I noticed that the keys on my laptop were pretty dirty the other day. The heavily used ones have a nice brown stain in places, mostly from just skin oils, and normally I don't notice them, but it bugged me one afternoon, so I wanted to clean them.
How do I do it? I haven't ever really worried about it, not traveling as much with laptops as I have with this one, and not using them as much as I have in the last year with this one. It gets used almost every day, moves from the basement to the bedroom, and I wanted to be clean it up.
So I asked my Twitter community the question and got these suggestions:
I decided to try a few things and document it so hopefully someone else has an easier time. Here's a before picture, so you can see how things look.
(ignore the date, I didn’t set the date on my camera)
I then started with baby wipes. We keep a few around since they are handy to clean up, or wipe off kids' skin even at 8 years old! I turned off the machine and lightly wiped a few of the keys. As you can see, it seemed to clean off the keys pretty well. It didn't take much elbow grease, just a couple minutes of rubbing across them.
My next experiment was to try rubbing alcohol and Q-tips. A quick search of the bathroom netted me some supplies, and I started on the other keys. Here's the before:
and the after
I think that this worked as well as baby wipes, but it was definitely more effort. After a few minutes the colors was back to white, and the keys felt fine. The alcohol evaporated, and even the smell was gone quickly.
I declined to try Christy Leonard's solution of using the broom, and I cleaned up the keys enough to not worry about the distilled water and toothbrush. I’ll let someone else try those.
My suggestion if your keyboard is dirty? Use baby wipes. You can pick up a small travel pack cheap, and almost anywhere. You can throw them in your laptop bag, but unless they’re sealed well, they will dry out quickly.
I had my third monitor die recently and have been using just the 2 on my desk. However one of them is a little smaller, and so I've been struggling to see it off to the side of my desk. I'd really like to get a larger one, mostly because it's hard to see the smaller monitor that's a little further away.Yesterday I was in Wal-Mart, grabbing a couple groceries and some blank DVDs when I saw a Sanyo 32" LCD on sale for $350. Quite a bargain, and it's pretty large. On the spur of the moment, I decided to invest in my career and test one out as a PC monitor. I got it home, set it on my desk, after clearing things off, and plugged it in. My Windows 7 desktop detected it immediately, and let me set the maximum 780p resolution, which is 1300x768. That's a decentn resolution, and as you can see above, it makes things LARGE. Very cool, and I was excited at first. The monitor on the left is a 22" one that I really like. It's a Westinghouse and it works great for me. It's bright, and clear, and that's the issue. It's hard to see from the image, but the Sanyo LCD TV is much, much less bright than the monitor. I wasn't sure how much of a difference it makes, but it's a huge difference. It actually was a noticeable difference on my eyes in about an hour of using both monitors. As much as I love the large size, I can't use it for any length of time, especially with the bright 22" one next to it. So I'll return it today, and I'm going to grab another 23" one.
I was heading out on a trip to SQLSaturday #17 recently and decided that I wanted to try and travel with only the netbook. My laptop gets heavy, this was a short trip without the need for any audio or video, so it seemed like the perfect chance to try and survive with a small machine.
However in preparation, there were a few things I wanted to bring with me.
I used SQL Server to check things and answer questions, so it’s nice to have a copy of the developer edition with me. I also use One Note extensively for my writings and with the Live Mesh synchronization I have, this works well. So I downloaded the software from MSDN and got ready to install it. Since I need SQL Server for my laptop (it has 2005 only), I decided to burn a DVD of the .iso. I’m sure there are other ways to do this, but this was the simplest for me.
I put the SQL Server 2008 DVD in my laptop, shared the drive from the networking and sharing center, and then connected from the netbook. It was very simple, with me typing “\\Qosmio\DVD” in the RUN box of the start menu. That brought up a credentials box and when I entered my account and password for the laptop, I was connected to the DVD drive. Qosmio is the name of my laptop and I had shared the DVD drive as “DVD.”
I started setup and immediately it asked to download an updated .NET framework. I ran that and then rebooted, reconnecting to the DVD when I was done. The SQL Server installation didn’t detect any warnings or issues, and I selected the database engine, tools, SSRS, SSIS, and BIDS. I started the installation and lay in bed, netbook on my chest, laptop next to me, watching TV and the installation alternately.
Let me say this was incredibly slow, and after 30 minutes, even though I was seeing slow progress, I decided not to wait any longer. I put both machines on the dresser and ignored them until the next morning. When I woke up the installation was finished and I had SQL Server running on the netbook.
After the first SSMS startup, subsequent startups took about 7 seconds, slightly slower than the desktop, but not by much. The intellisense seems to work quickly enough for me, and while my standard ALT-X for executing a query is awkward, the machine works fine. I think it would work well for demos that don’t need a lot of processing power or have a lot of rows to return.
I also decided to install OneNote, which is part of Office 2007. I was concerned about disk space, and was thinking to just install this one item, Following the same procedure as above with the Office DVD, I connected and ran setup. When it asked for the DVD key, I add to eject the DVD to read the key, and once it was entered, Office gave an error that it couldn’t read setup. Apparently as soon as you get the last digit in the key entered, it looks to move forward. I closed the drawer and hit “retry” and things proceeded. I checked the installation without any other products, and then with Excel and Word added back in. The disk space was negligible, maybe 200MB, so I decided to include those two products as well.
I left it running, expecting a slow install after SQL, but when I came back about 30 minutes, it was done. I fired up OneNote, pointed it to my Live Mesh One Note folder and it loaded up all my current editorials. I haven’t used Word or Excel much, but they’re there if required.
Right now I have 4.7GB free out of 15.2GB on my SSD., I was concerned about space, but most of the things I deal with are small documents, and except for databases that are < 1GB, I should be fine. I have installed on this machine:
This is about everything I need. I also have drivers for an external USB device. Things are working well, so I’m going to mess with the device and try to get Windows 7 on it next week after the RTM is available.
The trip down to Baton Rouge had me presenting a non-technical presentation. I used the external USB device from Tritton Technologies and it worked great. I connected right in and I had an image on the screen. I even edited the presentation a little the night before in my hotel, moving a couple slides around, and it worked great.
During the trip I answered email on Webmail, wrote some blog posts with Live Writer, and even edited a few things in One Note. The space savings was great, and it was fantastic to have a greater battery life. I took notes in notepad and Live Writer during sessions, and the small device worked out well on a desk and on my lap.
A successful trip, and I’m looking forward to more of them with just this small device.
I have my weekly conference call today, and in trying to get the webcam to work, it appears to be locked up with the manufacturer's software. Usually this happens and I reboot, and it will free up. Sometimes two reboots.
However the laptop has been acting up. Even with the new drive, if I reboot it freezes up during the POST screen, getting about 2/3 of the way through and then stopping. I might have to power down and up 10 or 15 times to get it to boot. I'm sure one of these days it won't ever boot.
While I need to get a call in to Toshiba and see what they can do, I'm also scared to reboot today. So no webcam for the call.
I'm searching for a new laptop bag. After getting a backpack from Microsoft and using it on a few trips, I realize that it won't work. Since I know there are a few other people looking for them, I commissioned a review on a Maxpedition bag from the Scary DBA. I'm looking forward to seeing what he thinks of that one.
In any case, when I was trying to stuff things into my bag and struggling. So I unpacked the bag and then took stock of what I had in there. My list of things:
Wow!
I was actually stunned by how much crap I was carrying around. No wonder I didn't like carrying the backpack. I can cut down a touch of this stuff, but I'm missing my camcorder, which I'll need at PASS along with a microphone.
I definitely think that I need to consider a rolling bag of some sort.
Don't look for all this at SQL Saturday #17. I'll be there with just the netbook, leaving the 15" laptop at home.
With my hard drive failing in the laptop recently, I scrambled to do something. I was on the road, and didn't have a lot of choices, especially as I was in a weird place. I was on vacation, and I didn't have super immediate needs, but I did have a commitment to speak on behalf of SQLServerCentral at the Richmond SQL Server and .NET Users Groups.
So I did a few things. I grabbed a netbook, which would give me short term help, and also I tried another solution I'd read about. I got a Black Widow, external SATA dock and a copy of Acronis True Image Home version along with a new SATA drive. I managed to get my laptop to boot, and then copied off the latest versions of my documents to an external drive.
NOTE and WARNING: Your hard drive will fail at some point. Make sure you back things up. A cheap, 1TB external USB drive costs about US$200. Get one, and periodically copy things off. I'd done this before my trip, but I was 4 days late in changes to a few things. I was lucky I could get the latest versions of things.
Once I was sure things were working, I took a deep breath. At this point I didn't see the external USB drive because it was completely blank. The hardware showed up, but no guarantees there was a drive there. I probably could have tested it somehow, but I was pressed for time with family calling for things. So I inserted the Acronis CD in the drive and booted to it.
When it starts, it's a GUI, and it's slow. It's loading off CD, and that gives you new appreciation for how well things work off a disk drive.
It's mainly a backup program and gives you lots of options. I had to move down to the clone disk option. The guy at Best Buy said I'd want to walk through the advanced selections to choose the new size of the partition. My old drive was 160GB and the new one was 320GB. I could live with two partitions on the new drive, but I've prefer one.
So I walked through, choosing the source disk and target disk, setting the partition to be the whole disc. Read carefully as the options were slightly confusing to me. I managed to get this right, and things are confirmed in your settings.
My screen didn't look like this one above, as I'd set one large partition for the target drive.
Once I started it, I had a couple graphs on the screen showing progress. The estimated time on my Qosmio F40, dual core 2.2GHz machine with SATA drives, was about 3 hours. So I moved on with vacation, slightly worried about it. I returned late that night, but was afraid to make the switch at that time. I rebooted the laptop, and it was working, so I left things alone. Well, that and I didn't have a screwdriver to work on the laptop. I packed up the new drive in it's plastic casing and went to bed. I had an early 100 mile drive down to Richmond the next day.
When I got time in the afternoon to try things, I removed the drive from the laptop with it's case and then put the new drive in the casing. I slipped it back in the slot at the front of my laptop and rebooted to find ...
The Acronis CD program starting.
I was confused, but then I realized that it was booting from CD. I switched the drives back, which was a slow process. And the same result, which didn't surprise me as the drive was failing. So, I left things alone, grabbed the netbook and a copy of the presentation on flash drive, and went to talk. I'm glad I did that as I had issues with the netbook as well.
When I returned, I opened the laptop and looked at it awhile. I mentally went through the steps and realized I'd inserted the drives upside down. I quickly reversed the original drive, praying that it hadn't damaged the connectors, and it worked. The SATA connection looks fairly symmetrical, so that's good. I then removed the drive, changed out the old for the new in the case and re-inserted it, and I had my laptop back, quicker, and with an extra 150GB of space.
Since then I've been using the new drive and it has performed flawlessly. All of my stuff works, the settings, the configuration, security, everything is as it was. I was skeptical that this would work, thinking there might be some system partitions or things, but the Acronis software has run very well. If you need a backup of your hard drive, want to put in a larger one, or have a drive failing, I highly recommend this process. My cost:
For a total of US $190. That's much cheaper than a new laptop, and it's certainly worth the time it saved me in rebuilding a new drive and installing things. I'm actually tempted to make an image of this hard drive periodically rather than back things up to ensure that I can recover if something happens.
I arrived in Richmond, VA this morning earlier than expected. I was meeting a few people and things were pushed back, so I had the chance to go by Best Buy and find a USB->VGA adapter. Apparently they don’t have the HP VGA cable, so I got this adapter instead.
I opened the box to find the device, and a CD. That’s interesting because the netbook doesn’t have a CD drive. I’d debated about grabbing an external DVD drive when I was in the store, but my bag is heavy enough. With my laptop, power adapter, extra USB disk drive, and now the netbook it feels like I’m carrying quite a load.
So how to get this working? Luckily I had an idea. I hit the local Starbucks and then connected to the web, downloading drivers from Tritton Technologies. One annoying thing was once I’d gotten to the site, they list a number of models, all of which look alike. I had the device with me, but not the box, and there as no model number printed on the device. A serial number, but that didn’t help. Grrrrr.
I had to go back to the car, look at the box, and then download the driver. I suspected that there was one driver for all models, but I hate trying to uninstall drivers. I’m still a little gunshy after all these years working with Windows.
Once that was done, I wrote a couple blogs, including this blog on the device. Some impressions:
I’ll have more impressions over the next few weeks as I use this and compare it with my laptop.
Unpacking the netbook was pretty simple. Open it, grab the large one page poster, and then the netbook. There were basically 3 steps. I'd completed one by removing the netbook. Step two was to snap in the battery, and then step 3 was to connect power. I guess step 4 was to turn it on, which I did.
It has a power brick, which is annoying for a small device, but there's not much you can do since they are trying to keep the device itself so small. Power and wireless on/off are on the front, connections on both sides. They even include a USB snap in cover for that port.
Turning it on starts the Windows XP setup, which I haven't seen in years. Even with a 16GB SSD, it was surprisingly slow. I think that's just XP setup, which was slow. I turned to my laptop, trying to ensure I had things working there while that device booted. I knew it had booted since I had a nice Yanni/New-agey music track playing in the background. I looked over there, and sure enough it was waiting for me to choose the XP setup options (English, etc.). I walked through the setup, including giving it a name. I chose "Tiny" since that's what it is. I'm tired of having names like "desktop", "Steve_Laptop", so I'm following Jerry Pournelle and giving my machines nice names.
After that happened, the machine rebooted, which was noticeably faster, and I was ready to go. I connected to the hotel's wireless network and I was online.
Now time to experiment with some work.
It was not what I expected. When I was leaving for a run this morning, I decided to apply an update to Vista and let it reboot, thinking I'd defragment the drive when I returned. It was acting funny and running slow, so this seemed like a good idea to me.
I got back from the run, went to sync my Nike + run and noticed the machine was off, so I pressed power and then sat down to stretch with water thinking this would take some time. After I was done, I went to check email and noticed that the laptop was still stuck on the POST screen, with the progress bar about 2/3 of the way across.
Uh oh.
This had happened last week, just before we left, and it had me worried. I thought the hard drive had failed, but when I powered down, left it for 10 minutes, and powered up, it seemed to work fine. I thought I'd do that here. After 10 tries, I was seriously worried.
My first thought was Holy Sh*t! Here I am, on vacation, 1700 miles from home, I got that from a sign nearby :), and I have a presentation to do tomorrow. I don't even have the presentation on a USB key, because well, I'm an idiot. I do have it up on Live Mesh, so I could get it, but I needed to work on it. I also had some stuff on a USB drive, but I am by no means sure I have most of my stuff from the drive.
So I sat for a few minutes and thought about it. My best bet was probably to go get a netbook. I've been thinking about it, and it would be a good solution for a few days. I should have a service contract with Toshiba (this machine is a Qosmio F45), but they won't likely get anything done before I get home, and I have all the 411 at home, and I'm leaving for Richmond tomorrow, then back here Fri night and flying home Sat.
Luckily I have the amazing T-Mobile G1 phone with 3G and I could look up the local Best Buy. I found one on the S side of Baltimore, about 10 mi away, so I showered and packed up. Just before leaving I tried the laptop again, and success! It booted, so I hooked up my USB drive and copied over all documents, pictures, downloads, and videos to the external drive. At least I have a copy of everything. Then it was off to Best Buy.
My purchases were:
I'd asked the Geek Squad person in the store, since I knew there were ways to clone a disk drive, and he pointed me in this direction. I can use the Black Widow dock with any SATA drive, 3.5" or 2.5" and that will let me hook both drives to my laptop. From there I can boot the Acronis software and then clone my 160GB drive onto the 320GB one. Hopefully with one partition, but in any case, I'll have a working (fingers crossed) laptop.
Since I wasn't confident, and I could use a traveling machine that can be low power for presentations, the HP will come in handy. Once I have the laptop squared away, I think I'll move to Windows 7 and see how that does.
I'm afraid to clone the drive right now since I need to get a few things done, but I'll try it later and see where I come out.
The USB not in Hyper-V thing is annoying. It actually made me stop and consider my alternatives for a desktop. I have 8GB and want to use it, so I'm going 64-bit. The question is which OS. As I see it, I have a few choices:
I've given each of these some thoughts below.
In looking over these alternatives, I'll discard Windows XP 64. I want to move forward, and this appears to be a flaky 64-bit, early alternative OS. Missing drivers, various issues, and it's old. I'll need to leave it soon, drivers aren't being written for it, etc.
I run Vista Ultimate on my laptop, and while it's OK, it's a pig, and overall I think it's a small POS. Not a big, honking, steaming, pile, but a small one. I don't like it, what little I've seen of Windows 7 makes me think it's better, and so this is my last choice. Actually after going back to XP. I still have a 5GB file on my Vista laptop I can't delete. It "calculates" for at least 20 minutes before I give up.
W2K8 is my current choice. It's installed and I'm partially into driver set up. However the Hyper-V not supporting USB makes me question Hyper-V. And if I'm not using Hyper-V, why use Windows server? Win 7 starts to make sense (or Linux).
Windows 7 is interesting. I hear wonderful things about it, from a number of people that have just moved to it as their primary OS. It's not often that beta software from MS is baked. SQL 7 was, a few others, and this seems like it's there. I just get this guy feeling from the people I know running it and I am very, very tempted to do this. Once I have a desktop, this will likely go on my laptop, so I'll have a consistent environment.
There is some concern about the upgrade to RTM, but a few people have moved from the beta to RC using the Windows Easy Transfer, which gives me confidence in moving later.
Joe Webb, a fellow SQL Server MVP, runs Ubuntu on his laptop. I saw this last year at a conference and was intrigued by it. He loves it, and it's cool looking. He seems very productive and that's a priority for me. He doesn't appear to have to mess with it a lot from my talks with him, and that's what I want as a host OS. Something that just works.
On my laptop, I think I'd just go with Joe's setup and VMWare. However on my desktop the issue is that I run 3 monitors and I'd like to continue doing that. In a few searches, numerous people have had issues getting multiple monitors working on Linux and they jump through some hoops. I haven't found anyone running 3 or 4 monitors, and I don't want to be the guinea pig on this one. The last thing I need is to document a 3 monitor setup on Ubuntu and have all the Linux kids emailing me with questions.
The more I think about this one, the more I am thinking that either VMWare or Virtual Server is the best choice. Why? One of the things I've done, and would like to continue to do, is move a VM from my desktop to my laptop as needed, usually on some USB drive. This sounds like I can't necessarily move them around. This blog post says also that Virtual Server doesn't support 64-bit images.
If that's the case, then it seems like VMWare is my best option. I get one free license for being an MVP. I am happy to buy a 2nd if that works for me. The alternative is to not move VMs around.
That's a consideration, especially as I don't do it a lot, and potentially I could set up some other way to do this.
The 64-bit thing is definitely something I want since I get 64-bit stuff to test at times, and I'm sure I'll get more as time goes on. So I want to be sure that I am Hyper-V or VMware.
What do I do? I'm really not sure. I think that Ubuntu, Vista, and XP are out. So do I go with Win 7 as a workstation or W2K8? I think for now I'll go with Hyper-V and W2K8 since it's already installed and it's not any worse than Win 7 in my mind. The USB thing I can deal with, and worse case, since my stuff is backed up with LiveMesh (which works with Windows 7), I can easily rebuild and move things if needed.
I have a new machine, albeit one with a bad video card, running Windows 2008 Server R2 with Hyper-V. My plan was to use this as my workstation and run Hyper-V for various things, SQL Server, Visual Studio, as a browsing desktop, etc.
I wrote recently about finding a few blogs that convinced me this might work when looking for a new workstation. I decided to put together a few other links that contain information about using Windows 2008 in that mode.
This blog (Using Windows 2008 as a Super Workstation) is from someone at MSDN, and has some good hints. I still need to update drivers, and I am moving one video card from my old machine to the new one while waiting on a replacement from the vendor.
I also found this site: http://www.win2008workstation.com. It's a blog with lots of information to make your W2K8 server run smoother as a workstation.
And one more: How to convert your Windows Server 2008...
Most of this info is from IT guys that are doing development. So they are looking for high performance, VM capabilities for separation of issues, and general work, work.
HOWEVER, I haven't seen a lot from people on using some of the workstation like things like cameras, iPods, ec. I did verify there is a 64 bit version of iTunes, which I had planned to drop in a VM.
However as I've been reading more about setting up Hyper-V, I found this wonderful note that VMs in Hyper-V don't support USB peripherals. I've seen lots of blogs, like this one, that talk about a USB over IP, and I might go to that, but for now I might run iTunes in the host and keep other stuff in VMs.
I think this is a huge mistake by Microsoft. I know lots of Hyper-V is for servers, but there are plenty of people that will want to put this on desktops, AKA developers, and they like gadgets. Part of the purpose of a VM is to separate out things that might interrupt your work, like gadgets.
I'm hoping that MS will fix this, but for now it has me second guessing W2K8 as a desktop.
I had the video card go bad in my new desktop, so I spent a few minutes rolling back to the old one, only to find networking extremely slow. It took, literally, about 5 minutes to open Google's home page, slowly bringing down data, despite the connection saying it was 100mbps.I checked Tia's machine, and my laptop, all running wirelessly, and they were fine. Since the wired cable I have runs up and over a door, making a new one isn't a simple project. I could do it, but it wasn't something I wanted to do on a Sunday morning.So I grabbed a Belkin Wireless-N USB adapter. I'd gotten one for about $40 when Circuit City closed (one of the very few bargains) and it was going to be used in the basement. Instead I dropped it into my new Belkin USB hub (feels like a Belkin ad, huh?) and it connected right away, all 270Mbps of it!I was glad I had that handy as it saved quite a bit of hassle. Now I need to decide how to handle moving forward with the desktop.
