For Most People; It's "Desktop Replacement"

I'm a pragmatist. Back when I was single, you'd never catch me darkening the never locked doors of Walmart. A lot of that has to do with my solidly Asian upbringing which raised me on German cameras, Swiss watches, and British clothing. But, over time, Walmart changed and so did I. Marriage, and children has shaped me into someone who simply does what needs to be done and use whatever will do the job with little regard to pedigree. There are however a few areas that my little side-business affords me relatively high-end equipment. And of course, that means in my hobbies of photography, computers and A/V equipment, I use brands such as Nikon, ThinkPad, and KEF. This doesn't keep me from recognizing the realities of how technologies fit into "regular" peoples' lives though. 

For most people; this is their reality where computers are concerned. They just need something that works and hopefully will last past it's well beyond it's 1 year warranty period. The price of these things are typically somewhere between $400 and $600. Most people are drawn in by ads that start with the magic number of "3". Unfortunately they rarely look closely at the details and that the other two numbers typically put them far closer to the far less comfortable "4", so by the time they get out of the store, they are quite often way too close to the dark and sinister "5" number! Then they notice that the anti-virus is only a 60 Day trial and the included Micro$oft Works isn't compatible with Office. Even worse, that M$ Office listed on the box is only for a 30 Day trial. So, $100-150 later, they are an ambivalent owner of a machine that costs them close to $600 and will probably not last past it's 3rd year. But that's OK.

What's their options? One of these? They're OK sitting in the corner of the family room, but kind of hard to balance on your lap, huh? Which is where the concept of the "Desktop Replacement" came into existence. In actuality they were already around. 

All the way back to the days when Adam Osborne created this monster, the handwriting was on the wall.

Even better, when Bill Moggridge adapted the flat Sharp panel technology into the Grid computer of 1982 at a smokin' $8000....minimum. I actually have one of these Grid cases in my closet. Kinda cool.

The days of the desktop was numbered. Really the concept of the desktop wasn't for home users anyway. Other than "enthusiast", who really wants to open up a computer anyway. Plus the ultimate arbiter of all things home oriented would throw their weight into the fray and the outcome would be academic. When something much smaller, which could be folded up and put away (never mind that no one ever puts them "away") is an option, what do you think your wife will choose to buy? So, the end of the desktop as we know it was just a matter of waiting this laptops became cost effective enough to be a viable option. That number was roughly $1000 (retail). At that point; the laptop computer became a "commodity", Walmart started carrying (and selling) them in bulk and the war was over. It completely didn't matter that a device made to be that much smaller, generating that much heat, that was supposed to sell for that amount, ultimately meant a very cheaply made product! So what if it dies in 2-3 years!?! We'll just buy another!

Thus was born "Black Friday", Green Wednesday, Purple Thursday; it simple doesn't matter anymore. Of course, it wasn't always this way. I remember ordering $2500 for mid-line ThinkPads and $4500 for high-end ones!

"Normal" run-of-the-mill laptops such as this cost around $2000, and couldn't do much of anything compared to full-blown desktops that everyone bought which came complete with CD-ROMs, capacious 340Mb hard drives and huge 15" VGA (640 x 480) tube monitors! 

Laptop computers were stuff of super-spies, like this IBM ThinkPad 701 (Butterfly) used by the bad guys in the 1996 Mission Impossible. You remember; the one where Tom Cruise breaks into the CIA to hack an "unhackable" computer and steals the secrets on an unheard-of Magneto-Optical disk? This $5000+ computer was considered so cool, it was even used in the "Golden Eye" James Bond movie as well! 

Generally you can tell where a product fits in the market by the cost of the the accessories surrounding it. In those pre-2000 days, if you were cool enough to have a laptop, it might very well end up in a Zero Halliburton briefcase (or it can hold stacks of money or bags of cocaine...your choice), or this specially "fitted" leather briefcase by some Italian name I can't pronounce correctly. Not the space of the Magneto-Optical drive so you can read your stolen secrets from the CIA. Now, sometimes people bring me my technological patients in (appropriately) Walmart bags!

But today, the "laptop" computer is the province of soccer moms and part-time ministers like my friend Tony who owns the Gateway NV78 so that can get a little bit of "work" done while he's watching TV. 

Recently, while doing a some work on it, I was really impressed with it's capability. The 17" screen has about the same resolution of the typical 19" desktop screen you can pick up from Best Buy or any other place, and it's rather large chassis easily fits a full-sized keyboard complete with a number keypad. To my surprise, when I opened it up to look at what turn out to be a 320Gb hard drive, there was space for a second one down there as well! Wow, if the buyer wanted to, he/she could put two commonly available 1Tb drives in there and turn this machine into quite a storehouse! Now the build quality pretty much stinks, but it looks good. Of course, you take something that cost $5000 and cut more than $4000 from that ......you can imagine what happened. Technological advances can only do so much. Costs have been cut so much; they can't be made in the U.S. and Japan any more, hence "Made in China". Of course, profit has been slashed to the bone, but ultimately the killer has been build quality. These things, can and do break on a very regular basis. And so exists the current state of modern technology.



 

Technological Carpe Diem

I'm a terrible person! I had an opportunity so I dump the "love of my life" for another......the X300 for an X301. This is what happened. I had a "contract" in hand for a "new" laptop from one of my old customers (repeat business is awesome). She had just emailed me "out of the blue", stating that she's ready for another computer. The ThinkPad R52 that I sold her 4-5 years ago has been great, but now ready for an updated machine since she's about to start a new degree program this summer. Her needs were the same as before ("Office" type apps, Internet, and a little light photo editing), but she just needed this machine to operate the newer OS (Windows 7, which is what she has at work) and an updated version of Office ....and she had a $300 budget. All that sounded very much like what I do on my X300 which these days sells in the $250 range on a regular basis. So I showed her my machine, which I had upgraded to 4Gb of RAM and a 128Gb SSD vs. the original 2Gb of RAM and 64Gb SSD. We agreed on $285, cleaned up, reloaded with Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, MS Office 2010 Professional, and ready to go.

So, this is where the Frugal Propellerhead part comes into play. Now, that I knew I had $285 to work with, I needed to find a replacement for the X300. If you've read this blog for any amount of time, you've probably guessed that I've been researching for the possibility of this situation for some time now. First, I didn't just pull the selling price out of my hip pocket. I knew that the X300 routinely sell for somewhere between $200-300, and that's for a "stock" version with either 2 or 4Gb of RAM and a 64Gb SSD (the 128Gb wasn't available at the time it was introduced). So, an upgraded one like mine would be at the top of the range and that's not including Windows 7 OS much less MS Office. So I knew even if my buyer checked on the pricing, I'd keep my reputation as offering a good product at a good price intact. Secondly, I also knew that I could find X301s selling for between $250 and $350. Therefore, if I'm lucky, or good, then I should be able to buy my replacement for around my X300 selling price.

As it turns out; I was lucky AND good. Last week, I was watching a handful of the X301s on eBay of which I quickly narrowed field down to two likely targets. They both had 4Gb of RAM. One had a 128Gb SSD, but the other seemed to be nicer (it's usually hard to tell from eBay photographs). Besides, I had an almost new 128Gb SSD sitting in a drawer. As luck would have it, I missed on the first (128Gb SSD) which sold for about $230, but didn't feel too bad since the second one didn't appear to have many bidders and it ended at an awkward time of the afternoon on a weekday when most people would be at work. It was at something like $185 when I entered a max bid $235 and won it at $200 even! I'm betting that one of the issues was that the seller set the shipping at a rather high $30, but at $230 total, I didn't much care. I got the machine I wanted at a great price.I upgraded and made $55 in the process! The shocker was when I opened the box and found an almost pristine laptop. 

Why did I go through the trouble of all that work to upgrade to a machine that's basically just like the old one? Other than the fact that's it's newer, more powerful while running cooler; it takes DDR3 RAM. That means I can upgrade to 8Gb for less than half the cost of doing it with DDR2 that the X300 takes. Oh...... and I can't afford the X1 Carbon......yet.......

Which leads us to the history lesson. Other than my love for ThinkPads, I love ultra portables. Above you see a stack of them. Starting at the top, you have the PC110, then the 235, 240, the S30, the X301 and finally, the X1 on the bottom. Over the years you can see that they've basically taken the same volume and kind of Pizza-dough'd-it. Actually, only 3 of the 6 have been available here in North America, with the other 3 being "Japan Only" models, but you get the idea. 

I love undersized laptops. It goes back to the first one I ever owned; the great IBM ThinkPad 701 "Butterfly". You know a design is great when it receives a name.....and when it's immediately ensconced in the Museum of Modern Art! That was only the beginning of this obsession.

It was so bad, I even owned the weird "ugly duckling" twins, the ThinkPad 500, and 510c which were really not very good computers but they were fun .....and small.

Some years later when I was already in the mid-sized ThinkPad stage of my computing life with the T2x series, I acquired a 240e through a trade. It was cool, and small (compare it to the FDD that it's attached to), but seriously underpowered by that time.

However you can see by comparison to some of the other machines of that era, how small it really was.

Then came the "X" rated part of my ThinkPad life: beginning with the X20 (that you see depicted here attached to it's "Ultrabase") which was a work acquisition for departmental travel. Over time, I'd own most of the models in that series including the X21, X22, X30, and two X31s, the last of which is still sitting under my desk. In the more modern idiom, I currently have my daughter using an X61.

Of course, ThinkPads don't have a monopoly on ultra portable innovation. There's the amazing Fujitsu "U" Series that are smartphone sized, and Apple with the iconic Macbook "Air" which just beat the X300 to market. However, I'd have to say that probably the company that got there first, with the least (?) is Sony with the X505! This amazing computer came to market almost 5 years before the similar, was thinner than Air (can you say that?) by quite a bit, and essentially had no competitors in the market.

As for me though; I'm not quite ready to give up the admittedly, rarely used optical drive. This in combination with the "must haves" of the famous ThinkPad TrackPoint and other features such as high resolution display, and it's portability make the X301 the right Ultra Portable for me. Well, and a for profit trade-out doesn't hurt either!

 

Office Monsters!

 

No, I don't mean that weird guy in the cubicle down the corridor; I mean Giant Monster "Laptops". If you're not acquainted with names such as AVA Direct, Eurocom, Falcon Northwest, and other builders of custom "gaming" notebooks, then this will be something new for you. Remember this name: Clevo. That's it.....just Clevo. This company pretty much is the driving force behind all the various esoteric gaming laptop computer companies all these years, and even the almighty Alienware before that kill-joy Dell swooped in and bought them out.

For years, this little know Taiwanese company has been stuffing essentially desktop hardware into what could loosely be called laptop computers. I say that because the result has generally been north of 10 pounds and with the giant power bricks (literally the size and weight of a real brick), they often push the 15 pound barrier. 

Some of you might remember my little ill-fated foray into the gaming computer world for my son that resulted in the selling off of the modified Clevo, and Alienware parts machines. Although I got my money back out of them, but didn't accomplish what I set out to do, and I still have a bit of a fixation on these giants. In the time from when I was dabbling with these oddities, till the present, things have gone just a wee bit crazy.

 

That's three hard drives depicted in the D900f in the upper picture and that's FOUR fans in the chassis of the new X7200 in the lower picture! That's one for the CPU, one for the chipset and one each for the two GPUs. It's ridiculous, but you gotta love 'em for their shear audacity! 

Meanwhile, as all this was coming to pass on the "portable" gaming front, the "Big Boys" tried to take big mainstream. Dell was first "out the gate" with the Inspiron XPS M2010 ... which, with it's 20" screen was so big; it was it's own case.....complete with handle. 

Of course, HP simply can't allow Dell to do much of anything that it didn't have an answer for; so behold the Hewlett/Packard HDX "Dragon"....with a deck so big they put a well for a remote in it! 

Now, conceptually, the idea was for these things to be "media" PCs with every A/V bell and whistle under the sun. Never mind that nobody wanted to sit in front of a 20" LCD, vs. attaching a media PC to a really big (40" plus) monitor for their A/V enjoyment. Everybody needed to jump on the bandwagon! Here you see one of the Samsung behemouths complete with requisite attractive Korea model that probably couldn't even lift this thing! In the end, it was basically an interlude in the PC business and these things have pretty much gone away. 

So; what are we here to talk about after all that "rabbit chasing"? The real "monster" of course. Luckily, not the "River Monster" variety which is my wife's current TV show obsession! No, this one is pure ThinkPad. I can't imagine Lenovo being really wild about this concept, which is why it's been killed off fairly quickly after 2 models; W700, and W701. What you see here is the W700DS, standing for dual screen, obviously (more on that later).

 

Here's the deal on these oddities. Five years ago, in 2008, Lenovo released the first of the "W" line, W700, and W500 to act as replacements for the "p" (workstation) versions of the "T" line. The W5xx exists to this day, is pretty normal and therefore uninteresting. Also, it's not nearly big enough to qualify for the "monster" label anyway. Conceptually, the W7xx machines were supposed to do everything that a desktop machine would do, but have an attached monitor and be closed up and moved (sort of). 

 

One of it's more interesting ideas was to make it a photographer's mobile digital darkroom, complete with automated color calibration for the monitor and an optional built-in Wacom digitizer pad complete with an active pen tucked away in a silo in the side of the machine. 

To give you an idea of how large it actually is; that's an X300 (13.3" screen) it's next to in the upper image and an X61 (12.1" screen) sitting in it's "lap" in the lower image. Inside the giant chassis are 2 hard drive bays capable of taking and configuring two hard drives into a RAID set. 

It's so big, that even the "Mini-Dock" made for it is big! The CPUs in them can range from the fastest of the Core2Duo series to the Core i7 processors. The last of the models could take powerful nVidia Quattro GPUs and up to 16Gb of DDR3 RAM. The 17" screen can range from 1440 x 900 all the way up to 1920 x 1200, plus a 10.6" pullout screen of 1280 x 768 resolution. Fully equipped, it was upwards of 11 pounds and cost in excess of $5500! Surfice to say, I'd love to have one. Over the years I've tried a number of times to develop a powerful "mobile workstation", beginning with the T4x series, then Z61m, and now T6x machines. However, I've never been fully happy with the results and now that the lower end of the W700s have dropped into the sub-$500 range, they are starting to get my attention. 

 

Maybe, like the "River Monsters" guy, I can land one for myself someday. But then again, there's the really cool Asus G73.....

A Case for My Bag Addiction

OK, my little obsession is out! My wife called it the other day when she came home and asked me about the big "rollie" case in the garage. I said that it was the case I kept at school in case I needed to bring home lots of stuff. She laughed and said, that bags/cases must be my little addiction. Of course, we Chinese are well known for our little intricate boxes and all manner of fitted cases, etc. For my part, I've always been compulsive about using the correct bag or case for the task when it comes to my cameras, or portable computer equipment. Over the years, despite my best efforts to pare down, I have quite a collection of them stashed away. 

I'll have to level some blame/excuse on has become a favorite source of them in the last couple of years. And that's Goodwill. REALLY; Goodwill! It started some time ago when we decided that we were better off donating our stuff instead of accumulating it for a garage sale. So on occasion when I was tasked with dropping off, I'd go inside and look around as well as drop off the bags of kids clothes, toys, old computer parts, what have you. And over the years have found all manner of useful items cheap, like cassette decks for $8, iPod dock/clock radio for Katie or $6 to cases and bags. 

Yes, Goodwill is an awesome source of high-end computer and camera bags. I learned many years ago, that computer cases/bags don't hold their value; no matter how much you paid for that Brenthaven or Port bag that was $100-150 when you checked that box while ordering that new laptop. They can regularly be found on eBay for less than it costs to ship it; somewhere in the sub-$20 range. On top of that, they are often "lifetime" guarantee items, so if you want, you can send it back and get a new one if that zipper breaks! But, even better, they can be found pretty regularly at Goodwill for about $6 if you know what you are looking for and patiently go through their piles of old luggage that people donate. Another source is companies who handle surplus computing equipment. When they take laptops "off lease" or "surplus" they often come with the cases that were originally issued with the computer. Sometimes they haven't ever been used since many of those laptops were essentially used as a desktop their entire service life. If you find those places, they're be large bins of Dell, HP, Port, etc. cases for about $15-20 each. A good tip is to find the one you like best, then swap the strap around till you find the one of those you like best as well. The two are rarely one and the same, AND they pretty much all clip on the same way. Also, make sure you check to see that they one you want has all the padding and misc. accessory bags that supposed to come with it. These places (as with Goodwill), couldn't case less on the brand of the case. They are all priced the same. 

Recently I was able to make the switch from a ThinkPad backpack to a very nice Timbuk2 Messenger bag courtesy of Goodwill for $6. They also make an insert for this bag to turn it into a stealth camera case that's far less likely to be targeted for theft versus a $60 case from Best Buy emblazoned with a Nikon or Canon logo! Mine has a bonus of a padded laptop/tablet section that's separately access in the back. 

A few years ago, I needed something special when we were going to Alaska. After a lot of searching, I found that the Adventure series from Tamrac was perfect for a single bag that carried everything onto a plane. On a day-to-day shooting basis, I needed something that not only could stay our of the way on my back, but quickly slide around so I could get out equipment. That was the sling style Velocity 8. Although neither came from Goodwill, I was able to get them at good prices (about 50% of retail) from Amazon and eBay respectively. 

 

A couple of weeks ago, I found an "As Is" Halliburton 105 case on eBay for about $30 after shipping. After I get replacement latches and foam for it, I'll use it to store equipment here at home so that I can have ready access to it. The back story behind these Zero Halliburton cases is really pretty interesting. Many years ago, THE Halliburton company of Texas/Oklahoma oilfield fame decided that they needed to have cases that could withstands the rigors of their work environment and keep their sensitive equipment safe. So they started making their own cases. They were so impressive that Zero corporation bought out that division and has continued to make the cases every since. These are arguably the most coveted and copied cases in history used by everyone from field engineers, to photographers, to drug lords, to the mythical James Bond, to the most famous of all......the "nuclear football" that travels with the President of the United States. 

One of my favorite eBay scores was this backpack. It's one of the cases made for Lenovo specifically for the ThinkPad line of laptops. A few years ago, my wife injured her knee right before school started. As an elementary school teacher, she carried all manner of stuff with her back and forth on a daily basis. On crutches for the better part of 2 months, she needed a backpack style case which had the capability to stow a computer safely as well. So I went looking on eBay. One of the surplus outfits that I use on a regular basis out of Pennsylvania had a few of these things that were selling cheap. I mean cheap, something like $20 for an item that originally cost about $100. So I bought one. Unfortunately, it had a tear on one of the little auxilary webbing attachment points. I asked about it, and the seller sent me another almost identical to it while telling me to keep the original one! I use the bad one as my travel bag for when I'm going to a client location for my IT side business. It holds my laptop as well as any tools, cables and software that I might need.

With all these bags, do I need another? No, I don't need anything; especially after I found another Timbuk2 messenger cases in the "small" size for my Micro-4/3rds system. However, I've always coveted one of Zero Halliburton's Attache' style cases made for laptop computers. Especially in the unusual Gun Metal Grey color!