Convergence is a good thing. But as your mom may have told you, you can have too much of a good thing. She also may have told you that just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it.

This sage advice applies to the Thanko USB mouse and speaker combination. The mouse connects to your PC via USB. The speaker’s 3.5mm input jack apparently splices into the USB cable. The speaker also has a built-in microphone.

The alleged convergence Nirvana is that now you don’t need external speakers or a microphone. Instead, you just use the speaker and microphone on the mouse, which you need anyway.  Of course, when you use the mouse, your hand will block its speaker. And it’s questionable how well you will be heard while speaking into a moving mouse microphone. But hey, as your mom also may have told you, it isn’t a perfect world.

[via Slashgear]

I use Secure Digital High Capacity (SDHC) memory cards (or their mini or micro siblings) in a range of devices. I understand storage; 8GB stores twice as much as 4GB. But I have little understanding of speed ratings like Class 2, 4 or 6.

Tom’s Hardware, my primary source of information on hardware, demystifies SDHC memory cards, and compares cards from different manufacturers, in 13 SDHC Memory Cards Reviewed : SD Memory Cards for Professionals. The conclusion? Well, I don’t want to promote reader laziness. Read the article

Source (including picture): Mobile Devices Today

(Picture courtesy of The Brothers Root Blog)

Recently I noticed, when returning home after a long day, or waking up in the morning, that the display on my Dell Dimension 8400 desktop was black. I tried changing the display type, changing between DVI and VGA cable, powering the monitor off and back on. Northing worked. I had to turn the computer off completely, then back on. Even that was problematic. Being impatient, I turned the computer back on within seconds of it turning off. The computer would go into an infinite loop of reboots. I learned that I had to keep the computer off for about 30 seconds before turning it back on. That at least worked to get back to Windows … until the next crash.

Eventually I witnessed a crash rather than discovering it after the fact. There was a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death). However, the BSOD only appeared briefly. Then back to the Black Screen of Death. Black and Blue about summed up how I felt.

I googled the symptoms. The results pointed to the video card. This confirmed my suspicions. Often a BSOD is caused by a bad video driver. Additionally, I told you in Improving My Vista Experience that I “upgraded” my video card to ATI/AMD’s Radeon HD 2600 XT. Good ideas, like good deeds, are duly punished. Additionally, ATI/AMD’s Vista (the OS of my desktop) drivers are infamous for being as stable as Charles Manson on crack.

But it turns out the culprit wasn’t the video card. Instead, I had some bad RAM. Actually, my RAM hasn’t changed since I upgraded my RAM about 7 months ago as reported in Improving My Vista Experience. So I guess my RAM went bad.

How did I discover this? I went through the Event Viewer and examined the errors. There were a lot of them. Some led me down false trails. But one consistent one was: “The hardware has reported an uncorrectable memory error. Event ID 1801.” Googling that, the two principal culprits were the BIOS and the RAM. I quickly eliminated the BIOS as the culprit. That left testing my RAM.

I used Vista’s built-in Memory Diagnostics Tool. I also used three free third-party tools, Memtest86, its new and improved version, Memtest86+, and MemScope. All reported errors.

RAM, unlike time, is cheap, so I just replaced all of the RAM with “genuine” Dell RAM. Problem solved. Though not before many hours of troubleshooting. What do “normal” people without tech skills do?

The picture is part of a video which shows young ladies using Microsoft Surface to pick up men at the Rio hotel in Las Vegas. Unfortunately, technology has its limitations; I doubt I could successfully use Microsoft Surface to pick up beautiful young women at the Rio. Which probably is for the best, since I think my wife would take a dim view of that use of technology.

Back to grim reality. MSNBC has announced that it plans to use Microsoft Surface on election night (which can’t come soon enough for me) to track the electoral vote.

OK, but what is Microsoft Surface? This wiki article explains:

“Surface is essentially a Windows Vista PC tucked inside a table, topped with a 30-inch reflective surface in a clear acrylic frame. A projector underneath the surface projects an image onto its underside, while five cameras in the machine’s housing record reflections of infrared light from human fingertips. The camera can also recognize objects placed on the surface if those objects have specially-designed “tags” applied to them. Users can interact with the machine by touching or dragging their fingertips and objects such as paintbrushes across the screen, or by placing and moving tagged objects.”

Hmmm … sort of a Tablet PC? Indeed, as this MobileDevicesToday article explains:

“Tim Russert used a white board famously in 2000 to show the electoral map. Sharp observers know it was a Fujitsu Tablet PC in 2004. This year, move out Tablet, hello Surface.”

The article further explains the use of Surface by MSNBCs Political Director, Chuck Todd (aka Chuckie T):

“Electoral Map. Todd will use Surface to quickly and easily view historic voting results, polling insights and demographic data for each state. And by placing an object on the display, Todd will be able to instantly change the map to showcase results from previous predictions or to identify up-to-the minute changes.

Battleground States. This application will allow Todd to visually demonstrate the impact of various potential voting outcomes in key states and the effect they have on the number of electoral votes needed to win the election. This will be a great tool for Todd to lay out various electoral scenarios.”

But I agree with the author’s conclusion that while this is a “pretty cool and engaging use of the tech,” it “won’t replace Russert and his whiteboard in my heart.” I miss Tim Russert.

In any event, on election night you might want to tune in to MSNBC (guess what the MS stands for?) to see this use of technology. As for other mentioned use of this technology, try it at your own risk!

In Improving my Vista Experience I explained my decision to upgrade my graphics card and increase my RAM to improve the performance under Vista of my 4 year old but still serviceable Dell Dimension 8400.

I used the July 4th holiday to install the graphics card and RAM. There is a reason my brother is a surgeon and I am not. Nevertheless, installation was (relatively) uneventful.

I then ran Vista’s Windows Experience Index tool. It detected my hardware had changed and invited me to refresh the settings. Surprisingly, the tool hung the first few times I tried it. Googling solutions, I learned many others shared my pain, but only a few claimed cures, ranging from deleting the existing experience index information to sacrificing chickens (just kidding). Finally, by trial and error of the recommended solutions, and perhaps the mercy of the Vista gods, the tool finally completed. Here are my scores (red indicates changes):

Unsurprisingly, the improved graphics card substantially improved the Graphics scores. Somewhat surprisingly, the increased RAM did not improve the score for memory operations per second. Then again, the prior RAM score, 5.3, already was quite high. It also appears that the extra RAM was utilized partly to increase available shared system graphics memory. 

Of course, the whole point of this exercise was not to improve my Windows Experience index. Rather, it was to improve the performance of my desktop under Vista. Did it work? Perhaps it’s wishful thinking, or a desire to justify my expenditure, but yes, performance does seem better.

I have a Dell Dimension 8400 that I purchased almost 4 years ago. Then it was the latest and greatest, one of the first to use PCI Express. Of course, computers age even faster than dogs.

I’ve since “upgraded” the OS from XP Professional to Vista Business. Unfortunately, my mouse cursor too often is the disc that is the Vista equivalent of the hourglass. Eventually this busy state ends, and I can proceed. However, frequent 30 second or so interruptions is subjectively irritating and objectively interferes with my work. I’ve tried various tweaks, like turning off the Superfetch service and modifying Indexing options. That seemed to help a bit, but not much.

Where is my hardware weak link?

My next though was brute force, upgrading hardware. To determine which hardware to upgrade, I used Vista’s Windows Experience Index tool available under Control Panel > System. Here are my scores:

These scores are explained in Windows Experience Index: An In-Depth Look. Here’s a simplified explanation:

Given my 2.0 graphics score, I turned off Aero. That helped. But still graphics is a weak link, not only on its own, but by using system RAM. Speaking of system RAM, while its 5.3 score is excellent, 2GB is really only OK for Vista.

Upgrade or not?

I only briefly considered whether it was worth upgrading a 4 year old computer rather than buying a new one. Not exactly being a spring chicken myself, I’m partial to not throwing out the old just because it’s old. Additionally, upgrading the video card and RAM is relatively inexpensive (around $200), and when done I’ll have a perfectly good machine. Also, my plan for my next computer is not an off the shelf single processor machine, but instead one I build that has a quad-core processor and uses a 64 bit OS. For backwards compatibility reasons, I’d like then to have a secondary computer with a 32 bit OS. My Dimension 8400 would fit that bill, if I can resolve its current pokey state.

Which graphics card?

That decision made, I went to Dell Replacement Spare Parts & Upgrades, entered my service tag, and viewed the available upgrades.

Dell offered a lot of choices for graphics cards. Since I wasn’t going to get another 128MB choices, I focused on the ones with 256MB or 512MB. My choices basically were:

Radeon HD 2600 XT 512 MB GDDR3
Radeon HD 2600 PRO 512 MB DDR2
Radeon X1650 Pro HDMI 256 MB
Radeon HD 2600 PRO 256 MB DDR2
Radeon HD 2400 PRO 256 MB DDR2
Radeon HD 2400 PRO OverClocked 256 MB DDR2
Radeon Xstasy X1300 256 MB DUAL LINK

Not being a gamer, my knowledge of graphics cards is about as good as my knowledge of women. OK, my knowledge of graphics cards is not that bad. Still, I needed help to wade through the choices.

I went to the AMD ATI Radeon product page. I saw a link to an Upgrade Advisor. Perfect! I clicked on it. Alas, it isn’t functional: “We are currently improving the ATI Upgrade Advisor Tool.” Oh well. I went back to the product page. The comparison tool required me to make choices on issues I understood little or not at all. I then read the descriptions for the 2400 and 2600 series. They were long on marketing mumbo jumbo (“feature-rich upgrade”, “lifelike interactivity”, “immersive realism”, etc., ad nauseam) but short on useful information.

I then went to my favorite hardware information site, Tom’s Hardware. I found an article which discussed the 2400 and 2600 series. The article reassuringly concluded:

“Are the HD 2400, 8500 and 8400 series cards good for gaming? No, but for an HTPC they would be good. Looking at the video playback CPU utilization as well as the fact they all have DX10 hardware means that they would be good for the home or office situation where an inexpensive dual monitor Vista experience is desired.
…
Are you looking to upgrade from a system you bought or built over three years ago? If you are like most people, these would make a great upgrade path.”

Well, at least I was reassured once I figured out the meaning of HTPC (Home Theatre PC) and DX10 (DirectX 10). I’ve got to learn the lingo better.

Based on my research, 2600 was better than 2400, 2600 XT was better than 2600 Pro, and GDDR 3 was better than DDR2. I don’t know what “better” really means as a practical matter, but the price differential was relatively low ($36). So the Radeon HD 2600 XT 512 MB GDDR3 it is!

Upgrading RAM

Upgrading RAM was easier. I have 4 slots. 2 slots were occupied, 1GB each for a total of 2GB. I have to install RAM modules in matched pairs. So the choice is 2 x 1GB vs. 2 x 512MB. Surely 4 GB of RAM is better than 3GB? However, a 32 bit OS “sees” only 3GB of RAM. Nevertheless, there is some uncertainty if the upper limit is somewhat over 3GB, and the price differential was not great, so I ordered the 2 x 1GB.

Where to buy?

For the graphics card, I went straight to the source: ATI. Its Where to Buy link, after choosing the what I wanted, eventually took me to this page, which listed Dell and other vendors, all quoting near the same $165.00 price as Dell … except Newegg, which quoted $79.99!

My prior experience with Newegg has been very positive; both their prices and service have been excellent. Nevertheless, given the large price differential, I wanted to check if I was comparing apples to apples. The Dell site (and others) quoted a manufacturer part # 900183, whereas Newegg quoted 900171. The VisionTek site was no help. I finally was able to create this comparison. Essentially no difference in features, or at this site, in price, which was reassuring. So Newegg it is!

I ordered the RAM from Crucial simply because I’ve had good prior experience with them and Dell’s RAM choices were limited and mostly out of stock.

Total cost, including shipping and tax: $175!

Will it work?

I dunno. I’ll let you know after I receive and install the graphics card and RAM.

Two days ago I posted New Mouse in the House! about my new Kensington SlimBlade Presenter Mouse. I mentioned how the mouse installed flawlessly on my newest Tablet PC<tease>more on it soon</tease>. What’s relevant now is its OS is XP Tablet PC edition.

Today when I left the house I unplugged the USB dongle, packed it inside the mouse, and easily slipped the mouse in my gadget bag. This was the very convenience reported by James Kendrick that persuaded me to buy this gadget in the first place. Arriving at work, I plugged in the USB dongle in my Fujitsu P1620 (whose OS is Vista). The system recognized when I plugged in the dongle and tried to install drivers. I then got an error message that the install has failed, stating: "The driver installation file for this device is missing a necessary entry. This may be because the INF was written for Win 95 or later."

I tried rebooting and different USB ports for the dongle. I also found on Kensington’s website a support page listing Kensington SlimBlade Driver v 1.1 with Vista as a supported OS. While this driver is only supposed to enable advanced trackball functionality (see my prior post), I tried it anyway. No dice.

I called Kensington tech support. I spoke with someone from a foreign land (about the only way I get to travel these days). Nice chap, but it became obvious he was reading a script and therefore wasn’t listening to a word I told him. After about 15 minutes, I asked to be transferred to the U.S. I was, and spoke to a somewhat more knowledgeable chap. He recommended that I replace the input.inf file in C:\WINDOWS\INF with the one on my Vista CD. I also asked him if there was a newer driver than version 1.1. He said no, and that in any event, Vista should natively support the mouse, the driver just added trackwheel functionality.

I then did what I should have done in the first place; a Google search. I learned that, as in many things Vista, my misery had mucho company. Indeed, PC Magazine had reported on it on April 16 in Microsoft Vista Update Causes USB Problems. I also found a number of possible solutions; this seems to be the best thread.

I tried to uninstall the offending Windows Update, KB938371. However, right-clicking it did not show an uninstall option. Naturally.

Finally, in Device Manager, where my mouse was shown under the Mice category as "unknown device", I didn’t just delete the entry and try again. Instead, when I right-clicked it and chose uninstall, in the resulting dialog, I also checked "delete the drive software for this device." I rebooted, and magically the mouse started working. Therefore, I didn’t even need to go further in the solution suggested in the last post in this thread.

Not leaving well enough alone, I returned to the Kensington support page. Lo and behold, in the intervening hour, there now was Kensington SlimBlade Driver v 1.3, dated June 2 (yesterday). I installed it, and my mouse still works!

Not sure what the moral of this story is, but hopefully you should find this interesting, and maybe even useful.

Feeling better, I decided this weekend to go shopping. For me, that means electronics stores. At the local Circuit City, I bought the Kensington SlimBlade Presenter Mouse. I became aware of it from this jkOnTheRun post. There James Kendrick, who I regard as a guru in all things mobile, said it best:

“The ThinkOutside Bluetooth Travel Mouse has been a good workhorse for me but more and more recently I have been thinking of replacing it.  While it’s nice to have a wireless Bluetooth mouse since I use so many different mobile devices it’s quite a pain to have to re-pair the mouse all the time when I switch gadgets.  It slows me down to be sure.  I also have been thinking that it would be good to have a mouse that was thinner since I use so many thin gadget bags with narrow pockets and the ThinkOutside, while small, is too thick to fit in a lot of these pockets.”

The SlimBlade Presenter mouse is not a Bluetooth mouse. Instead, it uses a small USB wireless dongle shown in the picture. One problem I have had with USB wireless dongles is they are very easy to lose. However, this wireless dongle can be stored inside the mouse when the mouse is in your gadget bag rather than being used with a computer.

Another problem I’ve had with both wireless and Bluetooth mice is battery life. I carry batteries with me, but by the time I use them, sometimes they’re out of juice. But Kensington quotes a 6 month battery life. Kensington also has built in a couple of battery saving features. First is auto sleep; when your computer goes to sleep, so does your mouse. Also, storing the dongle inside the mouse for transport automatically turns off the mouse, further saving battery life. But of course, batteries do run low eventually. The mouse has a battery indicator which turns red when that happens.

The mouse is easy to set up. I plugged in the dongle and the mouse was instantly recognized. The mouse seems very responsive so far. The scroll wheel enables vertical scrolling, and tilting the scroll wheel left or right enables horizontal scrolling.

But what about the word “Presenter” in the mouse’s name? Pressing a button toggles the mouse between mouse mode and presentation mode. There is a backlight that cues you that you are in presentation mode. In that mode, the scroll wheel enables you to go forwards and backwards, such as in a PowerPoint slide presentation. I tried it and it worked great. This is a very useful feature since while presenting (or in my case teaching) I don’t have to lean over the laptop and find the appropriate key to press. Tilting the scroll wheel apparently has no functionality in presentation mode. 

The mouse comes with drivers which apparently are necessary for the tilt wheel functionality, and perhaps also the presentation mode; the documentation isn’t very clear on this. I installed the software with no issues.

According to Kensington, the mouse and its software will work on XP, Vista and Mac OS X (10.2.8 and up). So for those of you who own both Windows and Mac laptops, you can easily use this mouse with both.

With these features, this mouse is relatively expensive, for a mouse that is. I paid $49.99, but if you look around, you probably can get it for about $10 less.

Criticisms? The software doesn’t appear to have an update feature, and also doesn’t appear to be available on Kensington’s website. Additionally, the manual is sparse, and the online help seemingly non-existent. Then again, there probably isn’t a lot of need for help; this device is pretty simple to use. But these criticisms are relatively minor. At least so far, I really like this mouse!

I took time off yesterday from configuring my wife Devvie’s new P1620 to watch my alma mater UCLA go down to defeat in the NCAA Basketball Championship Semi-Finals. This morning it was time to lick my wounds and go back to work.

I used the Belkin Easy Transfer cable (pictured above) and the accompanying software to transfer user settings, account and application information from Devvie’s P1510 (which runs XP) to her P1620 (which runs Vista). The purpose was to avoid having to perform tedious tasks such as re-entering her e-mail accounts information in Outlook. It all worked as advertised, and relatively quickly. To test, I fired up Outlook on the P1620. Her email accounts were all there. I clicked Send/Receive. I did have to enter her e-mail passwords (I guess that’s a security precaution) but that’s all.

You can use Easy Transfer to transfer files as well. But I didn’t. Just as moving into a new house or an apartment is an opportunity to rethink which items to keep and to re-organize them, I view a new computer as an opportunity to rethink file organization and storage. I’ve set up a Promise SmartStor NS4300N NAS (network attached storage) which is accessible within our internal network as a shared drive and outside as a FTP server. We’re moving the data files on the P1510 to the NAS using KarenWare’s free but powerful Replicator. The plan is that Devvie will check out files from the NAS, and when done working, will update her changes to the NAS, again using the Replicator. We’ll see how this system works out.

Easy Transfer does not migrate programs. Microsoft does offer a free but beta Easy Transfer Companion for that purpose. I passed. I’ve read mixed reports about how well this tool works. Therefore, I was concerned I might be creating problems rather than saving time, especially since it wasn’t all that hard to reinstall her programs. In this regard, as with files, the new computer was a good opportunity to rethink which programs she really uses. Turns out not too many.

Well, Devvie is up and running with her P1620. I’ve asked her to test drive it while I’m home (it’s Sunday) as it will be easier for me to solve any problems while I’m physically here. But (famous last words) I don’t anticipate any glitches.

So now the wait for my P1620 and whatever adventures await me with slimming down the Vista install.

Rob Bushway of GottaBeMobile has posted his long-awaited interview with an executive of N-Trig, the manufacturer of the capacitive touch screen on the Dell Latitude XT which Rob is about to receive! He’s also posted his further thoughts on that interview.

The interview and Rob’s take make very interesting reading. I’ll summarize my take here on only one aspect of the interview — there are many other interesting aspects — what the future in the next year or so holds for other Tablet PCs using capacitive touch. No real surprises, but it’s nice to get confirmation from the source:

• 12″ – Look for other manufacturers using capacitive touch screens, as well as Dell with other models.
• 8+” – You will have a longer wait for devices such as my soon-to-arrive Fujitsu P1620, but it likely will happen.
• UMPCs – Maybe. I wonder though, since the raison d’être of the UMPCs is low cost, and a capacitive touch screen won’t be cheap.
• < 7″ – You probably won’t see capacitive touch screens in devices smaller than 7″, like the 5″ OQO model 02.

The interview also has an interesting interactive feature. Rob had invited his readers to post questions — I didn’t because other readers covered my questions — and had a number of them answered. There apparently is more to come, as the post closes: “We are working on additional questions from readers that needed some more research.” Rob also states “we’re planning a special podcast to discuss these items in more depth.” But there is a lot of interesting information even now, so go over to GottaBeMobile and check out the interview, as well as stay tuned for more!