I know my MacBook Air can get pretty warm, but I never measured it quantitatively. I don't know what people use to measure those in OSX; but luckily I have Windows 10 installed via BootCamp (i.e. natively) and I am familiar with the tools in Windows.
I downloaded the trusty duo: CPU-Z and Realtemp. This is the Mid-2011 MacBook Air from the SandyBridge era. The CPU is a Core i5 2557M, which runs at 1.7GHz with a max boost of 2.7GHz.
I didn't want to run any stress tests straight away. But I ran Windows Update and updated the other software installed in there while monitoring the temps. It was astonishing to see the temps hover around 85-90C with a CPU utilisation of around 50% according to task manager, while hitting a max of 95C. I have no doubt it will throttle if the CPU runs at 100%, and probably burn a hole in the bottom of the aluminum unibody chassis if I attempted to run Prime95. So I didn't. This was good enough proof that the temps were terrible in such a thin chassis. I wonder if dust has something to do with it, because it is a 5.5 year old laptop. It cannot be free of dust.
I wonder if it is worth getting it serviced at the Apple store along with the battery. It won't be cheap @ AUD 189. Honestly, I don't want to spend any money on such an old laptop.
About a week ago, iTunes stopped detecting my iPhone 5S. Windows Explorer detected it alright. I could see it as a device. And I could access the photos folder once I designated the PC as a Trusted PC. But you had to press Trust this PC every time I connected the phone to the PC.
Apple has done a lot of things so that you don’t need to depend on iTunes to download everything. You could download/buy stuff and update iOS over the internet directly. That’s great, but you still cannot copy any files to the phone from the PC without iTunes. You could use Dropbox (copy the file to Dropbox, sync on the phone and open the file in the respective app) but you cannot do that with large media files. You still need iTunes.
I reinstalled iTunes many times. But it didn’t fix the problem.
But last night it hit me that it could be one of those other services that gets installed when you install iTunes which could be causing the issue. I thought that all of them are removed when you remove iTunes. That was NOT the case.
The million other services that iTunes installs
So I first uninstalled iTunes and all of the other services and stuff one by one. After that I rebooted the PC. When the PC booted back to the desktop, I downloaded the latest iTunes installer from Apple website, and installed it.
Once the installation was completed, I connected the phone. iTunes was automatically launched (that’s the default behavior unless you disable a service) and it could see my iPhone 5S.
Indeed it is, if I was living in the US. In the US, the price of the 32GB model is $349 and 64GB model is $399. If I can make at least $200 from my old tablet, I say that's good enough. I don't want to get the 32GB model though. That would be a downgrade from what I have right now.
The Asus Transformer T100 is ones of the first BayTrail tablets that came out with the launch of Windows 8.1. That $349 price tag includes a hardware keyboard as well. (AFAIK, it lack the addition battery though). Doesn't matter. Even with the Latitude 10, I'm not having problems with the battery life. I am fine having to charge it every night if required. Other than that, the price is the selling point. This price is same as Surface 2 which is ARM based and doesn't come with a keyboard. (You have to pay an additional $120-130 for a hardware keyboard on it.) And this is a convertible tablet, not just a tablet with plugable keyboard. The Surface 2 is not a proper laptop, because it doesn't stay stably on the lap.
Besides, there aren't any other options. Dell has Venue 11 Pro and that's about it. But it is not available for purchase as of today.
If you compare the Asus T100 with the Dell Latitude 10 Essentials, the differences are very noticeable. First, it has a CPU that's more than twice as fast as the one in the Dell. Then the GPU is many times faster. You get the keyboard. You get free Microsoft Office 2013. although it doesn't come preinstalled - a key to install the software is bundled with the package. Nevertheless, you get the best office suite for free. The speakers are very loud - as per reviews. The speakers on the Dell are horrible. It's about 100g lighter as well. The storage is still eMMC, but it would be slightly faster than the one on the Dell. Not sure if the performance difference would be noticeable though. I have always felt that the sluggishness of the Dell was always due to the sluggishness of the storage subsystem, not the CPU. So if that is the case, even a small bump in storage performance would be a godsend. Plus, it comes with Windows 8.1 out of the box. So you don't have to update to Windows 8.1 if you had to do a factory restore.
Only thing you are going to miss is the back facing camera. Who takes photos with a tablet anyways. Ah, and you don't get a full sized USB port on the tablet although one is available on the keyboard so that is not a big deal. I wonder if you can use both of them - the one on the keyboard and the one on the tablet body - at the same time. That would be awesome. I really miss not having multiple USB ports on the Dell.
So, obviously there is no competition between the Dell and the Asus. The Asus wins hands down.
There is one issue though. I don't live in the US. I live in Japan, and in Japan this tablet costs $449 for the 32GB model and $549 for the 64GB model! Ouch!!! That's too much! They want me to pay an extra $150 for the same 64GB tablet?
Sofmap is giving 10% points if we buy it from them, so the price of the tablet drops below $500. But still, I'm not sure that is worth it. I'll wait and see if the prices would drop. Perhaps when more and more shops start selling the tablet, it would become cheaper.
On the other hand, the Surface Pro 2 128GB is going for $870 for some reason. The price in the US is $999. Weird country Japan is!
Intel recently released the new iteration to their ultra low power CPUs known as the Intel Atom CPU. The new iteration is called BayTrail. If you didn't know, it's predecessor was CloverTrail which is the one that's available in most Windows 8 tablets. Unfortunately, that's what's in my tablet too.
BayTrail comes with a huge performance boost.
First, it is a quad core CPU. CloverTrail was a dual core CPU with Hyper-threading support. No Hyper-threading in BayTrail though.
And then comes the biggest improvement: out of order execution. This massively increases performance as it lowers the idling caused by I/O (including the cache accesses).
Then, there is turbo boost as well.
Now it supports DDR3, although the supported speeds are only 1066MHz.
A 1.33GHz (1.8GHz boost) BayTrail gives about half the performance of an ULP Core i5 (dual core) CPU running at 1.6GHz. So it is not that bad. It is way faster than CloverTrail. Even the GPU on it is the HD4000 which is only one generation behind the latest Haswell CPUs. Previously, the ATOM SoC was using a 3rd party GPU called PowerVR by Imagination Tech.
So, it seems like we have a winner, especially on the tablet front. But there is a big issue. "Storage performance". The tablets coming with the BayTrail CPUs are using the slow eMMC storage solution, not SATA based SSDs which you would typically find in PCs. eMMC is still solid state storage, but they are about 10 times slower than modern SSDs. Even though the iPad is also using eMMC, iOS is optimized for ARM platform so much that you don't get much of an issue as you would get when running Windows. Windows needs a proper SSD.
I don't know if this is a limitation with BayTrail or if they tablet manufacturers are opting for the cheaper storage to increase margins. If it is the former, we have no choice. But if it is the latter, the manufacturers are making a huge mistake because once people get fed up by seeing every bad move the manufacturers take to make an extra dime, they are going to take their business elsewhere.(i.e. buy an iPad). They are going to lose their profits trying to make higher profits. This is why even though Apple products are pricy, people tend to buy more and more of them. (I've asked Ryan Shrout about this, so hopefully he will find the answer. I really hope it is the latter, which means there is a chance that at least one manufacturer would come to their senses and release a BayTrail based with storage solution based on desktop class SSDs.)
I'm sure the newer eMMC storage is faster than what was offered with the CloverTrail based tablets. (Head down to the bottom of this page for performance numbers of the Asus T100 Transformer Book. Compare with the VivoTab Smart which is a CloverTrail based tablet.) But I doubt the improvements, if any, would be large enough to warrant a pleasant experience on a tablet running Windows 8.1. For example, last night I checked the CPU usage of my tablet while doing a lot of things. Even though the CPU usage didn't go past 50%, it still felt sluggish. Installing GIMP took so long that I let it install and went to sleep.
Just for reference, check out how the eMMC storage solution in my tablet performs compared to the Samsung 840 series SSD on my desktop PC.
Tablet
Desktop PC
What a difference! Especially when it comes to small files. I'm sure, even with the CloverTrail CPU inside my tablet, if it could be equipped with a decent SSD, I won't notice how slow the CPU is.
Looks like it cannot get any more trivial than this. Wouldn't just double clicking two workbooks (xls, xls files) work? Apparently, with all their wisdom, Microsoft have decided that people don't wanna see multiple Excel sheets. By default, all the workbooks will open in the same Window. This is applicable to Office 2007, 2010 and 2013 all it seems.
But especially when you have multiple monitors, you want to load them up in separate displays to make use of all the screen real estate you have. An ugly way of doing that is resizing the Excel window to span across both displays (you cannot Maximize it though) and then vertically splitting the workbooks so that one stays on the left hand side display and the other stays on then right hand side display.
But there is a better way to do it.
First, open one of the workbooks by double clicking the file. An Excel windows will be launched and the file will be opened in it.
Now, you should see the Excel window on the Taskbar. Right click on it and click "Microsoft Excel". That will open up a new window.
Now all you have to do it to either drag and drop the other workbook on to this new window or open that workbook via File -> Open.
That's it. Now you have the workbooks opened up in separate windows. You can extend the same method to open up many excel files in separate windows.
It's yet another blog post about my tablet woes. It's almost ready to be sent for repairs but there was one issue. I never mentioned to them (Dell support) that I had Windows 8.1 Preview installed on my tablet. While I don't think that is the cause of all the issues I've been having, especially the touch screen issue, there was a good chance they would put the blame on me if I mentioned it to them. They'll just say they cannot support Windows 8.1 especially on Preview state, and that I'm on my own. They are all the same. They never accept it as their fault. Neither do we, but hey, the customer is always right.
So as a last resort onmy end, I wanted to re-install Windows and see what will happen. I tried to boot off the bootable Windows 8 32bit USB stick that I just created but for some reason the POST screen never allowed me to change the boot device nor get into BIOS. Usually it shows a message saying press F2 to enter BIOS and press F12 for boot options. I don't know why it didn't show them.
Forgot to mention one thing though. Since I didn't have the touch screen working, I had to connect my G15 keyboard to the sole USB port on the tablet and plug in the mouse and the USB stick to the two USB ports on the keyboard. Thank goodness for these new gaming keyboards coming with USB ports. And mine isn't new either. I've had it for 4 years and I got it second hand too. But the darn thing only has USB1.1 ports so it was horrendously slow.
There was a problem with my native Administrator user account in Windows 7 x64 installation. I wanted to reset it but I didn't know how to do it. Usually you simply would migrate to a new account. But this is the native Administrator account, hence you cannot migrate it to another account.
I thought it I deleted the account folder from the disk, it would be automatically recreated (with default settings) upon next log in. So I created a new user account with admin privileges and logged into it. From there, I deleted the C:\Users\Administrator folder.
Instead of loading it up with default account details, it created a temporary profile which would be deleted when I logged off. That's not what I signed up for! The following is the error message I received upon logging in.
Your user profile was not loaded correctly! You have been logged on with a temporary profile. Changes you make to this profile will be lost when you log off. Please see the event log for details or contact your administrator.
But never fear. There is always a way. The following Knowledge Base article is written for Windows Vista, but it is applicable to Windows 7 as well. I bet it is applicable to Windows 8 too.
First thing I did after waking up today was checking if the Windows 8.1 Preview update was available to download. It sure was and I proceeded to install it on my tablet. The PC was doing a 24hr Prime95 stress test (increased it from 12 to 24) and I couldn't install it in the PC just yet.
So I searched for the 8.1 update and it took me to this Microsoft website. From there I had to download a small setup program which was required to modify the Windows Store app so that the update shows up on it. When I ran that setup file, it installed few thing and restarted Windows. Before showing the welcome screen, it did some changes to Windows like what it does after Windows Update installs some updates.
When I came back to the desktop, I was asked to go to the Windows Store to download the 8.1 Preview update. It was there and I continued with the update. It downloaded a rather large update file measuring 2GB, slowly over the Wi-Fi network and started to install it.
The first thing it did was to check whether the system was compatible. (WTF! They check for compatibility after I've wasted about an hour downloading the update? Which idiot came up with that design?) It found one compatibility issue. It was the Dell Data Access Protection software. Bloatware, it must be. The setup couldn't continue before I uninstalled it and dealt with it. The setup minimized to the system tray until I finished removing that software.
I believe you all know that there is something called Windows Blue coming out in a few months. I believe that the amount of changes in this upgrade will make it sit between a service pack and a completely new version of Windows.
Few days ago, a current build of Windows Blue leaked into the Internet. While Microsoft might show that they don't like the idea, in their hearts they know that it is free marketing for them. The Verge compiled a list of changes found in the leaked build in the form of a video.
So, it seems the changes are mostly, if not solely made for the Metro portion on the OS. Right now, that's what I really want them to do because I now have a tablet and some of deficiencies of Metro is killing the great tablet experience.
What else can Microsoft change/add in Windows Blue?
1. Ability to enable a more aggressive mode of auto-correcting, at lead when you are using the virtual keyboard. I don't understand why this should not be an option that the end user can choose for themselves in the first place. While the layout of the virtual keyboard, especially in the landscape view is great, the lackluster auto-correct functionality is not making me wanna use the keyboard too much. I'm not the only person having this problem. It is not as if Microsoft doesn't know how to implement proper auto-correct functionality because Windows Phone seems to do just fine in that area. Just like a dumb design goal it seems. (Edit: I've been writing a part of this blog post on my tablet and actually I'm not so mad about how autocorrect is working. But it seems that the contextual mistakes are not detected properly. For example, if I wanted to say "I'm not so mad..." but typed "I'm not domad...", I would expect it to correct it as "I'm not so mad..". But it doesn't fix it properly. It corrects the mistake as "I'm not do mad". Funny thing was that iOS fixed it as "I'm not Donald". Well, at least it came up with something that made sense. Not praising or blaming anyone, just saying.)
iTunes is such a badly designed app for Windows. Whenever you use the Home Sharing feature of it, you cannot shut down the PC without listening to its whine. There have been times when I have simply pressed the power button of the PC and went away, only to find out that the PC has not been shutdown. The shutdown process has been interrupted by iTunes. It drives me insane just to wait and see if the PC has been properly shutdown when I am in a hurry (that happens always) to go to work.
But there is always one thing you can turn to in situations like this: Windows Registry. There is a setting in the Windows Registry where once you enable it, the blocking tasks will be automatically terminated when you send the shutdown signal, after a specific time. It is not enabled by default because Microsoft doesn't know what your use-case is. You might actually need the PC not to be able to be turned off if you are running a certain looong task in the background like a video encode job or a rendering job which you might have forgotten that it is running - especially with these multicore CPUs. (Remember how it was like when you had single-core CPU doing video encode jobs? It would bog down the PC so much that it will never go unnoticed.)
The easiest thing to do is to copy the following code to notepad, save as a .reg file and run it. You can experiment with the timeout threshold. I have set 2500ms. A shorter timeout delay will shutdown the PC faster but the apps that are properly being terminated might crash and corrupt its files and longer timeout such as 5000ms will obviously slow down the shutdown.
Ever since Microsoft released Windows Vista, file deletion had been very slow in Windows Explorer. It was very noticeable when you were deleting a huge folder with hundreds of thousands of files.
I frequently encounter this problem at work. The XPS driver source itself is huge and for certain tests I have to check out multiple versions of the source. Ultimately you crowd up the hard drive with files that you don’t even want to refer again. Then there comes the day you have to clean up the junk because you are running out of space in the drive. Deleting files using the Windows Explorer will take forever. I usually did this while we were out for lunch.
But I was curious. There should be a faster way. And I found one, which is about 2 to 3 times faster than deleting them through Windows Explorer. But you lose the progress bar and the fancy animations.
