Category: Internet & Technology

A couple of weeks ago, I ordered a Dell Vostro 1000. Then I cancelled my order to buy an HP instead. Then I re-placed my order when the HP sold out before I could order it. When the Vostro arrived, right on schedule, it was pretty much what I expected when I unpacked it: big, black, bulky. It was a business machine after all, and I wasn’t buying it for looks. What I wasn’t prepared for, however, was how bad the 15.4″ LCD screen was.

I haven’t seen a screen that bad in years! It had a matte finish, which I was expecting, but the back-lighting was uneven and it was the most dull, lifeless screen I’d ever seen. Everything was also vaguely out of focus. I wasn’t expecting it to be that bad, and even though this machine was only going to be used for Web access and basic word processing, I wasn’t willing to grimace every time I used it. I figured I’d give it a few days of use to see if my initial gut reaction faded, so I began the long process of patching the Windows XP OS it shipped with (why Dell doesn’t ship the machine with the latest patches is beyond me). After getting it patched up, I uninstalled the Google junk it came with – I consider Google Desktop Search to be no different than the trial versions of the other applications that Dell’s consumer laptops ship with, and I thought the Vostro machines were supposed to be junkware free?

I used the included Dell Support software to check for newer drivers and whatnot. It’s bizarre that Dell’s support software tool isn’t useful enough to actually report to the user what version of a certain driver they have and then report if there’s an updated version or not. Instead, you have to go the driver page, look at the date on each driver, and guess if you think your Dell computer has that version or not. Ridiculous, no? I saw a few drivers and a BIOS release that looked quite new, and seeing as how Dell shipped me the Vostro lacking the past half-year or so of Windows XP updates, I figured the drivers might be equally out of date. I installed the drivers, then got to the BIOS update and let it run as well. At the end of the BIOS update, the laptop rebooted, and I sat staring at a black screen. Nothing came up after the reboot. I held the power button down, which forced the power off, and booted it up again – nothing. I then pulled the battery, left it for a few minutes, and tried again – nothing.

I was baffled as to how Dell could offer me a BIOS update that fried the machine, but I called tech support and they arranged for a courier to come and pick the unit up – this is after the tech told me that I had damaged the machine myself by updating the BIOS, but they’d repair it anyway. The courier was supposed to come on Friday, but didn’t arrive until today – the laptop is now out of my hands and off to be repaired.

Technically I still own the Dell Vostro, but as soon as it gets back from tech support, I’ll be calling customer service and sending it back for a refund. The poor-quality screen is the biggest reason, but the way the machine tanked after the BIOS update is the rotten cherry on top of this whole situation.

It’s a really great thing that Dell offers buyers multiple choices when it comes to laptop batteries: there’s usually a 4-cell, 6-cell, and 9-cell battery option. Dell always lists the watt hours information as well – great!

But what’s ridiculous is that there are no images, illustrations, or written information about the exact sizes of the batteries: specifically, which batteries will stick out of the laptop (the “hump”). This is a really important thing to know, because when I’m buying a laptop I usually want to get the biggest battery possible, but one that doesn’t stick out. I just ordered a Vostro laptop today (for my church) and was given the choice of three different batteries – yet no indication of which one(s) was actually flush with the laptop.

In general I find that the “More Information” links on the Dell Web site do a poor job of providing the customer with the information they need about the given accessory or feature option. The explanations of screen finishes are equally weak. I’ve posted this over on Dell’s IdeaStorm site, so if you have a minute (and agree with me), please go over there and vote for my request.

I have a big phone on my desk with a big screen. It has a big clock on it. Over the years I’ve had this phone I’ve become quite accustomed to looking at it to see what time it is, even more so than looking at the clock in the system tray of whatever PC I’m looking at. The problem? It has a built-in time adjustment for daylight savings time – which would normally be helpful – but since the US of A decided to change DST, and Canada followed along, my clock has been one hour slow since the old DST date. If I change it manually, it changes back to what it thinks is the correct time. There’s no option to override this, there’s no way to change it. And because it’s landline phone, there’s no firmware update to fix this problem once and for all. That’s a stupid digital device. I’ve heard so many pros and cons about DST I don’t know who to believe any more, but I do know that it’s frustrating to have a clock that’s been giving me the wrong time for a few days now. 😉

The above image, taken from this blog, is sobering for a long-time Windows guy like myself. The Mac marketshare numbers continue to grow, and if this image is any indication what the average college student is using, I wonder what sorts of shifts we’ll start to see in market share five years from now? As much as I like Vista, it just doesn’t measure up to what I was expecting to see from an operating system that had been worked on for five years. Will Vista be remembered as the tipping point for when Microsoft’s empire started to fall? I sure hope not, but I’ve lost count of the number of people I know that have switched to OS X…

Speed. There aren’t many Internet users who wouldn’t want Web sites to load faster, files to download quicker, and email messages with large attachments to get sent faster. Upload speed in particular hasn’t kept pace with download speeds – over the past five years I’ve seen my cable modem downstream speeds double from 5mbps to 10mbps, but the upstream speeds have inched up to only 1mbps. Having 1mbps of upstream bandwidth is more than enough for regular email, even with some hefty attachments, but once you start looking at uploading 500 MB worth of photos or a 100 MB video to YouTube, upstream bandwidth starts to become the bottleneck. There’s also the issue of network stability – it doesn’t matter how fast your connection is if it’s down.

So in light of that, I started to look at hardware that allows you to bond together multiple cable modems or DSL modems, giving you a faster connection. I remember systems similar to this back in the 56K modem days – they called it “shotgunning” back then if memory serves. There’s relatively cheap hardware from D-Link ($179 USD), and there’s a solution from Linksys that’s roughly double the price. In addition to the faster upload speed, which I desperately want, there’s the issue of external network stability and speed. Sometimes I’ll find that the connections that Shaw (my local cable modem provider) peers out to are bogged down, and I often wonder if I had Telus DSL (the “other guys”) I’d be seeing better overall performance.

There are some catches with this approach however: in my research thus far I’ve found that each “connection” can only be attached to one external modem. So if I’m doing an upload to YouTube, it will go out via one of the modems, not giving me a combined upload speed of two modems. If an uploader is multi-threaded (say, a photo uploader) then each thread can run on each of the modems, giving a much faster experience. But quite often the things I’d want more upload speed on are things like big FTP uploads, which if it’s a single file, is only going to use one modem.

So while I started out quite excited about the idea of bridged Internet access over two high-speed modems, it seems the reality of the situation makes it a bit less appealing. Anyone out there doing this have any thoughts?

I’ve never had any dealings with the folks at Etymotic, and while I’m sure their headphones are impressive, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing when I saw this ad on another Web site:

The ety8 headphones might sound amazing for all I know, but they look too much like big, clunky earrings for me to ever be comfortable wearing them out in public. When I saw them my first thought was of Star Trek, and not in a good way – if I geek like me gets a negative impression from that, then on the street it could only be worse.

It’s kind of ridiculous that the leading MP3 players (iPod, Zune, Sansa) still don’t have Bluetooth built-in – yet with Bluetooth designs like this, maybe it’s not so surprising…