Some time ago I bought a Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2 laptop. At the time it was the fastest thing I could buy. It was also the heaviest! With a 17″ 1920×1200 screen and all the toys, it’s a bit of a dead weight. It was always intended to be a desktop replacement, so it mostly sat on my desk all of its life so the weight wasn’t an issue. Having nice big screen was lovely for desktop use and playing the odd game.

It has a 1.8GHz Pentium CPU and an nVidia 6800Go video card. Not long after I bought it, the video card failed. I blogged about the issue and the rubbish Dell Support.

Well, it happened again just after the warranty ran out. Convenient, huh? Exactly the same problem as previously happened – corruption on the screen indicating hardware failure. I contacted Dell and they basically said they couldn’t help, but if I wanted they would sell me a new video card for £200. I was torn and frustrated. I could get a cheap entire laptop for not much more than that, but not one with a decent 3D card and 17″ 1920×1200 display. I was irritated that they couldn’t see that this was a recurrent issue with the machine which made me less inclined to pay more money to them.

Whilst on the phone the guy asked me at the end if I was ‘satisfied’ with the support. I said ‘no’ of course which he was surprised at and after trying to argue that I should change my mind, he forwarded me on to his manager. The manager then proceeded to argue that I should change my answer to ‘yes’ because the agent had provided me with the correct answer – which was that he couldn’t help me. I was pretty peeved by this point that someone asked for my opinion of whether the transaction was a success and when I voiced displeasure, was badgered for a further 20 minutes to change my mind. I didn’t.

So since then (October last year) my dell laptop has sat in a drawer, unused, wasted. I have jumped on ebay now and then to try and get hold of a 2nd hand video card – it’s a modular MXM 6800Go – but never bought one. They’re quite rare and command similar prices to what Dell quoted me.

A few weeks ago I was chatting with a co-worker about his broken Playstation 3. He’d read threads online about how the fault he has may be a common one, where many online suggest slamming the motherboard in the oven for a bit to ‘reflow’ the solder. Many reports online say this works.

I was in one of those moods yesterday, and dug out the laptop and managed to figure out how to take the thing apart and get the video card out. I wound the oven up to 200 degrees C and put the card in for 9 minutes. I figured I had nothing else to lose. If all those posts online were a massive conspiracy to get thick people such as me to put delicate electronics into a hot oven then they succeeded!

30 minutes later the card was cool enough for me to put it back in the machine. I carefully put it all back together and booted it up. It worked! The video corruption had gone. Well, almost. I was left with one vertical purple line about 3 pixels in from the left, which I can totally live with. In the drive was an old Crunchbang CD which booted up just fine.

So now, have I joined the ranks of the internet crazies who say putting electronics in the oven might cure it? Yup. Don’t do it though, because it might all go horribly wrong and I wouldn’t want you to blame me would I?

                          

I’ll cut right to the chase. I have a 2.5 year old Toshiba M400 laptop which is also a tablet PC, and the rotate options don’t work ‘properly’, and they never have. Many others have similar laptops, and theirs “don’t work” either. I’d like this to be fixed, but don’t know how to achieve that.

I didn’t buy the laptop because it was a tablet PC. I bought it because at the time it had the highest resolution (1400×1050) at a low physical size (12.1″) with built in 3G. If anyone ever asks “do you use it as a tablet PC” the answer is “no”. If the tablet features worked I’d probably use it as one more often.

The issues with this laptop:-

The screen doesn’t autorotate when you swivel it round.

This means you have to use the graphical screen rotation tool either before you swivel the screen or after. Either way you either end up with the desktop screen upside down, or having to man-handle the laptop so it’s up the right way, or use the UI upside down for a moment. This is naff. It should automagically do this as it does on Windows.

There is a graphical tool for rotating the screen, but no graphical tool for rotating the tablet.

The tablet is an input device which has no graphical tool for rotating. Ideally the screen rotation tool should ‘know’ that the PC is a tablet and should rotate the input device. Alternatively a separate graphical tool should exist which has options for rotating the tablet input device.

The screen and tablet don’t rotate together

If I do rotate the screen using the graphical tool I end up with the tablet and screen out of sync with eachother. Using the tablet pen the directions are inverted (left is right, up is down etc) whilst the screen is rotated. There is a command line tool in the wacom-tools package which can rotate the tablet, but no GUI, and nothing that keeps the screen and input device in sync.

I attended a sesion called Better touchscreen support at the recent Ubuntu Developer Summit but it was sadly only concerning touch screens, not tablets. I did raise these issues in the session but nobody really has any time or inclination to fix them, despite there being at least two devices in the room of this type.

Over the last 2 years I have spoken to various developers who work in the areas covered by this and nobody really seems interested in fixing this. I get the usual “feel free to submit a patch”. I’m not a coder

There are various scripts and fudges online that can achieve some of this, but none of it is integrated into the existing tools and none of it is shipped with Ubuntu. This makes me sad. Anyone fancy helping?

                          

Update: Please see Reply from Rory, and his blog entry describing his experience with Ubuntu.

Rory Cellan-Jones discussed Microsoft Windows 7 with Sian Williams and Bill Turnbull, the presenters of BBC Breakfast this morning. Once again the BBC reporting of Microsoft products turns into a bit of an advert combined with a slap in the face at the end from Rory to those people working on Free Software. My comments at the bottom.

07:46

Sian Williams: “Thank you very much Carol. More on Windows in just a moment, we’re rebooting, it’s got a new operating system and Rory Cellan-Jones will be here to test it”

Bill Turnbull: “First though, Simon, and more on that postal strike”

Simon in the studio, is having microphone problems. After a few moments Sian suggests that Simon fix his mic. Discussion of what they’ll do in the mean time including paper review and going straight to Rory.

…

SW: “Because Rory is still trying to reboot the Windows sytem…”

…

07:51

SW: “We’re talking about Microsoft Windows. At midnight the latest version comes out. It’s called Windows 7, it’s faster says Microsoft, and it also lets you use a touch screen computer.”

BT: “Well the success of the PC operating system is hugely important for the future of Microsoft because its prior version – Vista – got dismal reviews.”

SW: “Our Technology Correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones is here and he’s had the system for a week, and we had a little panic, but it’s all back and working”

RCJ: “You were going to be looking at a blank screen because I’m a Technology Correspondent therefore I have a few issues with technology”

RCJ: “Here it is. This is the touch screen version of a new operating system. The big selling point is that it’s supposed to be simpler, quicker, not such a big chunky heavy thing as Windows Vista, which as you said was a bit of a disaster”

RCJ holds up a boxed copy of Windows Vista.

RCJ: “Lots of people installed this then found various things didn’t work, their printers stopped working and so on. What Microsoft say is that this time we’ve learned our lesson, we’ve spoken to people, we’ve worked out what they want, and what people want is for things to work.”

RCJ: “So this is the touch screen version as I said, you can move various windows around, you can go to the start button down there to start things. Usual range of programs, I’ve been playing with it for a week and it seems to does what it says on the tin, it seems to be pretty efficient. But I think if you’re a very loyal windows person you’ll want it, if you’re not, perhaps you won’t.”

BT: “It does all the sorts of things that you’ve been able to get on an iTouch or iPhone, the Mac machines for some time.”

RCJ: “Well what you can do on an iPhone yes, not what you can do… what I’ve got here by chance is a a Mac computer. They will say their system, this (pointing at the Sony computer running Windows 7) has learned a lot from that (pointing at a Macbook Air running OSX). It doesn’t yet have touch screen capabilities, an actual Mac computer. But there are lots of other operating systems out there, but the key fact is that Windows is used by about 90% of the worlds computer users so it’s very important to them. ”

SW: “In the end you want it to work, work quickly and for all the applications to work. The touch screen thing, how many people will be buying a Windows system wanting the touch screen.”

RCJ: “It’s a gimmick isn’t it. It’s quite a fun gimmick”

RCJ tries 3 times to move a Window using the touch interface, and fails

RCJ: “It’s a bit of a flavour of the future of computing. There’s a lot of research going on saying that these things the mouse has a limited shelf life, will be redundant. In a few years time we’ll be moving things around the computer by wiggling our ears a Microsoft engineer told me yesterday. There will be new ways of interacting with them and this is just a staging post, but in the mean time you’re absolutely right people want to be confident that everything they normally do will work with the new system.”

BT: “If you’ve got a computer though and it’s not touch screen do you need this? Will this new program work for you?”

RCJ: “Lets be clear it’s not really about touch screen, that’s an added bell and whistle. Yes, it will work, and the key thing for Microsoft whereas vista didn’t work on this whole new range of small computers people are using – netbooks – this is a slimmed down version designed to run on those little computers too.”

SL : “Where does Windows stand with Apple in terms of competition and how many they sell?”

RCJ: “Well, Apple has been growing fast, has growing it’s market share, but from a tiny tiny base. I think it was 3% a few years ago in the states at least it’s doubled to 6%, a bit less than that. Of course it’s right at the luxury end of the market, you’re going to pay a lot more for an Apple in general than for a computer running WIndows.”

RCJ: “But what it has done is kind of wound Microsofts pride. It’s not really seen as cool anymore by the majority of computer users.”

BT: “There are other operating systems you can get for nothing.”

RCJ: “Absolutely, I was just showing one off here. There’s something called ‘Ubuntu’ which is launched next week. It’s a whole sort of little community of enthusiasts building operating systems for absolutely nothing and trying to persuade us that we don’t need to be in with the big boys but actually most computer users frankly they don’t want to bother with that sort of stuff they want something that’s there…”

BT: “..that everyone else uses..”

RCJ: “Yes”

SW: “Vista came out three years ago and as you say it wasn’t very well received, and a lot of people went back to XP. Those people who are still on XP now, are they likely to go with the new version, should they go with the new version, does it offer much more?”

RCJ: “It does offer a lot more, but I think people will be cautious. What sensible people do is sit around a bit see what happens to other people, see how secure it is, and there will be updates, there are inevitably updates, very swiftly when you bring out a new system. You see the sort of hiccups you iron them out, and I think a lot of people will wait to see what happens.”

BT: “Can we touch it yet”

RCJ: “You can touch it, but you did break it”

A few points that came to mind:-

• I don’t recall such a review of OSX Snow Leopard when it came out, BBC biased towards Microsoft?
• Will there be a similar review of other OS releases this month/year such as Ubuntu and others?
• Why focus so much on the touch elements if most computers don’t have a touch screen and it’s a ‘gimmick’. Perhaps it just makes good telly, even if it’s somewhat misguided
• No mention of the pain users will have upgrading
• No mention of the cost
• No mention of the fact that OSX is cheaper, instead focussing on the cost of Apple hardware. Isn’t this an OS review, not a hardware review. I’d bet that Sony touch screen Rory used isn’t exactly cheap
• ‘little community’ building Free Software you say Rory? Dismissive and unnecessarily Patronising
• ‘don’t want to bother with that sort of stuff’. I find many users don’t want to ‘bother’ with viruses, malware and broken software, but they do, on Windows
• Ubuntu isn’t ‘out next week’. The latest version is. Ubuntu has been around for 5 years (this week). What we’re doing is no different to Microsoft shipping a new release of Windows, and Apple shipping a new OSX. It just so happens ours is free

Rory, please feel free to come along to the Ubuntu Release Party next Thursday 29th in London, and you can meet some of the great people who help put Ubuntu together.

Update: Whoops, Sian Willams, not Sian Lloyd. Apologies Sian, thanks Dave. Gah, sorry Bill, got that wrong too..

                          

Apologies to anyone reading this on a free software planet. If you don’t live in the South UK then this is likely of zero interest. Skip it.

Travelling on the 17:03 First Great Western Train out of Gatwick heading to Reading, I got off at Farnborough North station without my bike. Someone had taken it off already. It was quite a busy train and like an idiot I didn’t keep my eye on it.

The train Stopped at Reigate, Redhill, Dorking Deepdene, Guildford, Ash and North Camp. So it must have been taken by someone getting off at one of those stations. If you know anyone who recently came into a Black Brompton with silver trim, let me know. There is a sticker on the side for East Street Cycles (where I bought it), and it has a metal right non-folding pedal rather than the usual plastic one.

I’m a bit stuck and considerably out of pocket without it.

Update: I have been contacted by the police who have requested the CCTV footage from the train company.

                          

Dear Asus,

I write to you as a customer of your Eee PC line of computers.

I’d never really considered buying any of your hardware up until you released your Eee PC line of products. When I discovered that the Eee 701 was pre-loaded with (Xandros) Linux and came pre-configured with all the usual applications that I am familiar with on my Linux Desktop I was delighted.

I bought two, a white one for my wife and a stylish black one for myself. Since then I’ve purchased a further two Eee PCs (900) and influenced a small number of others to buy similar machines. I love mine and my wife loves hers. Hers runs the standard Xandros Linux install (still) which works just fine. She connects securely to wireless networks, prints to our networked printer, reads data off USB memory devices and cameras and was delighted to find the 3g dongle we tried just worked. How great is that!? Thanks!

Mine on the other hand has seen various operating systems. For a long while I used Xandros, then moved briefly to Ubuntu 8.04 then back to Xandros again. After a brief flirt with Ubuntu 8.10 and Crunchbang Linux – all very good – again I came back to Xandros. I loved that your partnership with Xandros Corp resulted in a system that was fast to boot, ran software I knew, had its roots in Debian (always a plus point for a geek like me) and was robust & dependable.

I’ve used my Eee PC on planes and trains, in pubs and restaurants (whilst waiting for take-out), indoors and outdoors, and pretty much all that time I’ve loved the experience. Yes, the keyboard takes getting used to and yes it’s not the fastest machine ever but I knew that when I bought it, so that was a concession I was willing to make.

One concession I wasn’t willing to make is buying the machine with Microsoft Windows installed so I bought one with Xandros. Personally I don’t care for Windows. I’ve used it and I’m pretty good at fixing it when it goes wrong (ask my accountant, my in-laws, customers, neighbours and friends) but I prefer not to use it. So I was happy that you made laptops that didn’t require me to pay for an operating system that I was never (I really mean that, never) going to use on the device. You scored a great home run with that decision. Thanks again!

Now 18 months have passed and I notice new models are on the horizon carrying the Eee PC moniker. A friend of mine pointed out the Eee PC Seashell (1008HA) for example, which looks very nice on the website http://www.asus.co.uk/eeepc/1008HA/features.html. But hang on, what’s this. I’m now told by your marketing department that “It’s better with Windows®”, and I am invited to find out more by clicking a link to http://www.itsbetterwithwindows.com/.

The site you link to is not new to me, but it’s the first time I’ve seen a vendor link to it, indeed it’s the first time I’ve seen a vendor of hardware that runs Linux link to it. Forgive me for saying this but it seems that you’ve kicked the Linux community squarely in the teeth with this one. I applaud you for bringing Linux to the mass market with the Eee 701, but that good work is all but undone with this stunt. I can only presume it’s a stunt of course.

Lets take a look at “It’s better with Windows”. I presume you’re referring to Windows XP (released in 2001) given that’s the logo on the above page. I guess you can’t possibly be referring to Vista as that barely runs on most of your Eee PC range, and Windows 7 isn’t even released yet, so it can’t be that.

Apparently Windows is “Trusted”, it “..delivers a dependable experience..”. Do you honestly believe that? An OS which is insecure by default with viruses, malware, unexplained and untraceable crashes, required (and un-requested) reboots and a vendor who keeps telling us the OS is dead makes for a dependable platform in your eyes does it? I don’t think I have ever heard anyone say Windows XP was ‘dependable’ unless under duress or contractual agreement. Which is it with you?

I note with interest from that site that I “can be up and running right away”. Of course that’s after I have entered the product key you conveniently put on the underside of the laptop. Then I have to apply the usual updates or service pack to Windows itself, grab office updates (or indeed an entire decent office package [no, Microsoft Works is not in this category]), get new virus definitions and update or installed a malware detector. What else, oh I should scan the machine for viruses (you know these hardware vendors, sending out machines with viruses on them. Tsk!), search for malware, download a PDF viewer, download or update a java stack, flash and various codecs, and all the other basic stuff you need to be “up and running right away”. What’s your definition of ‘right away’ in this instance?

I also see that Windows is “Compatible”, and that I can be “confident” my devices and applications will work. Ok, lets see. My HP Printer, digital camera, 3G dongle, sound card, mobile phone and wireless stick all refuse to work on a Windows XP machine without navigating some obtuse vendor websites or chugging through a load of vendor supplied CDs. It does have a CD-ROM drive, right?

You make some nice kit, and were instrumental in the rise of the netbook form factor all around the world. I can completely understand you pandering to the masses clawing for Windows XP because they don’t know any better. But don’t insult my intelligence by telling me it’s ‘better’, because it flat out isn’t, and a patronising, condescending pro-Windows website isn’t going to convince me otherwise.

Linux was good enough for you at the launch of your Eee PC models two years ago, and it’s even better now. How quickly you changed your allegiance when the hardware caught up with the requirements of Windows. We now know who our real friends are. Maybe you never really were our friend, maybe you just used us to steal a march on the competition. If that’s the case then you suck.

It was nice knowing you, when you didn’t suck.

Alan Pope
An ex-customer.