It is amazing the number of netbooks and small form factor laptops that were showcased at CES. I am a full supporter of Laptops. I have gone through the process of eliminating as many PC’s in our house as possible and replacing with Laptops. My current need is to replace my wife’s laptop, in this purchase process I have been looking to get a 13inch machine.

I have not found a need to have a larger Laptop and it seems that the constraints of a larger pc are not worth the hassle. If I need more screen real-estate I can just hook up to a secondary monitor.

The leading players in the 13inch laptop market are Asus, HP, Lenovo, and Mac. I have ruled out a Mac due to cost and needs. Each of these laptops have exceptional battery life, which is one of the critical items on my list.

HP dm3-1130us: (HP site)

Thinkpad Edge: (Lenovo Site)

Asus UL30A-X5 : (amazon link)

I have read and heard great reviews of each. In one conversation the HP model was called a MAC killer (I don’t know about that). Since batter life is a critical item, the ThinkPad and ASUS are at the top of the list. Though the thinkpad can be configured with an AMD processor, it appears that the Intel chips have better battery life. I am not against AMD, I just want a longer run time. Those of you who know me, will understand the fact that I love thinkpads. They have the trackpoint and are durable as hell.

The only issue with going out and purchasing the ThinkPad is the cost. The intel version runs about 700 Plus.

Anyone have thoughts, suggestions, reviews?

Was checking twitter and one of the people I follow had a link to a sweet laptop bag. I followed the site to see some laptop bag goodness.

They make some sweet bags - http://www.booqbags.com/

I’ve been testing mailbrowser (MailBrowser.com)

It is a gmail (browser plugin) that allows you to search / file / lookup contacts based on interaction. Similar to Xobni for outlook.

I have used Xobni for outlook before and had performance issues. I will update on the usage of this new little plugin

I have recently started to listen to more podcasts. When training for the Chicago Marathon back in 05 I listened to a lot of podcasts.

Here are some that I subscribe to

• 5 live world football
• Hak5.org
• Tekzilla
• Dave Ramsey

What else is interesting that I should be listening to?

I am very lucky to purchase computers. I have a macbook, netbook, toshiba laptop (wife), and my trusty T61 thinkpad. I have realized that I use each device for a specific task. Excluding my wife’s laptop I have found that the macbook and netbook are interchangeable. The small form factor MacBook makes it as handy as the netbook.

Because of this I am thinking a purchase to replace both would be in order. A 13/14 inch laptop that I would use for more travel and development.

The Asus UL30 or the IBM Thinkpad Edge are pretty tempting.

I have a lot of storage at my house. I have over 3 terabytes worth of storage available to me. The problem is not space, it’s files. I have files everywhere.

The best example I can use is pictures. I’ve got pictures on my computer, my wife has pictures on her computer. The files are synced and stored on the backup server and then archived. So one picture could live in 3 places. I have not found the perfect solution yet, I just know that almost everything we have is backed-up somewhere.

I use Mozy for backup and DropBox for file syncing. I just upgraded Drop Box to the 50 Gig pro package to allow me to keep a lot of stuff in one place.
https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTE3MzA3MDk

Once I have a better story about consolidation of files, I’ll post that.

I always seem to have some type of software that I need to install on my machines. This is normally due to re-installing or getting new machines. There is a great site that helps you add all your favorite programs in one install (allmyapps) basically makes a custom installer.

You just need to head to their site. Select all your favorite apps (firefox, vlc, imgburn, audacity, etc..) and it creates an installer for you. What a time saver.

http://www.allmyapps.com

There is a sysinternals tool that allows you to take your computer and make a vhd (virtual hard drive) from your system. This is just fantastic. I can’t wait to find a reason to use this.

I can see the reasons where you can want to make a backup or even move an old system for storage. Imagine if an employee leaves the company and you want to keep his files and system intact. With this tool you can make a virtual copy of the drive and allow you to have it available for later use.

Sysinternals Disk2vhd

I finally did it. I now own a MAC. I recently purchased a new to me MacBook. I won’t bore everyone with the specs, but it has 2 gig of ram and the Intel Duo processor.

I want to create an Iphone app and realized that you really do need a mac to do development. So far (I’ve had it for 2 days) it works really well. I plan to use it more like a desktop than a notebook. This means it’s time to get rid of my trusty SSH server that is on my 9 year old dell.

As for Iphone development. My “hello world” app went well.

If you are like me you use your camera on your iphone. I have to admit it is not the best camera, but I always have it on me. So I have found over the last year that I have taken a lot of photos.

I wanted to re-stage my iphone and realized that I needed to backup these photos or at least move them. After a few little Google searches I found there really was not a great tool to do this. I found a lot on Windows XP that shows to use the autoPlay to use camera wizard. However, I use windows 7 and there is no wizard. What I did find is you can go to (Control Panel\Hardware and Sound\Devices and Printers) or search for (view devices and printers)

This brings up all connected devices, it should show your Iphone as a Camera and you can right click and Browse files. Once you see the pictures you can just drag / drop them into whatever local folder you like.

Since my hard drive was failing on my laptop I purchased a new drive. To migrate from the failing drive to a new drive was very easy with Macrium Reflecthttp://www.macrium.com/. This is not an ad for them, but the software works great. You just run the image creation while in Windows, save the image to a USB drive or the network. Then add the new drive, boot from the pre-configured CD and presto you have a new drive and all your old data.

My laptop hard drive decided to start acting up yesterday. Before it formally crashed (I’m not counting the 6 times where it just clicked and stopped working) I decided to make an image of it.

After I validated the image I went out and purchased a new internal SATA laptop drive. My new WD Black series is 350GIG, 7200RPM. It’s amazing that when I went to the store I did not realize it has been near 10 years since I last purchased a drive. I did not know who was on top Seagate or WD.

Just to be safe I also upgraded my desktop’s hard drive. My new desktop drive is 1 terabyte. It’s amazing that for 200 dollars I can get 1.3 terabytes of data storage.

I am a huge fan of Mozy (Mozy.com). They offer free and paid backup solutions online. I use their services on every computer I have.

Recently they announced that they have over 15 petabytes worth of data. What is a petabyte you say? Well, it is a lot of data. Mozy has a fantastic article describing how much data that is. Check it out.

Mozy article

I am always amazed how sites can launch and draw traffic. Then add a feature that just takes off. The facebook chat feature that lets you have an IM / Chat session with another facebook friend has over 1 billion messages a day. 1 billion is a huge number. In recent months we all have become immune to million / billion / trillion because of our Nations spending. Don’t let the numbers mix, 1 billion is a lot (I mean a lot) of traffic.

http://mashable.com/2009/06/15/fbchat-facebook-billion/

That is just a massive amount of chat sessions. For a any site to get that amount of usage from one of it’s tools or features is a sign that you are doing something right.

So are you one of the people who want a new Iphone. I am. The main reason (SPEED) I like my phone, use it a lot. But the speed could be better. Am I willing to pay 500 bucks for speed. Well, not right now. Here is an interesting article on the price of the Iphone

http://i.gizmodo.com/5284318/whiners-of-the-world-shut-up-about-the-iphone-3gs-upgrade-price