Archive for January, 2010

Windows 7 on Dell Vostro 1510

Saturday, January 23rd, 2010

Two weeks ago a friend asked me to upgrade his Vostro 1510 from Windows Vista to Windows 7. I believe Vista sucks and Windows 7 is acceptable. So I had no problem with his decision and didn’t object. Everything went smooth. No problems at all and everything worked out of the box.

Somehow they managed to provide a great upgrade experience. If you had trouble upgrading from NT4 to 2000, from 2000 to XP and from XP to Vista give it another try. I’ve seen many obscure things happening after upgrading, not this time. Well at least not until yesterday.

He called me and explained that his keyboard stopped working. It works if he enters BIOS but not after Windows is running. Rebooting didn’t solve the problem. Waiting one day and booting the system did. I guessed it could be a hardware problem. Maybe a cold solder joint.

I visited him on my way to a appointment and he told me he found a “solution”.

I just unplug my Ethernet cable and plug it in and everything works.

I cannot describe how much WTF my face was after he showed me that it really works.

I think I’ll do some research this weekend. Just to obscure to ignore the problem.

New details

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

27th is coming,… and now we see some details. We don’t know if it is a hoax – sorry but you can say what you want but I don’t believe images of Apple products before they are official released / announced.

apple_tablet_rendition-100121

Source: AppleInsider

It looks like they are using OSX and not iPhone OS. And this is exactly why I would not be sure if it isn’t a hoax.

On Macworld is an article that explaining what key features a tablet needs.

works like a mac

I don’t believe it. I’ve never seen a desktop OS that is easy to use as tablet system without heavy modifications.

Modifying a system that works great or using a system that is already running with touch only input and adding some features. What do you thing is the easier job?

A full features OSX would have some advantages – let’s hope I am wrong and they didn’t take the easy path.

iPhone OS4 multi tasking and Apples tablet

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

Rumors are spreading that we’ll see iPhone OS4 on 27th January. There is only one interesting part in this post

The source said Apple will introduce “a few new ways” to run applications in the background,

We remember: multi tasking on a phone is bad. I don’t believe we’ll see 19 applications running in background draining your phones battery in 4 minutes.

But let’s look at another news from AppleInsider. Skip the blabla about games and iTunes.

It is also expected that the tablet will be able to run existing iPhone software once it is modified to run in a range of screen resolutions.

Let’s pretend they just run iPhone OS – could explain the change. No matter how stupid background applications are on a phone on a tablet they could be useful.

Seven days to go,… did I mention that I hate waiting,…

Apple Event

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

We’ll see a lot of nice stuff. I hope I’ll find some time to watch the stream.

iPhone data usage

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

Until this month I always had a 200MB data contract. But after using Dropbox, Evernote and some Emails with attachments I used around 620MB.

I got a company contract and have some advantages like a competent hotline. It was no problem to get a data flatrate starting last month so I don’t have to pay 390€ extra.

Now that I have a flatrate again I’ll have to check if I can get tethering working with my 3.1 software version without jail breaking my device. Let’s not start the endless discussion why I won’t jail break my iPhone.

But what I am really looking forward to is something completely different. Since I had some time while the nice hotline dude was calculating my new monthly fee I asked when I can get the new iPhone. Short answer: “when we have it in stock – but it will cost you a bit. 1€!”. Now let us ignore the fact that I think it is too expensive. 1€. How dare…