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Lenovo Thinkpad to Samsung Netbook So, week one of working for the new company and it's been a gentle introduction. The schools are out on half term so I have ended up spending significantly more time running around after the children than I have done in the office (Sorry Sean, will make the time up next week, honest). One thing I have had to do is get up and running with a new machine. Until the big bucks start rolling in we are keeping the overheads to a minimum and trying to get away with using machines we already have kicking around. So, for the time being I have moved over from a rather sexy (and pretty decent spec) Lenovo ThinkPad T420 that I was using in my last job to a not so sexy (but still pretty dinky) Samsung Netbook. Now I was a pretty big fan of the Toshiba Libretto back in the day and I must say I still think there is a niche for this kind of machine (until I get my iPad I guess and completely change my mind!) Admittedly the Samsung does have it's fair share of quirks and niggles (the keyboard for one is a bit "Spectrum" like and my fingers keep slipping off the touchpad when I try to use the buttons) but overall it's not that bad and I'm slowly getting used to it. I think I will need to stick another 1Gb of Ram inside, but for now I'm pretty light on the apps I'm using so we'll see how we go. The screen resolution is a bit odd at 1024 x 600 but I am using small icons and auto-hiding the taskbar (not something I particularly like) to get around some of the problems with dialogs and buttons disappearing off the bottom of the screen. The biggest frustration I currently have is not necessarily with the Netbook itself it's with Windows 7 Starter. For a long time now I have been used to using a secondary monitor with a laptop. I keep my email and/or web up on one of the screens and use the other for apps. I didn't appreciate that with Windows 7 Starter you cannot extend your desktop to another screen, you only get the Duplicate and Project options. Now with a Netbook, the additional real estate and productivity gains offered by a secondary monitor is a big bonus if you are working at a desk for a decent period of time, and I must admit to being more than a little frustrated with this particular Windows 7 Starter limitation. That said, I'm already looking at the upgrade prices to Windows Home Edition before I make too hasty a decision and dismiss this little gem of a machine to the increasing sad pile of nearly but not quite test boxes sitting in the corner... Chris. ICT Lessons in Schools Finally after lots of reviews, the government is looking to change the format of ICT lessons in schools. Over the last few years and having followed children's ICT education with interest, we have been surprised to find out that nothing fundamentally has changed since the early introduction to IT. It will be a breath of fresh air to see the option of programming and software development coming to the forefront as opposed to the production of vanilla PowerPoint presentations and everyday basic computing and file management activities. Having been the victim in the office so many times of "death by PowerPoint" presentations, bringing programming into the curriculum will provide much needed opportunities for young adults to be both creative and expressive in their thinking, whilst still working within the framework and structured building blocks that are the cornerstone of any software development language. Syrinx Systems already offer one to one tuition for programming and have several adult students whom they have supported and tutored. As a company we are hoping these changes will happen sooner rather than later... Bookmarks Behaving Badly A few days ago a customer had an issue with his internet browser in that Firefox had lost the bookmarks and he couldn't save any new ones. After some remote access via Crossloop I decided something was odd and even though he had installed the latest version of Firefox to see if it would cure it, alas it did not. As remote accessing wasn't the fastest method, I decided to work on the laptop directly. First thing I did was create a new profile by calling Firefox with a special switch "firefox.exe -profilemanager", this worked perfectly so then I set about trying to work out what was wrong with the original profile. What did I find? Well inside the troublesome profile directory there was a file called places.sqlite.corrupt, so Firefox had obviously realised there was an issue but for some reason hadn't created a correct replacement. I simply copied an empty version from the newly created profile and restored the most recent file from the bookmarkbackups directory that looked like it had enough bytes to contain the required data. Problem solved. |
