Since I stuck a horrid bastard-of-a-workaround-solution repeater in the serving hatch it's all been not so bad. And I now trust Cloud Services to deliver to Bridge Road. Which makes me very happy. And cloud is what consumer consumption is all about - or will be very soon, as people catch up, unwittingly, with a phenomenon that's taxing the brains of CIOs the world over...
The home office. Equipment therein. Good stationery. An optimised work environment. There, I've said it. It's quite topical for me: I am heavily involved in my company's first, tentative steps on a policy approach to 'Agile Working'. A recognition that our corporate estate is costing us a fortune every year, that technology is freeing people from the single desk they used to occupy and that many people are more productive when allowed to work to their own pattern, in their own choice of location. Inevitably we're going to have to battle with a degree of entrenched mistrust - some managers will never be convinced that having people working away from their beady oversight is a positive step - but the move to having many more people than desks has been on the cards for a while. When major competitors are operating on a 50% ratio, we have no choice but to follow suit. And, personally, I'm all for it: I'd hate to work at home all the time (and my role wouldn't suit it anyhow) but, if I need to get my head down, I'll do so far more effectively in my attic than at a desk in Leatherhead. When we first moved here I bagsied this room for exactly that purpose and, over the years, have kitted it out to a better standard than any office I've worked in. Two widescreen monitors are a must as is, arguably, a good colour laser printer. The remainder of the list is where it all begins to go a bit stockings and suspenders... Because I also have:
Which is precisely why I love working up here.
Have some pictures. I may have dicked about with them a tad. To make them more interesting like. I've posted about my desire for an optimised, portable computing environment before. But the Samsung 305U is not quite as optimised as it could be - a) because it has a relatively slow, 5400RPM hard disk drive (HDD), as do most small laptops and b) because the drive has been showing a couple of errors under chkdsk since I got it. Nothing apparently impacted, but always a slight concern that the drive's going to melt down unexpectedly. I've been considering putting a solid-state drive (SSD) in one or two machines for a while, but have baulked at the cost - but I got a mail offer from Crucial this week which I couldn't resist. Time to visit some hitherto unchartered geek territory... For the uninitiated: Hard disk drives have platters which hold data, a bit like vinyl LPs, spinning around at high speed, with data read and written by magnetic heads that move backwards and forwards across the surface of the platters. Despite the fact that they may operate whisper-quiet, there are lots of bits moving about in mechanical fashion inside your laptop. Yuk. They're inherently the slowest bit of any system, consume a fair bit of power and are not particularly forgiving of being chucked around. Solid-state drives have no moving bits and are much more like an SD card or a USB memory stick. They use less power, are MUCH faster and much less prone to shock-damage. They're a newer technology - at least, when implemented as an alternative to a traditional 2.5"/3.5" disk - and, until recently, have been much more expensive. You'll find them in Apple's notebooks and some high-end laptops, but not many (yet). Tablets all use some form of solid-state storage - which is why everyone swooned in delight when they first saw an iPad. The price differential has fallen away dramatically in the last few months: As traditional HDD capacities increase to 'no-one could ever fill it' levels, the £ per GB ratio at the smaller end has dropped to a factor of three or four. A year ago, twenty was more typical. In a laptop machine that can only hold one drive, the storage needs to be big enough for the OS and all the data you want to carry about - whereas a desktop will hold more than one drive, with considerable benefit to putting the OS on a small SSD, all your data on more traditional media. 256GB is the sweetspot for a laptop, for me - and when Crucial offered me a 256 GB m4 SSD for £120, I clicked all the way to to checkout. Which was a bit of a mistake: When it turned up yesterday, I started thinking about the process of installing it. Which led to me having a look at the Samsung for the two screws which would release the hard disk. No screws. Oops. It's buried somewhere inside the guts of the machine, which may make this a highly unamusing task. No trace of a useful manual on t'Internet, although I did turn up some blurry YouTube video of someone taking the back off one. Not particularly helpful, since he'd already taken out all the appropriate screws before filming. Did make it clear that this was going to need care, lest I bugger something - lots of carefully levering the back off... Ho hum, bought it now, might as well give it a go... Which I did, last night. I chose to clone the disk, rather than do a clean install of Windows 7, using EaseUS ToDo Backup - took about three hours to run, but worked impeccably, as with every EaseUS application I've used. The 'clean install' route is probably the better one, because the OS install will detect an SSD and configure itself accordingly (as long as it's Win7 or 8) but I couldn't be arsed to reinstall all the apps and figured I'd learn more by trying to retrofit the environment. Which I did. More than I'd realised I could. Getting the hard drive out after I'd cloned it to the SSD was a proper marathon: 11 screws, some very careful prising and the discovery that the Samsung has a slim SATA drive, thinner than the SSD. But the SSD seems to have jammed in there OK, without the rubber mount surrounding the old drive. And it's been running fine since, so I'm happy it'll carry on that way. Establishing that the BIOS, Windows and the rest of the environment know about it has been something of an education... Have some very useful links - particularly the first one: TweakTown's Solid-State Optimisation Guide Microsoft Windows 7 Blogpost on Solid-State Drives Anandtech: The Trim Command Lifehacker: Enabling Trim on Windows 7 I am now an expert in Trim, Write-Caching and Superfetch. SSDs don't need all sorts of junk that Windows tends to enable to get the best out of HDDs - so Defrag and Indexing off! So I'm happy. And more than a little relieved not to have busted anything. You can really feel the difference the moment you turn the machine on - and the Windows Performance Index figures speak for themselves: Max possible score for disk performance is 7.9 - and you'd only get that with the very latest SSD.
Pretty straightforward: If you're considering it a) I'd go for a clean install (or allow time for a bit of self-education) and b) understand what it's going to take to get the drive out BEFORE you commit the cash... About a month ago, I wibbled on about the extent to which domestic devices will chit-chat to all and sundry over your home network. And I mentioned that I have a surprising number of devices already gossIPing (sorry) away. This weekend, I counted them.
Not because I particularly wanted to, but because I get occasional problems with devices having the same IP address on the network - mostly down, I think, to my habit of hibernating PCs. It's irritating, because some devices won't tell you there's a problem, they'll just not work until you reboot them. There's a simple solution - make sure every device on the network gets the same, unique, IP address every time. So this is what I spent a bit of time doing this weekend. Turned into quite a Sherlock Holmes affair, since some devices just don't want to let you know what they are, you have to divine it from tables of MAC addresses and manufacturer. Also doesn't help that my crappy Netgear router GUI fails to correctly report the MAC address or identity of devices that are connected via the repeater. A proper 'Well, I've %&£*ing started now...' exercise. Now finished. Which, in a vaguely anally-retentive way, makes me happy. Seventeen. Seventeen devices on the network. And I bet I've forgotten one somewhere. A skipping rope? A jigsaw puzzle? An encyclopedia? The world has moved on. Abby wanted an iPod Touch. We didn't want her to have an iPod Touch because few of her friends will have an iPod Touch, they're expensive, they're highly loseable and stealable and they suffer from Apple's walled garden approach when it comes to exercising any kind of parental control. And I have no doubt that, in a year or two, we'll be buying her a phone - which will be some kind of smartphone, duplicating much of what she could do with it. So, we disappointed her by buying something that's generally more versatile, reasonably priced, more controllable and not Apply in any shape or form. The Google Nexus 7 has surprised me with both it's capability and its pricing. The press are generally pretty impressed with it as well. And now that Abby is getting over the initial 'it's not an iPod Touch' reaction, it's beginning to impress her too. Our ability to control what she can do with it and at what time is impressively functional: I think it's critically important that children are able to ease gently into the connected world we now exist in - but, at 10, need to be shielded from stumbling over the many aspects that they aren't ready for or becoming too screen addicted. Funamo helps us do exactly that and allows us to help her understanding mature without nasty surprises. Apple are imminently expected to release a 7" tablet, despite what Steve Jobs always said about them. - because they clearly do have a place. I'm quite happy for the house to step away from the Apple ecosystem just a little: There's more to life than fruit.
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March 2020
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