laptop, compared to other Dell models I used to own. I even managed to to get smooth shutdown/suspend/hibernate/resume functionality with Windows 7, what may be a subject for a separate post.

Another thing that bothered me too much was that laptop came with Computrace lojack feature enabled and locked in BIOS. Dell locked it per BestBuy request, I supposes. The feature itself is very controversial, if you google it; some people like it, some hate it. I belong to the latter group, primary because 1) I want to be able to control my own system, and 2) Computrace's boot hooking code effectively blocks CHKDSK (even when a disk check has been scheduled by Windows), creating a danger for my file system integrity. Let alone the fact their software "calls" some servers without my explicit permission or knowledge. Needless to say, Dell Support was unable to help me getting rid of it.

So, inspired and armed by this great post on Computrace, I decided to cut the lojack out of my loptop BIOS. That was not too hard, and for mind-alikes I'd like to post a link to the latest Dell XPS M1340 A11 BIOS without Computrace. WARNING: if you decide to use it, you should know how to flash BIOS on your Dell, and be well aware that you can damage your laptop. I provide absolutely no warranty of any kind regarding this BIOS mod, and you have no reason to trust it, after all.

To begin...

2010-02-24T01:57:00.000+10:30

Sooner or later, everyone starts to blogging.