Ramblings from another nerd on the grid
Executive Summary
Boot from VHD is a new technique for installing and maintaining operating system environments. Unlike virtual machines, the operating system that is running from a “boot from VHD” environment is using the actual hardware instead of emulated hardware. This means a developer could easily use WPF and the full GPU processing power of a high end graphics card. In another scenario, this technology makes it easy to setup and run Windows Server 2008 R2 with the Hyper-V role, thus supporting 64 bit virtualization workloads.
The Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) is the container for the installed operating system. Because everything is inside a single file, there are a number of benefits that can be realized for data center server environments, as well as managed desktop environments. The following article dives into the technical details of implementing two operating systems. Both are installed in a VHD file and can easily be booted by selecting the preferred environment at power on. This could easily be scripted and automated.
The Installation Foundation – Windows PE
The Windows Preinstallation Environment (WinPE) has been updated for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. One of those improvements is the ability to use a Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) file as the target for an installation of the operating system (OS).
This has some interesting implications. Booting from a .VHD file that contains an entire OS seems rather magical. I mean think about it. You go to look at a hard drive and there’s a single file but Windows Server 2008 R2 is installed inside it. This would certainly simplify the ability to boot your servers on a completely new environment with little effort. This is going to turn change management on its ear.
The same is true for the desktop OS, Windows 7. You can install Windows 7 inside a .VHD file. Again, the OS is installed inside a single file and thus makes it rather easy to move or change out and bring up a completely different version of the environment. This will make test environments for developers super easy to construct and test discrete sets of applications or components.
One thing that is not well known is how easy it is to create the initial .VHD file and install the operating system into it. The supported and documented ways are geared towards very well defined support scenarios. You can see the supported scenarios in the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK). Most people have been reluctant to take the time to learn this because it involves the use of imagex captures and applies.
What if you could install with just the DVD?
You can. All you need is a hard drive with disk space and the DVD for Windows 7 RC or Windows Server 2008 R2 RC. In fact, when I was investigating the tools for this article I used a brand spanking new Hitachi 2.5” 320GB 7200rpm hard drive and both DVDs to create a dual boot environment. Nothing more. And it’s much simpler than I thought. The key is WinPE and DISKPART. Here is the screencast demonstration of the tools in action.
The Screencast Video – 23 minutes – Win7 and R2 Dual Boot via VHD
The Command Sequence Used in the Video
Other References and Articles
Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 RC – get it @ http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=60a07e71-0acb-453a-8035-d30ead27ef72. This is the bible for the supported methods of using “Boot from VHD”. Windows Virtualization Blog – see their VHD boot post at http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2009/05/14/native-vhd-support-in-windows-7.aspx. Particularly interesting is the performance area of the post. Knom’s Developer Corner – another nice post at http://blogs.msdn.com/knom/archive/2009/04/07/windows-7-vhd-boot-setup-guideline.aspx.
Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 RC – get it @ http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=60a07e71-0acb-453a-8035-d30ead27ef72. This is the bible for the supported methods of using “Boot from VHD”.
Windows Virtualization Blog – see their VHD boot post at http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2009/05/14/native-vhd-support-in-windows-7.aspx. Particularly interesting is the performance area of the post.
Knom’s Developer Corner – another nice post at http://blogs.msdn.com/knom/archive/2009/04/07/windows-7-vhd-boot-setup-guideline.aspx.
So What’s Next ???
Tomorrow I am going to backup my existing Windows 7 production hard drive. Windows 7 is installed in the traditional fashion on a 200GB drive right now. I am going to restore the backup to a larger disk then install Windows Server 2008 R2 RC into a .VHD and test mixing them. That’s a bit of a hybrid and one I think a lot of developers might be interested in. It would certainly demonstrate you can have a traditional implementation of your production OS, but flip to any other Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7 testbed very easily. I’ll follow-up here or another post when I get that implemented. Enjoy.
[UPDATE for 5/23/2009] As I indicated just above, I wanted to run an extension of the test I recorded. I backed up my 200GB Windows 7 RC environment then restored it to a 320GB drive. After that, I booted from the Windows Server 2008 R2 RC DVD and created a bootable VHD with R2 inside. The VHD is stored in a folder at the root of my 320GB disk. The R2 setup program fixed up the bcdstore area and I now have a dual boot hybrid. Windows 7 is installed in the traditional manner. R2 is booting from the VHD. Both are available on the selection menu at power up. Interesting stuff for sure.
[UPDATE for 5/25/2009] Since I received a couple of questions out of band on how I captured the demo, let me explain. The demo was captured using Camtasia v6.0.2. The demo was a Hyper-V virtual machine, not native hardware. I had mentioned that in some of the preliminary takes but I guess I didn't make that clear in the final take. Therefore, the booted OS in the screencast is actually using the emulated hardware of the virtual machine. Everything you see in the demo works on my native hardware, a Lenovo ThinkPad T61p.
One other thing, the VHD that is being booted from will expand to the maximum size specified at creation. It will revert to the used size when you shut it down. Keep this in mind because that buffer must exist at boot time or else.
[UPDATE for 6/14/2009] Although this article was originally written using a blank hard drive, I have received a few suggestions for adds, so here they are.
People have been asking me for years in my presentations what that icon on my desktop called “RichCopy” was. I would of course tell them all about it. That was always followed by a request for the utility. Well, it only took nine years to fulfill that request, but it’s finally here.
I didn’t even know we were going to release it, so I was pleasantly surprised to see it prominently displayed right at the top of the April TechNet Magazine. The cover pic on the website is too small for you to see the box next to the TechNet name, but fear not. Head on over to the column from Joshua Hoffman called, “Utility Spotlight: RichCopy”
Joshua gives you some of the background, history, and other information in the column. But you’ll want to head right to the download link and grab one of my favorite utilities. Here’s a screenshot of this bad boy in action. In the job below, I am uploading the content for the Interop Road Show to a server in Seattle. RichCopy has ten upload threads going and as you can see, I am uploading the very beginning of the self extracting archive.
This brings me to an important point. If you are supplying people a big fat .ISO image or zip file, please rethink your strategy. WinRAR from RARLabs is a great archive utility and when combined with a tool like RichCopy, it’s a match made in heaven. With WinRAR, I took the entire set of content and archived it into 100MB chunks. People that use multi threaded download tools like RichCopy are going to love me for that.
My team standard for FTP is the wonderful FileZilla. Like RichCopy, FileZilla is also multi threaded. I have never used RichCopy for FTP because until the public release, you were required to be connected to our corporate AD forest to use it. And the last thing I want is a FTP client that is running across the VPN connection. That has all changed now, so I need to run some tests with both of them and see if there’s a clear winner. Today I am using RichCopy for SMB and FileZilla for FTP. Using a single util for both may make more sense now.
Get RichCopy @ http://download.microsoft.com/download/f/d/0/fd05def7-68a1-4f71-8546-25c359cc0842/HoffmanUtilitySpotlight2009_04.exe.
[UPDATE for 5/1] Ken Tamaru was/is doing development and maintenance of RichCopy. He recently started a blog at http://blogs.technet.com/ken/. There is the place to ask RichCopy questions. Keep in mind however he has a day job and it’s completely different than being a developer for the RichCopy utility.
My first impressions of the Dell XPS 420 can be summed up in one word, "Solid !" I've only completed a couple of phases in my new machines metamorphosis, but so far I'm pretty impressed with the machine and it's future. So let's dive into what it was like when I received it, and the road we're on.
What is the goal?
When I purchased the machine Sunday, I had a couple of goals. First and foremost, it's a video editing workstation. I wanted a Quad core machine that could handle intense high definition and standard definition encoding, decoding and transcoding. Second, I figured if I held out long enough, the Windows Vista market would mature and I could add premium high definition television recording. TiVo is still handling the bulk of those duties at the moment.
The Package
The box arrived via Fedex in a light rain. I'm glad it wasn't a heavy rain because the hand holds are open into the box. There was no water damage. Inside the box was the typical foam enclosure and a special XPS branded pack of goodies including a mouse pad, wire ties, wiping cloth, binder for disks, etc. Nice job Dell.
The Hardware
Since I already have an array of LCD panels, I didn't order one with the unit. If you can afford the Dell 24" widescreen LCD, get one. I love mine. I also have a 20" 4:3 aspect ratio LCD sitting right next to the 24" in a multimon configuration. This gives you a ton of viewing options for the various applications and media you might view. The 24" is running 1920x1200 and the 20" is running 1600x1200. I use a KVM switch with these two monitors for the machines I own and use for work.
The XPS 420 computer is a medium to large size case. There's easy access into the unit and it is designed to hold up to three hard drives, one or more DVD drives, media readers, etc. I ordered my Dell with the cheapest hard drive they offer knowing I will be immediately replacing the drives through other sources to cut costs. I also ordered it with the standard 3GB of memory. The main two hard drive bays are quick access requiring no screws. There is power routed to both bays. If you order like I did but plan to add another drive, make sure you buy a SATA cable with the right angle end. A standard SATA cable will protrude too much and prevent case closure. I already knew that and had a cable in my drawer already.
The machine is very quiet. There is plenty of ventilation through the case and it will be easily vacuumed when it's time to get rid of some of the dust. The case itself is pretty attractive with the piano black front and silver sides. There are lots of USB ports front and rear, IEEE 1394 front and rear, GigE ethernet on the back, and an eSATA port on the back. I see a future for that port.
The XPS 420 comes with a Sideshow LCD panel on the front top. I haven't decided what if anything I'll use it for, but you can add all sort of Vista Sideshow gadgets and have it display stuff like the weather, number of unread inbox messages, stock ticker, etc. It'll be fun to play with that later but it's a back burner item for now.
I fired the machine up and took a look around but that was pretty short lived. I installed Ghost 12 and made an image of the factory install then pulled the 320GB drive out of the box. I installed a 1TB drive for the OS and applications, then another 500GB drive for additional data capacity. Although the XPS 420 comes with RAID on the motherboard, I am currently not using RAID 0 or 1. I do frequent backups so I really don't need the data protection, and I don't have an I/O bottleneck at the moment that would require building a volume with more than one drive.
The machine configuration I ordered comes with two ATI Digital Cable tuners. I'm not particularly impressed with the tuners because I think their design and stands are too big and clunky looking. They are external tuners and connect to the XPS 420 via USB. Good thing the XPS 420 has lots of USB ports. The tuner cases are designed to let the heat dissipate. I have both of my tuners hidden behind one of my LCD panels. Easy access to them, but out of eye sight. They are ugly (to me).
The Software
Although Dell lets you deselect a bunch of software normally referred to as "crapware" in our industry, this machine comes with an impressive set of software. Now don't get me wrong, there's stuff installed I would uninstall like the Google Desktop, but all in all it wasn't totally hosed by a bunch of crud. One of the suites you cannot deselect on the ordering site is Adobe Elements Studio. This includes Adobe Premiere Elements 4, Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 and Adobe Soundbooth.
I've been using Premier Elements for a while and like it. I have never used Photoshop before but it's time to learn considering we dropped development and sales of the Digital Image Studio product family. I've also never used the Soundbooth product, but if it works well, I know we can put it to use. Dell supplies the product disk and serial numbers for the Adobe Elements Studio products in case you want to reinstall.
The Operating System (OS) and HD Television
Dell ships the XPS 420 with a number of OS choices. Unfortunately none of the ordering configurations had what I want. So when the tough get going, the tough flatten the box and re-install from scratch. I considered running Windows Vista Home Premium, the 32bit version that the XPS 420 shipped with, for at least five minutes. But I decided to roll the dice and install Windows Vista Ultimate x64. I was a little worried about it for one reason and one reason alone.
The XPS 420 can be configured to support high definition recording. Not just any high definition recording, premium cable high definition recording. This is called OCUR and it's a Cable Labs certified and approved configuration that is required. The BIOS used by OCUR machines is special. So is the activation process. As it turns out, it was pretty easy to switch to the x64 OS and config. You just install a retail copy of Windows Vista Ultimate x64. When you fire up the Media Center shell and go through the TV tuner configuration, you will be prompted for a special product key. That key is on the COA sticker on the back of the XPS 420. After you plug it in, the tuners are activated. In reality, this sets up the PKI key sets used for the DRM required to be in place for OCUR systems.
After activating the tuners in the Media Center shell, it was a simple manner of downloading the guide and watching the standard definition channels. Verizon is coming by on Tuesday to deliver the CableCards that plug into the tuners. After those are in place and properly paired to the Verizon FIOS TV system, I'll be able to view all of the channels I pay for and record any content. In the meantime, there's a menu item under the TV setup area that lets you scan for "other TV services". This scan will detect any unencrypted QAM channels and add them to the guide listings. Most cable systems carry ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, PBS and others "in the clear". My scan found those channels so I mapped them to the appropriate channel for my area thus replacing the crappy standard def signal with the unencrypted QAM HD version. Nice. The machine plays high definition absolutely smoothly and fluidly. It should. The little screenshot at right shows me watching ABC in HD while directly connected to my Exchange Server mailbox (non cached mode) and surfing the net with IE7. It's not even batting an eye.
Performance
There has been a lot of discussion in the industry about Windows Vista, it's performance and usability. The Dell XPS 420 really makes Windows Vista shine. I ordered mine with the Intel Quad Core Q6600 processor, 3GB of memory (2x1GB and 2x512MB), 320GB 7200rpm SATA drive and the NVIDIA 8600 GTS video card. This is far from being a top of the line machine but it's still a very respectable platform. Like you, I have a budget so I didn't order the Extreme Quad processor, a RAID array, etc.
From what I can tell of the performance so far, it's going to meet my needs nicely. I'll know by the time the weekend is over. I plan to do some transcoding and video work tomorrow. When I decide to pull the 3GB of memory and bump it up, I will probably load it with 8GB of 800MHz RAM. That will improve the overall platform some and give the applications plenty of headroom while watching HD programming.
If you are a serious gamer, look closely at the graphics card and power supply options. I decided the 8600 GTS would meet my needs, cut down on power consumption, and lower the heat generated. So far it seems to be the right choice for the roles my machine will play. If you are a serious gamer, I'm not sure the other 475W power supply would meet your needs. Then again, that's why Dell makes the XPS 720 and purchased Alienware.
Summary
Like I said, this seems to be a very solid machine. If you can find one for $1500 delivered to your door, you should jump all over it. The case and construction offers a lot of flexibility and expandability. Ask me in 3-4 years how I like the machine. I hope to have this one that long. I'll write more about this later after the CableCard install. Buy with confidence. I am changing my rating to buy with some caveats. See the 12/29 update below.
[UPDATE for 12/21/2007] The CableCard install happened Tuesday without issue and I can see all of the FIOS TV channels in the guide. I can watch and record the HD channels. However, I have had a number of recording failures when the machine resumed from sleep. I am trying to spot a pattern so I am testing various sleep states (S1 and S3). More later...
[UPDATE for 12/22/2007] I updated the tuner firmware to the latest available production firmware from ATI. I also applied the Windows Vista updates that were recommended in the firmware release notes. This did not resolve the sleep/wakeup and record issues I'm seeing. In fact, it made it worse. Fortunately this isn't the core mission of my machine otherwise I'd be upset.
ATI Firmware updates:
http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/vista32/ocur-vista32.html
http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/vista64/ocur-vista64.html
[UPDATE for 12/27/2007] I have been running my machine for the past five days without letting it sleep. It has recorded each and every program without issue on a variety of HD channels I receive with my Verizon FIOS TV package. In fact, extender Xbox 360 HD playback has also been flawless. I am researching the power states supported by the machine and will experiment with sleep again before too long. I wanted to establish a baseline to verify the tuners are really working properly when fully powered and connected at all times. I'd say 5 days and 500GB of recorded HD content has done that.
[UPDATE for 12/29/2007] It appears I have the suspend/resume issue resolved with my XPS 420 when recording high def premium channels. I have a bunch of programs set to record over the next few days so I'll document my config and post a completely separate post on the subject Wednesday or Thursday of next week (assuming we can declare success). Spoke to soon... the machine missed a recording this morning so this issue is not fixed... sigh...
I also seem to have identified a bug in the eSATA port implementation. In order to use the eSATA port, the Intel ICH9R SATA RAID controller must be in AHCI mode. My eSATA port didn't work with the factory config they shipped me (x86 Vista Home Premium). I checked this morning since I still had the factory hard drive in original install state. I reset the BIOS to factory settings and checked things there, too. I'm assuming if you buy a machine directly from Dell with a RAID config implemented (two or more drives), that the RAID and eSATA port works. However, that's a x86 32bit implementation. I'd be interested to know the drivers and versions implemented on that configuration. Send me email if you have it. Dell is aware of this issue and looking into it.
[UPDATE for 1/11/2008] I have rebuilt my machine from the ground up. I am still on BIOS A02 and have the SATA controller in RAID AHCI mode. My eSATA port is working properly. In order for me to do this, I had to reinstall the operating system again, which is unfortunate. I could not figure out how to get it to work any other way even though I received feedback inside and outside Microsoft. I do not recommend doing this. If you reinstall the OS more than one time, you'll likely break the OCUR HD recording capability if you have the ATI digital cable tuners. I recommend you wait for Dell to come up with a supported solution from their engineering team. They may end up fixing this will a BIOS update or something. I certainly hope so.
At this point the only remaining problem I have with my machine is sleep/resume/record/sleep. I was sent a list of KB articles and their associated fixes. I will look more carefully at this over the weekend as time permits. I can certainly live without this working correctly but I would prefer to get it fixed.
So where do I stand on my buy recommendation? I still think this is a super machine. Dell is very aware of the AHCI RAID issue, sleep/resume and other minor issues. If you don't need to attach a big freaking hard drive or cluster of hard drives to the XPS 420, then buy with confidence. If you need the eSATA port and you buy a machine today, most likely the machine will arrive properly configured and this issue is effectively only valid for people that purchased prior to today. They can be fixed a number of ways right now but obviously a reinstall of the OS would be a last resort.
[UPDATE for 5/8/2008] See http://blogs.technet.com/keithcombs/archive/2008/05/08/dell-xps-420-six-month-report.aspx for my six month report card.
I’m sure by now that a number of you have signed up for the Verizon BroadbandAccess EVDO service. If you are a trail blazer and are part of the Windows Vista testing gang, you have probably noticed by now that Verizon’s connection software (VZAccess) doesn’t run under Windows Vista. Never fear, there is a solution to this problem.
Creating an EVDO Dial-up Connection
Happy surfing!!! FYI, I also tested VPN connectivity across this to my corporate network.
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[UPDATE 7–15–2006]
For the Kyocera, KPC650,
Every so often, something really kewl comes along that you just have to have. The Windows Vista Product Guide is one of those objects of affection. It’s a comprehensive look at the Windows Vista product line and explains the features, the differences between the product versions, screen shots, etc.
A word or two of warning is in order. First, the guide is pretty big (313 pages) so the filesize is almost 44meg. Second, you’ll need to install WinFX XML Paper Specifications Document (BETA) stuff in order to render this guide. You can download the WinFX goodies at http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/viewxps.mspx. Since I already had IE7 installed, I just installed the WinFX Runtime Components and was able to view the document without issue.
I cheated a bit however (as usual). I am running a Lenovo T60 Dual Core laptop so it certainly has the power to do such things. Let me know your experience. I am also currently in the Microsoft Toronto office so I sent the document to one of their high speed duplex printers. Now I have a few extra pounds of reading for my trip home tomorrow.
UPDATED 4/14/2006
So, where’s the guide? I had permission from the Program Manager to post the Windows Vista Product Guide to my blog. Apparently, it isn’t quite ready for public consumption so I was asked to remove the link. If you were lucky enough to download the “sneak peek” preview, enjoy! The guide will be back when we ship Windows Vista Beta 2.
By the way, the isp server that had the guide caught fire. Just teasing...
Technical documentation focusing on planning, deployment and operational guidance. It includes the Volume Activation 2.0 Step-by-Step Guide, Volume Activation 2.0 FAQ, Volume Activation 2.0 Technical Attributes list and Standard User Product Activation zip file.
Go get it at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=75674
As you’ll recall, I posted a preliminary version of the Windows Vista Product Guide (also known as “The Book of Windows Vista”) a few weeks ago. It was in .xps form and initial feedback was very good. However, in order to view and print the must have information, you needed to install WinFX. XPS is the XML Paper Specification. Well, we got some good critical feedback and guess what, we listened.
Now, you can download this puppy in Microsoft word or XPS format. Careful though, it’s not your daddies download. It’s 60MB of rich knowledge transfer. It’s a comprehensive view of the feature set in Windows Vista. There are consumer oriented chapters. There are chapters devoted to the IT Pro feature set.
You’ll need to decide if you are going be eco friendly or not. Use it in “digital” form or send it to your trusty duplex printer. Either way, I think you’ll enjoy this guide as you take your journeys to the wonderful world that is Windows Vista.
It’s my understanding this will also be printed and sold in a hard back format. I think it would make a nice edition in my library. Maybe I can get Brian or Jim to autograph one for me. Now that would really be kewl.
UPDATE 5/25/2006: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=bbc16ebf-4823-4a12-afe1-5b40b2ad3725&DisplayLang=en contains the links to the .xps and .doc versions.
Enjoy my friends!!!
Each of you has likely used one of the world’s most popular Wiki’s known as http://wikipedia.org. The English section of that site has 3.2 million articles and there are many more supported languages. An excerpt from the mission of the site is “to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content.” We have a similar TechNet mission.
As you’ll recall from TechNet 2.0 – Episode 1 – Core Scenarios and Branding, three big things we focus on for all TechNet scenarios are Content, Discoverability, and Participation. We really want to invite participation from everyone and what better way to combine that with discovery and content than to use Wiki technology?
Later this year TechNet and the Server & Cloud Division will partner to launch the new TechNet Wiki.
There are a number of interesting features that are part of the Wiki implementation. You’ll notice a very visible tag cloud. If the pic is hard to read, click it or any of the remaining screenshots for a larger version. Tag clouds are great for navigating large number of articles as well as seeing at a glance where activity is taking place. The Wiki has different views depending on whether you are logged in or not. You’ll notice I am not logged in above and we can see quickly the activity taking place, contact information, and how to use the Wiki.
Once I login, I can see additional information. In fact, I decided to click the Windows Server tag cloud and I get a listing of tagged articles as seen in the following screenshot.
I immediately spot an article I am interested in. You can see the one I am referring to above with the Event ID 3112. It’s the third article down. I click the article link and I am presented with the following information. As you can see, Tony Soper is writing about how to go through the process of troubleshooting a Hyper-V virtual machine issue. If you don’t know Tony, he’s one of our virtualization subject matter experts.
This particular article and condition was interesting to me because after modifying the Boot Configuration Data (BCD) for my machine, I inadvertently dropped the parameter to start the hypervisor on the Windows Server 2008 R2 boot entry in the BCD store. Tony’s article details this and how to fix the issue or points you to an article for additional help. Been there done that.
Another interesting aspect of the Wiki is the ability to see the changes that have occurred leading to the current version. You have the ability to run a compare if you like to see the revisions. In the screenshot below, I am getting ready to run the compare against the current version and version # 16.
After I click the Compare Versions button, I can see the revisions that have occurred as depicted in the screenshot below.
As you can see, Tony is correcting his own article but one of you could be adding or changing information as well. In this particular article’s case, you might add some information about using “Boot from VHD” technology and how to be careful not to step on a BCD entry and lose the hypervisor autorun parameter. Wiki’s are great for collecting knowledge like that and we are anxious to get this in your hands soon.
We believe a public wiki for technical content on TechNet has the potential to be a big step forward in all three areas:
I used the word "potential" above because Microsoft cannot succeed with the TechNet Wiki on its own - success ultimately depends on the direct engagement, support, and ongoing feedback from the IT community.
It’s a "big bet" for all of us, but one we believe in and are ready to take.
So, let's start with your feedback - what do you think of a TechNet Wiki? Let us know in the comments below. Thanks !
[NOTE] The screenshots are of our internal beta staging server so there may be some subtle differences by the time we provide access. Enjoy!
Friday afternoon I received two Lenovo ThinkPad W510’s. The one I decided to look at first is the model with the 1920x1080 Multi Touch screen. Let me first say I am not a big fan of this high a resolution on a screen that is 15.6”. I have two other laptops with 15.4” screens that have native resolutions of 1920x1200. But this machine is very different.
The Specs
Here are specifications for the machine I am currently reviewing. It is a ThinkPad W510 Model 4389-2UU. It has a Intel® Core™ i7-820QM quad-core processor 6MB Cache. I loaded the machine with 4x4GB PC3-8500 1066MHz SoDIMM memory sticks for a total of 16GB of RAM. The machine arrived with a Seagate 500GB 7200rpm hard drive. I pulled that drive and set it aside then installed my Intel 160GB Generation 2 SSD drive.
The screen is 15.6" (396mm) FHD (1920x1080) color, anti-glare, LED backlight, 242 nits, 16:9 aspect ratio, 500:1 contrast ratio, 95% Gamut, MultiTouch (touchscreen supports two-finger touch). To keep the screen calibrated, this model includes a Pantone huey™PRO X-Rite® Colorimeter. The color calibration sensor is in palm rest near the fingerprint reader.
The video chipset is the NVIDIA® Quadro® FX 880M with 1GB of discrete memory. The chassis has a VGA DB-15 connector which is typical. It also includes a DisplayPort connector (supports single-link DVI-D via cable 45J7915); and has a Maximum external resolution: 2560x1600 (DisplayPort)@60Hz; 2048x1536 (VGA)@85Hz; 1920x1200@60Hz (single-link DVI-D via cable 45J7915).
The W510 is 15.6W" (WxDxH): 14.68" x 9.65" x 1.26-1.41"; 372.8mm x 245.1mm x 32-35.8mm. The 6-cell weight starts at 5.66 lb (2.57kg); 9-cell: starting at 6.01 lb (2.72kg). For those of you keeping score, this machine is slightly wider than a T61p, and slightly heavier. If you are used to carrying around a T61p or W500, you aren’t going to get bent out of shape by the difference. This isn’t a T400, T410 or T410s so don’t bother comparing them on size and weight. This is a bigger and heavier machine. But it isn’t a huge, fat, 17” pizza box either.
The eval unit I have includes the 5-in-1 reader (MMC, Memory Stick, Mem Stick Pro, SD, SDHC), Two USB 3.0, one Powered USB 2.0, one USB 2.0/eSATA combo port, modem (RJ-11), Intel Gigabit ethernet (RJ-45), and an IEEE 1394 FireWire 400 (4-pin connector; 1394a-2000 standard). I have no idea why Lenovo still includes a modem and connector. In fact, I’m a little perturbed with it’s placement because it’s in the location where I would expect a couple of USB ports.
Under the Covers
I needed to go pretty deep into the case right away because I wanted to change the memory configuration and hard drive. The W510 has four 204 pin DDR3 memory slots. Two are easy access from the bottom of the machine, and two are underneath the keyboard. In case you are wondering, the ThinkPad T61p uses 200 pin DDR2 SoDIMMS that are not compatible with the W510. I have other machines that use the 204 pin DDR3 sticks so I pulled the memory out of all of them and loaded this machine with 16GB of memory. In the next 30 days I’ll put all of that memory to use with virtualization.
Lenovo also changed the primary hard drive bay. It’s underneath the machine and accessible from the bottom. It isn’t hard to swap drives, but it’s nowhere near as easy as the T61p, W500 or T400. I don’t really like the new design because I do a lot of drive swaps, but I can live with it. It certainly isn’t a deal breaker. The machine is designed for people that don’t swap drives often so you need not be concerned. Be happy there is relatively easy access.
Multi Touch Screen
Touch interfaces are the rage. They’ve been around for years and thanks to Apple and the iPhone, people have started to discover them en masse. The model I received for evaluation has the 1920x1080 resolution Multi Touch screen. I was eager to see he brightness and color of the screen because I fell in love with the screen on the W700. I plugged in the laptop and fired it up. The first time I saw the screen it had a slight rose colored hue to it. I just grinned.
I launched the Pantone hueyPRO X-Rite application and started the color calibration process. That is so kewl. You shut the lid, it does it’s thing then beeps on completion and you get to see the results. MUCH better. I am not a Pro photographer so I’ll let the Pros chime in on the screen from their reviews, but it looks pretty good to me. Extremely good for a touch screen device. The screen itself is listed as an anti glare screen but I noticed more glare on it than my T61p or other laptops. It appears there are some anti glare coatings on the screen. I’m not really sure.
I do know this, I would not order the multi touch screen. I don’t have a big use for multi touch applications on a device like this so I would order the FHD 1920x1080 without the multi touch option. For developers, it would seem to be a no brainer to get this option, but I’m planning on getting a slate style device this year so I would forgo the option on this laptop.
The FHD is super bright. That is the biggest gripe I have with the other 15.4” 1920x1200 based laptops I have. Those screens don’t have nearly the brightness and contrast as this screen. I still detect a slight graininess but I believe that is due to the touch screen. The other W510 evaluation unit I have has the HD+ 1600x900 screen and it is bright and extremely clear. However, that screen dropped the resolution below the tolerable limits for me, so the 1920x1080 FHD screen is going to be the one I get when it comes time for a purchase. Windows 7 and the DPI settings allow fine adjustments to font rendering to suit your preferences. I run 1920x1080 at 115% or 125% DPI. Looks great and it’s easy on my eyes. Lenovo has a winner with these screens.
My manager, John Martin, will snicker at the next comment or two. You see, I was in Seattle a couple of weeks ago and we were reviewing some data I had on my T61p. I turned the machine so he could see the screen and he had a surprised look on his face. I said, “What?” He remarked at how clean the screen was. I must admit I do like my screens fingerprint and dust free. I cleaned the screen just before I flew to Seattle. You can imagine my shock of all of those fingerprints on the W510 screen after just a few hours of use. Not sure I could live with that. Clean freak.
Other Stuff
Let me tell you about a couple of minor things I thought were pretty cool before I get into a Windows 7 re-install and the tips and tricks associated with that. First up is my favorite new button. The Microphone mute button. Press it an it kills the microphone and lights up a nice, bright, amber orange. Because I use my computer now for a lot of phone calls, this is a life savor. If you’ve ever done or said anything you wished you had not on a live mic, you know what I mean.
I also like some of the power management that has gone into this machine. I will fully explore it in testing over the next 30 days, but I really liked how the management software just shuts down power to the DVD drive until you need it. Nice. I’ll be testing the power management for real at the MVP Summit. I haven’t decided if I am taking this machine because I can’t use my data card in this machine (it’s PCMCIA).
The W510 seems to be running fairly quiet and cool, especially for such a powerhouse machine. I have not taxed the system yet. I have also not tested battery life. I did observe one thing I am going to re-test. I noticed if I put the Microsoft Wireless Mobile Mouse 6000 micro USB transmitter in the USB 3.0 port, the machine fails to boot. In fact, it seemed to overheat the machine. Strange. I am going to try a repro on that tomorrow or the next day.
The machine has two cool looking blue colored USB 3.0 ports. I was going to trek down to Fry’s today and see if they have any USB 3.0 hard drive enclosures, but I never made it over there. I am going to try and make the trip after I work out in the morning.
I have a gripe about the Ultrabay. Once again Lenovo has changed it so that you cannot use hard drive adaptors from a previous generation of ThinkPad's. Therefore, the T400/W500 Ultrabay hard drive adaptor will not go into the W510 bay. I looked closely at it, and it appears I could make it work, but I would have to use an exacto knife on the W500 hard drive adaptor I have. I guess I’ll have to wait and see if the come out with one. I don’t see it listed yet.
Installing Windows 7 x64 – Tips and Tricks
This is going to be a relatively short section but let me give you some advice. The eval unit I received came with the 32 bit version of Windows 7 Professional. Strange. Nobody in their right mind is going to fill four slots with 1GB DDR3 sticks so everyone has the potential to go well over the 4GB limit for x86 versions of operating systems. I know, people have 32 bit app compat concerns. This machine wasn’t designed for them. This is a power user work horse. Use 64 bit operating systems.
When I started looking at the drivers at the Support and Download area, my sixth sense told me something was missing. My sixth sense was right. Fortunately I paid attention to that and instead of flattening the original drive, I pulled it from the machine and set it aside.
I had to go back to that drive and get some files in the SWTOOLS directory. The SWTOOLS directory has all of the drivers and software that is factory installed. Be sure to copy this directory to a safe place. Be sure to use the installed ThinkVantage tools to create a factory disk set. It’s always the first thing I create when I get a new machine. It takes three DVDs.
The Lenovo W510 Support and Downloads area currently doesn’t have the power management driver for the W510. Huge oversight. This is a key requirement for the Pantone color calibration sensor and software. It’s also a key prereq for the MIC mute button and other components in the machine.
You’ll also find out most of the USB ports don’t work well with some external enclosures until the power management and NEC USB 3.0 drivers are installed. My external 2.5” Vantec NexStar 3 enclosure would only work in the combo eSATA/USB port. It would not work on the powered USB port or either of the USB 3.0 ports until the drivers were installed. Thankfully it worked because there were some key drivers needed on it.
I had already downloaded all of the 64 bit drivers I could find and had them stashed on the NexStar 3. Good thing. Windows 7 Enterprise x64 doesn’t recognize the ThinkPad W510 Intel(R) 82577LM Gigabit Ethernet or Intel(R) Centrino(R) Ultimate-N 6300 AGN wireless chipsets using the driver base in the RTM build of Windows 7. That means you cannot talk to the internet and Windows Update until you download and install them from the Lenovo Support and Downloads area.
Fortunately, nearly everything you need for a 64 bit install of Windows 7 is on the download area. The rest is in the SWTOOLS directory including software for burning DVD’s and other stuff. The ThinkPad W510 I received did not come loaded with “crapware”. In fact, there was very little pre-loaded. Thanks Lenovo !!!
Some Final Thoughts and What’s Next
So far I am very impressed with the physical build of the machine, fit and finish, and performance. I have a lot of planned testing coming the next 30 days including running Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V, Red Hat, and Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop if I have time.
I like the layout of the ports with the sole exception of the RJ-11 port. Dump that. I’m glad the USB ports are now horizontal instead of vertical. I am planning on getting a USB data card soon so that will be helpful for it.
That’s it for now. I wanted to give you some first impressions in the first 24 hours of having the machine. I went a little over that because it took some time to back up other machines, move memory and SSD drives around, research the missing drivers, etc. I have not hit any show stoppers so far and Windows 7 Enterprise x64 is flying (as evidenced in the screenshot above). Click on the screenshot for a larger view of the data.
[UPDATE for 02/10/2010] I have gone through the process of installing Windows Server 2008 R2 and documented the steps I took at http://blogs.technet.com/keithcombs/archive/2010/02/10/install-windows-server-2008-r2-on-a-lenovo-thinkpad-w510.aspx. I hope you find this useful. Please ask W510 R2 comments there.
Thanks.
High end portable workstations are a special class of computer. The Lenovo ThinkPad W520 belongs to that class and in many ways sets the bar. As a daily user of a ThinkPad W510, I was certainly interested in seeing and testing the new W520 to see what improvements were made.
Keep in mind I don’t have a lab with instruments to scientifically measure power draw, consumption, clock speed of the cpu or gpu, etc. But I do like to put notebooks through their paces with an interesting application mix. This is why I call it a “mini” review.
W510 owners should stop reading here. It’s that much better. Really. I’m not kidding.
The Lenovo ThinkPad W520 is twice as fast as my ThinkPad W510 at certain chores and eclipses it on battery life. The ThinkPad W520 has superior battery life over the W510 and reaches 6-7 hours of battery life at a moderate screen brightness. Lenovo continues to provide excellent thermal management cooling in the W520 workstation. See the performance and battery life sections below for more detail. In short, the ThinkPad W520 with the new Intel Sandy Bridge chipset is a strong improvement to the Lenovo W Series of portable workstations.
Specifications
The unit I received isn’t the top of the line ThinkPad W520 but it has some of the top tier components. It’s a model 4284-A58. It has the Intel Core i7-2720QM processor (quad-core, 2.20GHz, 6MB Cache), DDR3 memory controller (up to 1600MHz), Intel Turbo Boost 2.0 (3.30GHz), with Hyper Threading (HT) technology. This particular W520 is loaded with 4x4GB 204-pin SO-DIMM PC3-10600 1333MHz DDR3, non-parity, dual-channel memory. The screen is 15.6" (396mm) FHD (1920x1080) color, anti-glare, LED backlight, 270 nits, 16:9 aspect ratio, 500:1 contrast ratio, 95% Gamut. The video chipset is NVIDIA® Optimus™ technology, which will auto-switch between discrete and integrated graphics. The integrated graphics is the Intel HD Graphics 3000 in processor, and the discrete chip is the NVIDIA Quadro® 2000M, PCI Express® x16, with 2GB memory.
The primary drive bay is a full height (9.5mm) 2.5” hard drive bay and will accommodate standard laptop hard drives as well as full size SSD drives. It’s still bottom access and I don’t like that much. I prefer side load like the previous generation ThinkPad's. The Ultrabay is still the same as the W510 and is 12.7mm in height. The W520 received included the Seagate Momentus 500GB 7200rpm drive in the primary bay. I tested the W520 with it and the Intel 160GB SSD.
The W520 with the 9-cell battery is slightly lighter than the W510, but only slightly. The port configuration around the machine is the same as the W510 though they changed the USB 3.0 chipset to another supplier. This did have an impact on flattening the machine and using an external USB 3.0 enclosure. You must install the USB 3.0 driver before you use those ports. The new USB 3.0 chipset provider is Renesas. I am not sure what happened to NEC but this is a change from the W510.
The chassis dimensions are 14.68" x 9.65" x 1.29-1.44"; 372.8mm x 245.1mm x 32.8-36.6mm. This is exactly the same as the W510. The W510 and W520 aren’t massive in size but it is a large 15” notebook computer. It fits perfectly in the Wenger Synergy backpack which I have been using for the past 5-6 years. Highly recommended.
Although my W520 didn’t come with a mSATA drive, I have confirmed it is capable of using one in the PCI-E WWAN card slot. In essence, you can put a tiny Intel Series 310 SSD drive in the slot and use it for OS boot. This would allow for three drives total in the W520. Lenovo is promoting RapidDrive for the usage of the mSATA drive but I think OS boot is more interesting. Although the Sandy Bridge chipset in the ThinkPad W520 has SATA III 6Gbps support, I don’t have the new SATA III SSD drives yet to prove it works. Sorry, but that’s a big budget line item so it will have to wait for later. I intend to purchase some Intel Series 510 SSD drives when the price is right.
The model I received has the Intel 6300 WIFI and Intel 82579LM Gigabit Ethernet chipset.
Photo Tour
Front - in this picture and the following shots, I have the ThinkPad T410s on top of the stack, the ThinkPad T410 in the middle and the ThinkPad W520 on the bottom. There isn’t much to comment on for the frontal view. Sorry I don’t have the T420 and T420s yet for comparison. I use Windows 7 lid stickers for my machines so you’ll see that already slapped on the W520.
Right - the W520 ports are positioned exactly like the W510. On the right side you’ll see the memory card slot, 34mm ExpressCard slot with a plastic filler, the 12.7mm high fatty DVD burner in the Ultrabay, and the Ethernet port. I don’t like the placement of the Ethernet port here. I would rather have it in the back where the silly modem is, and have a USB port instead like the T410 above it.
Back - the one notable change on the back of the W520 is the power connection port. It has a new design to accommodate the 170W power supply connector and is different from several generations of ThinkPad's. You can still use the ThinkPad W510 135W power adaptor with this port. You cannot however plug the 170W power supply into a W510 or W510 dock. See the connector close up macro shot below.
Left - the left side of the W520 is no different from the W510. I will however point your attention to the eSATA port which is a combo port also known as a powered eSATA port.
Open - I believe the W510 and W520 key layouts are the same although I haven’t examined them close up. I did notice in this picture some of the keys are a slightly different color. I think this is due to inconsistencies in the manufacturing process for those keys unless it’s actually supposed to be that way. You wouldn’t normally see the color difference unless you were looking really hard for it. It just shows from the flash photography.
Thin - I usually take a lot of different shots of a machine from different angles and I thought this picture was interesting because it makes the W520 look thin like the T410s. It’s an optical illusion.
Power brick top - some people are freaking out about the 170W power supply brick. It’s rather large and for comparison I have it lined up with the 135W power supply for the W510, and a 90W power supply for the T410. It’s actually lighter than the 135W brick. 770 grams to 830. It appears in my testing the 135W brick works fine so if you are short on cubic centimeters you might travel with the 135W. You cannot use the 90W with the W520.
Power brick side - here’s another view of the bricks from a different angle.
Power connecter - here’s a close up macro shot of the 170W power connector compared to the connector on the 90W and 135W power supplies.
Power Management and Battery Life
I mentioned in the executive summary above that the Lenovo ThinkPad W520 has significantly improved power management and battery life. It appears from my testing that it’s at least twice as good as the W510. After some initial testing, I quickly posted some information. W510 owners everywhere are crying.
Why is battery life important on a portable workstation? In my opinion, it really shouldn’t matter too much. Almost everyone one I know that uses a machine in this class probably has a smartphone and a slate device or they will soon.
In the meantime, battery might be important in some situations but this isn’t a machine you’d be lugging from class to class, or meeting to meeting and taking notes on battery. You could, but it isn’t designed for that. It’s designed to run high performance workloads and you’d better be plugged into the wall for those. Enough of the lecture already.
For the consultants in the crowd that have a single machine, you’ll be happy to know the battery life is dramatically improved. In the tests at the blog post link above, this machine appears to get six hours of battery life quite nicely on the configuration I was sent. That’s pretty darn good and welcome relief for the workstation crowd.
Now you can watch a movie or two on that long flight home. Assuming of course the guy in front of you hasn’t pushed his seat all the way back. That’s where the T410s or a slate device will come in handy.
Performance, Gaming and Thermals
I do a considerable amount of work with high definition video. This seemed like the perfect test to see how much of an improvement the Sandy Bridge pipelining and chipset had improved over the W510. I was shocked at the results. So shocked in fact I ran the tests several times with different drives to verify what I was seeing.
For the encoding tests I used Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 10. I encoded to a 720p Windows Media Video profile at a 6MB data rate. This is a rich high definition format and it will tax every system I have including the ThinkPad W520. The source video is from my Sony high def video camera and I have a variety of subjects. I decided to use last years Fort Worth Mayfest footage.
The W520 completed the encoding job in 1.5 hours. The machine did of course kick the fan up on high but wasn’t obnoxiously loud. I was also pleasantly surprised to learn it didn’t fry the machine either.
In fact, although the machine was warm on the bottom, it wasn’t scorching hot. You wouldn’t want it on your bare legs, but it wasn’t bad at all. That’s a real good sign. During the encoding the four cores and four hyper threads hovered around 72% CPU utilization. Plenty of head room to do other stuff if this is your only machine.
The W510 completed the same exact encoding job in 3 hours. You read that correctly. The W520 was twice as fast as the W510 in all of the encoding jobs. I even used a variety of drives internal and external to rule out I/O bottlenecks. Yea, my jaw is still on the floor.
I don’t know yet why the W520 is soo much faster. I ran these tests six different ways on both machines and every time the W520 sliced through the work in half the time the W510 took. I checked all of the BIOS, Power management and performance settings three different times to make sure everything was nearly identical except the hardware. Hardware matters.
After the encoding jobs, I decided to do some testing of the graphics for gaming. I haven’t really done any PC gaming in a while since we use the XBOX 360 for that type of entertainment. However, I still have Half-Life 2 Orange Box and it’s a pretty well known entity. It was either use it or buy a modern game. I took the cheap route and used Orange Box.
I installed Steam and all of the games then cranked up HL2. I made sure to set the video settings in HL2 to 1920x1080 and all of the shading and stuff on high. The game performed remarkably well. I was getting some tearing and artifacts on quick turns and such but it wasn’t laggy or gross. That was with the BIOS set to NVIDIA Optimus mode. I changed it to NVIDIA discrete only and tried the game again. Now we’re talking. Smooth as glass and no tearing. I haven’t checked frame rates but they are high.
The W520 does an amazing job of cooling. It spins the fan up under load and after things simmer down, spins back down. When the machine is being used under light load, you can use the notebook on your bare skin. It runs nice and cool. At least mine does. My W510 also runs cool so they are pretty even on that count. I’ve seen quite a few W510 reports where that wasn’t the case so I’m hoping Lenovo really has this nailed for the ThinkPad W520.
Virtualization and RemoteFX
Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 installed on the ThinkPad W520 with complete ease. In fact, some of the nagging little workarounds I’ve been documenting for years have disappeared, finally. I installed R2 SP1 using the usual boot from VHD techniques documented all over my blog.
For those of you looking at the Lenovo Drivers and Download area, you’ll notice at the time of this review there aren’t many drivers. Fortunately, everything you need is on the hard drive that came from the Lenovo factory under the SWTOOLS area. The Ethernet and WIFI adaptors install correctly now with setup. Everything else is straightforward.
I installed the Hyper-V role and imported several virtual machines and confirmed everything was working as expected. Boring. My colleague Robert Larson asked me to look into making sure the W520 would run RemoteFX. Now there’s something new and interesting to try.
RemoteFX is a fascinating technology that lets you run a thin client machine from your desk, but take advantage of advanced graphics on the Hyper-V server. There are a number of ways to take advantage of RemoteFX but I decided to try something that would really prove it works.
Hmmm, what 3D application running on the VM would really prove RemoteFX is working? Aero Glass is already running but you can do that with the right RDP clients so that isn’t good enough proof for me. I need a game. Duh. How about installing Half-Life 2 into the VM and playing it across the wire from another machine on my network? Muuhaahaa.
Here’s a screen shot of me using the Windows 7 SP1 RDP client and RemoteFX to install the game. You can clearly see the Aero Glass effects in the RDP session. All of those graphics are being handled by the GPU in the NVIDIA discrete chipset on the W520, not the machine I am using to run the RDP client. I was pretty shocked at this point that Steam actually installed and worked.
When I launched HL2, Steam complained about not having the RemoteFX virtual machine emulated 3D card in it’s card database. I guess I was first. It let me continue and play the game. Since I had the RDP client session above set to 720p (1280x720), I ran Half-Life 2 with the same video settings. HL2 suggested medium shading and such for the settings so I went with that.
Actual gameplay was better than I expected. I expected this to completely fail but much to my amazement the game actually worked. The mouse control was really erratic and hyper sensitive, but movement forward and back or side to side was pretty decent. Certainly proof RemoteFX was working properly on the Lenovo ThinkPad W520. I’ll go back later when I have time and look more closely at framerates native on the W520 and inside the VM. I am out of time for this week.
The Screen and Multimon
Like the W510, the FHD screen on the W520 is fabulous. It’s bright and has good contrast. The high Gamut screen has good color support and it’s probably the smart choice for anyone considering a portable workstation. As with most if not all of the business computers Lenovo makes, it’s a matte screen. I don’t think I will ever buy a glossy screen laptop. Well, I haven’t yet. Anyway, the screen is very nice and I haven’t seen any complaints with it on the W510.
I am unable to run a test I wanted to run. Although the W520 can be used in the 135W dock designed for the ThinkPad W510, it won’t drive more than two monitors. You are going to need the 170W powered dock designed specifically for the W520. So I could not test driving 3-4 external monitors. I use three on a daily basis and have a fourth I could have used for the test, but until I have the right dock, it isn’t going to happen.
Here’s a picture of what I am talking about. In the pic above my Lenovo ThinkPad T410s NVIDIA Optimus notebook is driving three Dell LCD panels. That’s a cheap 24” on the left, a new refurb Ultrasharp U2711 27” in the middle, and an aging Ultrasharp 24” on the right. It’s funny that the middle panel color differences are so pronounced in the pic. I haven’t calibrated all three together on the T410s and this shows why you should. Looking at this in person is different. Your brain calibrates them real time. More optical tricks.
Because Optimus based machines have two active video chipsets, you can drive up to four external LCD panels with the Lenovo dock. I think most people won’t need more than three but four is possible. It’s the very first test I did with the T410s. Sorry I could not prove it works with the W520.
OS and Software
The ThinkPad W520 I received came with Windows 7 Professional x64. I was a little surprised to see it show up without SP1 already installed. Not only that, it isn’t patched to current levels or at least reasonably close levels. It’s sitting here waiting for me to install 29 important updates. This is pretty inexcusably in my opinion. Lenovo should really take the time to engineer an image that is more up-to-date than that. Make sure you update your machine to SP1 as soon as you get it. Hitting the update button on mine now.
As for the software that is pre-loaded, I give Lenovo a lot of credit for NOT loading the machine will a bunch of software I don’t want. On first boot you will be presented with some promotions for Norton AV, Bing, Office, etc. but you can politely skip those and move right on.
Lenovo has added some interesting programs I haven’t fully tested yet. Skype is installed and configured to use the dual mic and 720p camera built into the LCD panel bezel. Lenovo spent a lot of time tuning their new systems to work well with VOIP and other conferencing providers like Microsoft Lync so you road warriors could attend meetings. Lucky you.
In addition you’ll find facial recognition software for security. I am soo going to test this. I’m actually thinking of testing that with my Chihuahua Elvis to see if I can use him to unlock the machine. That should be fun.
Office 2010 Starter is pre-installed and there are options to purchase an upgrade at any time. Office Start 2010 includes Word and Excel Starter editions. Pretty clever. Give you some core features and provide an easy way to upgrade if you so desire.
Biztree Business-in-a-Box is there for installation along with Skype, Norton Internet Security, Windows Live Essentials, Corel WinDVD, Corel Burn.Now, Corel DVD MovieFactory, and a few other miscellaneous programs.
If you intend to use Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 as your primary OS, make sure you save the SWTOOLS directory on drive C:. You’ll want WinDVD and other apps that don’t come with R2. I haven’t yet verified the location of WinDVD in the lower level directories but I will.
I didn’t think the Lenovo ThinkPad W520 would be much of an improvement. It’s the same keyboard, chassis, screen, etc. as the ThinkPad W510. But the beauty is below the surface and in this case, the Sandy Bridge chipset offers much better performance while managing energy use much more efficiently.
You’ll certainly want to watch for more scientific testing by the professional review blogs and organizations but it sure looks like a super machine for your consideration. I look forward to seeing how it fairs against the competition in the shootouts. This is a sweet machine ready to do some hard work. Let me know if you have any questions.
[UPDATE for 3/29/2011] Lenovo.com just lit up the configuration wizards for the ThinkPad W520. Here’s a sample configuration and price from the US public buying site. Man, they have some nice new options. I’d really like to test the RAID support. Enjoy.
[Update for 4/3/2011] Todays project was to flatten the Lenovo factory image and install SLED 11 SP1 x86. The install worked well enough though SLED installations are really slow from DVD. GNOME and KDE are both working with the inbox VESA drivers. I downloaded and installed the NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver from NVIDIA.com without issue. To be clear, I have the BIOS set to discrete only. I don’t believe NVIDIA has Optimus drivers for linux. The accelerated drivers appear to be working pretty well at 1920x1080 with 16 million colors. Menu fades, app movement, and moving graphics objects around on the screen is fluid. Transparency effects are working.
You also might have noticed I removed my “buy with confidence” remarks from the body of the blog post. The main reason is due to the outstanding question on the support for SATA III SSD drives. I don’t know if the W520 supports the SATA III 6GB standard. Hopefully an answer is clarified by Lenovo in the documentation, an official blog post at the http://lenovoblogs.com site, or something soon. Eventually someone will benchmark the machine and provide some insight. I won’t be in a position to do that for several weeks.
I rather doubt the mSATA slot will be SATA III and I don’t think there are any SATA III mSATA devices anyway. The Intel Series 310 devices are SATA II 3GB speed. So the questions remain for the primary and optional Ultrabay drive interfaces. I supposed this also includes the Lenovo ThinkPad Serial ATA Hard Drive Bay Adaptor III since that is the currently supported hard drive adaptor. I will be surprised to hear the 43N3412 adaptor is SATA III 6GB capable.
So until the answers emerge, I would suggest making your decision carefully. I certainly wouldn’t pay a premium for the new 6GB speed SSD drives until you know for sure the system can fully exploit them. The machine is still a killer machine and if it fully supports 6GB speeds in all three of the possible SSD bays (mSATA slot, primary bay, Ultrabay), then it would certainly move it into the bad ass category of machines. It’s unlikely that all three bays support the 6GB speeds.
[Update for 4/5/2011] Good news. A number of people out there in the wild have received T420’s, T520’s and W520’s. Several of them have run SSD tests with the Crucial and Micron drives and are reporting jumps in throughput that would be indicative of a SATA III 6GB speeds in both the primary bay, and ultrabay. I’ve read this now at http://www.storagereview.com/lenovo_thinkpad_t520_review_first_thoughts and from three or four different people in the various ThinkPad forums.
I’m cautiously optimistic now. Some of the test results I’ve seen lack detail but at least there are a handful of reports. I’ll feel better when I’ve run my own tests but I thought some of you might be interested.
Here’s a nice infomercial on the ThinkPad W520. It also covers a few features not normally mentioned in the reviews. Notice it says battery life increase of 100% over the previous generation. See, they put that in writing.
[UPDATE for 4/6/2011] A little over a week ago I sent some questions into Lenovo around the drives and storage for the new Sandy Bridge based notebooks. Here are the questions and the answers I received.
1. Are the supported SATA interface speeds on the new ThinkPad's SATA III 6GB? Specifically, is this true for the T420, T420s, X220, X220t, T520, and W520?
[Lenovo] Yes, The new Huron River ThinkPads will support 6Gb/s, but our current drives that have been certified are only 3GB/s drives. The current roadmap is showing Late 3Q or early 4Q is when we'll qualify 6GB/s drives. This is true for the T420, T420s, X220, X220t, T520, and W520.
2. What SSD drives have been tested and are recommended for the new Sandy Bridge based machines?
[Lenovo]These are all 3.0 Gb/ps. ThinkPad 160GB Intel X25-M Solid State Drive II - Released ThinkPad 128 GB SS Drive II - Released Intel 320 Series - Not Released. Lenovo engineering has completed testing/certification of the Intel 320 Series.
[Lenovo]These are all 3.0 Gb/ps.
3. What is the hard/ssd drive bay height and size for the new machines? I need this for the primary bay, and ultrabay for each machine. I understand some of the bays will only take 7mm height drives so if you provide a table of information on the machines above I would appreciate it.
[Lenovo] Primary bay height for each system: T420, X220-X220T, W520 approx. 10.5 mm. Ultrabay height for each system: T420, X220-X220T approx. 10.5 mm. W520 Ultrabay is 12.7mm. Machines with 7mm height drives: Yes The X220/ X220T, T420s will only take 7mm drives in their primary drive bay.
4. Which machines support the mSATA drive in the WWAN mini PCIE slot? Do all of the machines support this? For the machines that do, is OS boot support supported?
[Lenovo] W520, T420, T420s, X220, X220T. Yes, boot is supported for all of them.
[UPDATE for 4/20/2011] I have confirmed with Lenovo that although the W520 has Optimus, it does not have Hybrid Optimus and thus cannot support four external displays like my T410s (see that test). Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but there you have it. On the bright side, I will test the T420s before too long and see if it really works.
See http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-76617 for the official support document on the Hybrid Optimus technology and supported configurations.
[UPDATE for 9/19/2011] It’s pretty rare for me to come back to update a review or comment six months after I wrote something but it seems there is a facet of this machine I didn’t really test fully back in March. I still haven’t but I wanted to bring some information to your attention.
First, you notice in my blog post above I’m pretty wild about the new battery life for the ThinkPad W520. That’s easily understandable because the battery life from the W510 isn’t nearly as good.
What you may not know is that the Quad Core CPU is limited to a certain performance level when running on battery power. The term many people use is “throttled”. I guess that term works. Throttling is a well known way to govern something. Cars and motorcycles have governors to prevent them from going over a certain MPH. ISP’s and wireless carriers throttle connections when you’ve used a certain amount of data. In that case of the W520, the CPU is throttled while on battery power.
I haven’t seen an official Lenovo statement on why this is. Some speculate they are doing this to prolong battery life. That’s a pretty noble cause, unless you really need max performance on battery power. I have seen other speculation that it was done due to some engineering challenge with supplying a hungry CPU with power when it is coming solely from battery. Until Lenovo explains what is going on and why it’ll be open for speculation.
Lenovo appears to be working on the problem. They have already published one BIOS that improves the throttling and I assume they are still working on further improvement. They have their senior Social Media folks and moderators involved in the threads. See Lenovo W Series Forum area. There is quite a bit of activity in the threads there.
I installed the v1.30 BIOS at the end of last month and can’t really tell much different on my machine with my typical usage models. I haven’t traveled the past few weeks so I haven’t been running on battery power. I did do a few quick tests three weeks ago and on my machine the CPU clock speed range is 800-1500 MHz on battery. I did notice some bugs are still present on sleep/resume so I assume Lenovo is well aware of them and the reason I think they aren’t done with further improvement.
There are couple of other rather large threads at the Lenovo site. Thankfully I am not seeing any issues like those that are being reported.
Heart attack time. There’s nothing worse than reviewing a Windows Server 2003 event log and seeing row after row of red X application event log entries. This is especially true for something like a bunch of nastygrams indicating group policy is failing on your Active Directory (AD) Domain Controller (DC). It happened on my DC. I went to do my daily review of the logs and sure enough, I had a whole screen of red X events. In fact, the events were occurring every couple of minutes. The exact messages I was getting are at http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;830676 The 1030 and 1058 events are pretty well documented although the actual source of the problem can be VERY elusive.
My DC is similar in design to a Small Business Server (SBS) 2003 implementation. In fact, I plan to move to SBS eventually. My DC is a tri-homed server running ISA 2004 SP1, Exchange 2003 SP1, etc. The ISA server is using the perimeter template and I’ve customised the rules, networks, protocols, etc. rather extensively. I’m like you and seem to always be fiddling with stuff. My most recent set of tweaks were related to DNS so I figured I’d butchered something up and hosed AD.
When reviewing some of the KB articles on the 1030 and 1058, I spent time reviewing the DNS implementation. I was pretty confident it was correct so I started looking at the other potential sources or culprits of this error. I looked at the registry, checked to make sure services are running, checked service dependencies, etc., etc., etc. Nothing seemed to work. Now I’m getting nervous. I’m thinking my SBS implementation might be happening sooner than I thought.
Then I noticed something in http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;314494 that I had blown off. Down at the bottom of the KB, it mentions File and Print Sharing being disabled on the network interface. I thought, surely this can’t be the reason I’m seeing all of the messages. After all, the internal LAN interface has File and Print turned on. The only place I turned F and P off was the WAN interface. So, I turned it back on and cleared the application event log. Time to grab a cup of coffee. I come back a few minutes later and click refresh… sure enough, no events. Kewl. So I surf the web, check email, etc. I come back to check about 20 minutes later… F$&% !!! I couldn’t believe that one little check box caused so much trouble. Geez I was happy. Time to relax. Screw the coffee, where’s my margarita?
Moral of the Story: Don’t Mess With Windows.
As is tradition on this blog, I like to write about my first impressions with new hardware. Yesterday at about 8am I received the HP Elitebook 8440p. This machine is HP’s high end professional 14” laptop and I was eager to tear into it and see how it handles the duties of my normal mix of operating systems and applications. Unfortunately, I have a day job so the “24 hour” report is a little late. About the only time that is going to ever really happen is when I get a delivery on Friday afternoon.
Brushed Metal
When I unpacked the HP 8440p, I instantly recalled the cold steel feel of my MacBook Pro. Sleek and cool to the touch. I really like the chassis. It feels like it’s made for business and will hold up well. Slightly heavy but solid.
The top LCD panel is brushed metal and looks very professional. The bottom of the machine is a combination of plastic and metal and feels very solid. I haven’t yet cracked open the case to see the innards, but I expect to see a solid frame on the inside because the machine feels very rigid.
I will take pictures of the machine later, but for now you should know the 8440p has a DVD drive, eSATA/USB combo port, RJ-11 and RJ-45 ports, and a smartcard reader on the right side. The back has power, DisplayPort and VGA. The left side has 3xUSB 2.0 ports, IEEE 1394 4 pin, mic, audio out and 54mm ExpressCard slot. The front has a Ricoh multi card memory stick reader slot and speakers. I must say I like the layout all the way around the machine. The bottom includes access to the primary hard drive bay, one of two SoDIMM slots, and access to slots for wireless modules.
False Start
You know that saying, know your audience? I roared with laughter when I hit the power button and the top-of-the-line HP Elitebook 8440p started booting through the Windows XP setup process. Where’s my magnet? I played along and let the machine do it’s thing because I was busy on conference calls anyway. About halfway through the process I decided to check the box and see if a disk set was there. Sure enough, there was a disk set for Windows XP and Windows 7 Pro. Both 32 bit. I knew I wasn’t going to create a x86 disk set to I let the install complete. I sniffed it and it smelled like a 32 bit OS so I hit the power button and grabbed my Windows 7 Enterprise x64 DVD.
When the going gets tough, the tough head to the downloads area for the OEM. Fortunately HP has been doing a great job for years in this department. Better than most OEMs in fact. The HP 8440p drivers and software area is well organized and easily understood. I downloaded all of the Windows 7 x64 drivers in anticipation of the install for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.
The BIOS and Windows 7 x64 Clean Install
As you might have guessed, I wasted no time in throwing in the Windows 7 DVD and nuking the factory installed WinXP x86 image. Before installing Windows, I took some time reviewing the BIOS settings to confirm they were set the way I prefer. I made subtle changes. I enabled the TPM chip, RAID controller, and tweaked a few more settings like boot order.
Windows 7 installed without issue although I made one change after the fact. I decided to shrink the Win7 partition and create a 40GB partition for a Windows Server install. I didn’t get the HP Upgrade Bay hard drive adaptor so I wanted to checkout R2 in the meantime.
As expected, Windows 7 installed without issue but the ethernet and wireless card devices weren’t working using the Windows 7 DVD inbox drivers. The downloaded drivers resolved that issue. This is beginning to become a familiar theme with the machines that came out six months after Windows 7 released. Keep in mind that the image you receive from HP works, and the drivers for custom images are on hp.com so there’s no real problem here.
I did hit a couple of issues with Windows Server 2008 R2. First, you must manually install the ethernet driver using the .inf file that was unpacked. This is the same process I documented with the ThinkPad W500 and T400 Windows Server instructions on my blog. Nearly Identical. Hint hint.
Second, don’t bother trying the NVIDIA video drivers with Windows Server. The will install but they don’t work on my machine. I have reported it to HP and will update this post, or my final post if I get a resolution. This has important implications. Windows Server video support is really required for the Microsoft field employees so we have control over multimon and projector scenarios. I’m sure it will get resolved, but I don’t know if it will happen before i return the machine.
Likes and Dislikes
I’ll document the specs of the HP Elitebook 8440p eval unit in a minute, but I am going to deviate from my normal modus operandi for a bit. The reason is simple. I have some pretty well defined notions of what I like in a machine. The 8440p has some. It’s missing others. And considering my wife took a place to Florida and back today and left her ThinkPad T400, you can imagine I am doing a side-by-side comparison while I backup her machine.
The machine I received has the Intel® Core™ i7-620M Processor (2.66 GHz, 4 MB L3 cache) CPU, the Intel Mobile Intel® QM57 Express chipset, I assume 4 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 SDRAM although the score didn’t seem like 1333MHz memory, 320 GB 7200 rpm SATA II hard drive, 14.0-inch diagonal LED-backlit HD+ anti-glare screen, NVIDIA NVS 3100 graphics with 512 MB dedicated gDDR3 video memory, 6 cell battery and weighing in at about 6 pounds.
First up, the keyboard. I could get used to the 8440p keyboard, but the trackpad is offset too far to the left. It throws me and everything else off. I also want a backlit keyboard. Or at least the ability to light the keyboard without a USB accessory. If you live on the laptop keyboard, this is a serious consideration. The key placements around the keyboard are very foreign to me right now. I am having a hard time finding the END, DEL, FN and other keys.
I’m pretty spoiled with the ThinkPad keyboards I’ve been using for the past five years. Evaluate this aspect of your purchases carefully. If you plan to use the keyboard a lot, choose carefully. If you plan to use the machine in a docking station with an external keyboard, this may not be a big deal.
Next is the screen. I really dig the 1600x900 resolution on the 14” widescreen. However, the HP screen isn’t bright or clear enough. That needs to be resolved with a better LCD panel in my opinion.
By comparison, the ThinkPad T400 1440x900 screen is awesome. Super bright (250 nits) and clear. HP should improve the screen to that level. At the current screen brightness and quality, it’s too grainy and I’m not sure I would be happy long term. Reminds me of the 1920x1200 T61p screen I have. I have never been satisfied with that screen either.
The Calpella based laptops are knocking down some pretty good performance numbers. The 8440p is no exception but you can see, a couple of areas could use improvement.
First, the memory score at right isn’t that good. A DDR3 machine should be scoring in the upper sixes or lower 7’s range if you are using good memory. See my W510 score for an example. I had the W510 loaded with Kingston memory when I ran that test to get that WEI score.
Second, notice the GPU scores. They aren’t exactly stellar. I don’t know if this is the hardware or the driver but either way it’s a little disappointing to see a score lower than my ThinkPad T61p from two chipset generations ago. This might have been a conscience decision to reduce heat and battery consumption. I’ll know more when I test the 8540w. It was certainly the case for the ThinkPad W510. Lower than expected GPU scoring.
The hard drive score is very normal for a 320GB 7200rpm rotational disk. The HP Elitebook 8440p model I received included a Seagate Momentus 320GB drive. The SATA controller in the 8440p is a Intel SATA RAID controller with support for RAID 0 or RAID 1. When I receive the upgrade bay hard drive adaptor, I will tear the machine down and drop two 500GB drives in the machine and see what it can really do. If you don’t want to go the RAID route, plan on using a good SSD drive for improved I/O performance.
Power and Sound
Power management and fan noise is becoming increasingly important. The HP Elitebook 8440p lasted for 3.5 hours last night on the balanced Windows 7 power plan. I didn’t tweak the plan at all. I didn’t use the LCD panel on full brightness. I had it knocked down a couple of notches from the top brightness setting.
The fan noise throughout the day yesterday was more than acceptable. It’s nowhere near silent, but it isn’t loud either. You should get used to having fan noise on a Quad core laptop. I haven’t performed any seriously taxing chores like encoding HD video, but even when the fan did spin up to higher levels it wasn’t obnoxious.
That’s it for now. I’ll test more stuff as long as I have the machine, but at soon as the 15.6” 8540w shows up, I’ll probably shift to it for longer term testing. Whenever that happens I’ll write a closing post on this machine and include some pics.
[Update for 3/11] I discovered the keyboard light at the top of the LCD panel. Very similar to the ThinkPad lights that shine down on the keyboard. I would prefer backlit keyboard keys.
[Update for 3/15] I decided the likelihood of me keeping this machine for 30 days is slim to none. I am supposed to receive the HP Elitebook 8540w this week so if that happens, I am going to return the 8440p and let someone else play with it. There hasn’t been any changes in my opinion of the machine. The keyboard is too foreign to me and I really don’t want to get used to it unless I decide to have Microsoft buy me one for my refresh in July.
This evening I was playing around with my new Canon G11 and I decided to take some pictures of the HP Elitebook 8440p. The pics started out as large widescreen RAW pictures. I then converted, cropped and compressed them. Hope you like the result. Someday I’ll buy some lighting systems and drapes so the hardware porn is better. In the meantime, these will have to do. Like I did for the Lenovo ThinkPad W510, there’s some commentary to go with each pic. As before, your browser will likely give you a scaled view of the pic. Click the picture to zoom in for the actual detail and dust particles.
If you look closely at the top of the LCD bezel, you can see the webcam, the little square light button and two shiny things. Those shiny things are protrusions that are used by the lid fastening and clamping mechanics. They go down into the gray round slots just to the left and right of the trackpad bottom.
That’s it for now. Thought you might enjoy the photo tour of the device since it seems the hardware vendors never seem to provide good hardware porn these days.
See http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsexperience/archive/2008/09/18/life-without-walls-wallpapers-for-your-pc.aspx for some cool wallpapers to cover your desktop. Seems a bit ironic to me.
For those of you running Microsoft Virtual Server, we have a new treat in store for you. Originally developed by Paul Despe then enhanced by Matthijs ten Seldam, VMRCPlus is a new VM client display and management tool. This tool will be available shortly on the Microsoft download center, TechNet online download centers, and in the companion disk of a new book written by Robert Larson & Janique Carbone. As with most if not all of our resource kit type tools, there is no support for the tool. However, here's a list of the goodies in the tool in case you are brave enough:
Download @ http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=80adc08c-bfc6-4c3a-b4f1-772f550ae791&DisplayLang=en
[UPDATE 1] The download link has been updated on 7/2/2007 to point to the official location on the microsoft.com download center as promised. Matthijs also has a blog now for questions. Enjoy.
[Update 2] In reference to the questions about the security model, see the post at http://blogs.technet.com/matthts/archive/2007/07/10/vmrcplus-and-authentication.aspx. It probably isn't what you want to hear, but there you have it.
Kingston Technology was kind enough to sent some evaluation 4GB SoDIMMs to me for installation and testing. They arrived a little later than expected this week but were sitting on the front porch when I got home tonight. They are now installed and I thought a quick screenshot might be in order. As you can see, the overall speed rating from the Windows Vista WinSAT assessment test is the same, but I have twice the capacity as before.
I’ll be putting them through their paces as much as possible over the next few days before I head to TechEd 2008. I need to finish getting through some UNIX interop content first thing in the morning then I’ll start building out an environment with some teeth.
What’s the current laptop world record for the number of Windows Vista virtual machines that are executing? Might be fun to put up a number before my flight.
See http://shop.kingston.com/partsinfo.asp?ktcpartno=KTL-TP667/4G or click the pic above for the Kingston ecommerce store price on the memory I received.
I’ve had the Lenovo ThinkPad W510 for nearly a month and it’s time to send my evaluation units back next week. I completed nearly every test I could think of so I thought I would run down some impressions on the machine. I really couldn’t decide on my approach to this, so I am going to start with a run down on the chassis then get into the nitty gritty details of some test results. The ThinkPad W510 faired very nicely but there were a couple of areas that need work. More on those later.
Photos and Comments on ThinkPad W510
I took a number of pictures of the ThinkPad W510. Nearly all of them turned out really well. I wanted to capture some shots of key areas of the machine. I also stacked one of my ThinkPad T61p’s on top of it so you could compare the dimensions, port layouts, thickness, etc.
When looking at the top down view, you can clearly see the new little bumps on the trackpad at the bottom of the pic. I prefer the smooth trackpad on my T61p. You can also see the color calibration eye sensor next to the fingerprint reader. I believe this will be present on all of the FDH screen models. Moving up the unit you can see the speaker grills left and right of the keyboard. I believe this is also an air intake because the grill is larger than the speakers. Further up the pic on the bottom of the LCD bezel you can see two microphones. They work really well though not well enough for podcasting in my opinion. The webcam is present in the top of the bezel.
The back shot is interesting because you can see the W510 is wider than the T61p (or W500). Sorry the pic is a little blurry. You can see the yellow powered USB 2.0 port on the left side with the analog modem RJ-11 port. Who uses a modem in this day and age? They should have dropped it and moved the RJ-45 Ethernet port there. Notice the 9 cell battery on both units is roughly the same size and extends the same amount. The right side of the back shot shows the differences in the cooling grill and it’s pretty obvious the W510 is slightly thinker than the T61p above it.
Following around to the left side you can clearly see the difference in the cooling exhaust. The W510 does a phenomenal job of cooling. Items of interest on this side include the DisplayPort port, two blue Superspeed USB 3.0 ports, a combination USB/eSATA port, IEEE 1394a port, and if you look real close, the location for a smartcard reader if the option was ordered. My units didn’t have that, but it would certainly be an option I’d want. Therefore, the Lenovo smartcard reader wasn’t tested. The little switch is the wireless kill switch. Notice on the T61p stacked on top that it has both the mic and audio out jacks.
There is nothing along the front of the unit other than the lid release switch. The right side of the W510 is however very interesting in good and bad ways. Again, the T61p is stacked on top for reference to the W510 underneath. Notice on the right side that the two USB ports the T61p has were replaced by the Ethernet RJ-45 port. I am not very happy with that particular change. As I mentioned, I would have moved the RJ-45 port to the back and dropped the RJ-11 all together. Another peeve is on the right side. The audio out and mic jacks were replaced with a single combo jack. That particular change rendered all of my headsets useless. More on digital audio later. Also present on the right side is the 34mm ExpressCard slot just above the memory card reader. And last but definitely not least is the 12.7mm Ultrabay. More on it with some close-up shots in a minute.
The bottom of a laptop is always interesting to me. In years past you would see makers use the bottom for intake or exhaust cooling. That’s a real bummer when you are using a machine on your lap, the couch or other surfaces that aren’t conducive to airflow. The W510 has lots of little slits in the chassis for airflow but it all appears to be intake only. I could not discern any exhaust. We’ll talk more about cooling later. Notice on the bottom is the access to the primary hard drive bay. I prefer the side access for the prime hard drive that is the standard in the T61p, W500 and T400 but it isn’t a show stopper. Now that hard drive capacity is at 500GB, I don’t need to swap the primary drive as often for a demo drive, or when using Windows Server 2008 R2. Also present on the bottom is access to two of the four SoDIMM memory slots. The other two slots are underneath the keyboard. You can also see in the pic of the bottom that I took pictures of the 4389-2UU model which is the 15.6” FHD Multi-touch screen model.
Ultrabay III
It seems every generation of a 15.x” ThinkPad requires a new set of peripherals for the Ultrabay and the ThinkPad W510 is no exception. It’s probably for the better in some cases because there are differences in the SATA speeds and this generation has new goodies up it’s sleeve.
Take a look at the picture of the Ultrabay. In this pic I pulled the DVD burner and placed it on top of the W510. On top of the DVD drive is the Serial ATA Hard Drive Bay Adapter III Part number 43N3412. This hard drive adaptor gives you the ability to add a second hard drive to the machine. Notice the thickness of the 43N3412 adaptor. It is not 12.7mm. Instead it is designed to be used in both the W510 and a host of other machines that have 9.5mm slots. See the pic of it inserted in the W510. It works but I would have preferred Lenovo created a hard drive adaptor specifically for the W510 that fills the gap and fits more snuggly.
The Screen
Now that we’ve seen the outside and did a little tour of it, let me give you a few impressions of the rest of the machine, performance, etc. My impressions of the screen since the first day hasn’t changed much. It’s a really nice screen. Bright and clear. It’s actually slightly brighter than the HD+ 1600x900 resolution screen present in the other 4389-23U evaluation model I have. Not drastically so, but it’s ever so slightly noticeable during the day time.
You’ll probably be disappointed I did not test the multi-touch screen extensively. I don’t have a need for it on a laptop at this time so I had to make some cuts in the stuff I wanted to try. Therefore, you’ll need to find another review that can give you a better idea of the accuracy of the screen. If I was still a developer, this would be a no brainer. Get the multi-touch screen.
With that in mind, I wish the machine they sent me to look at was the FHD 1920x1080 screen without the multi-touch. The HD+ screen appears to cut glare slightly better than the FHD multi-touch screen. I’m sure this is due to coatings and screen construction. If all things are equal, I’m sure the non multi-touch FHD is killer.
I have had several 15.4” 1920x1200 resolution Dell and Lenovo laptops. Not a big fan of that high a resolution on a 15.4” LCD screen. This creates a preference predicament. Should you or I buy the 15.6” screen with a 1920x1080 or 1600x900 resolution? 1680x1050 on a 15.4” screen is my preferred res. I guess I’m thinking I would end up going with the 1920x1080 FHD screen and just set the DPI to 110-125% to deal with font sizes and such. Not perfect for my eyes, but it’s better than locking myself to 1600x900 and losing vertical resolution. This is a REALLY subjective decision and I would highly recommend looking closely at machines on the market before you choose.
One other thing on the screen and the video supported by the W510. The ThinkPad W510 lets you create a dual monitor extended desktop very easily without having to buy an expensive docking station. I purchased a DisplayPort to DVI cable that allowed me to connect the W510 to 27” and 24” LCD panels and drive them both at 1920x1200. The cable at $22 seems like a no brainer until you save enough pennies for a dock. If you have a desk at home and your company office, this will definitely be something you’ll want to consider.
The Keyboard
I have read a few reports of displeasure with the keyboard on the W510. ThinkPad fans are not forgiving when it comes to the legendary keyboard on ThinkPad models and why should they be? We use them all the time. I was watching an unboxing video from one owner on the internet and the very first thing he tested was the keyboard. In that particular video the person doing the testing seemed a little dismayed at some slight flex under the new oversize ESC key. This appears to be by design. That location draws air in for the CPU and GPU cooling. The flex is barely there. Nothing to worry about in my opnion.
The 4389-2UU unit I received had a defective keyboard and I am apparently not alone. The keyboard on my unit was dropping characters I typed. Since that was the model of the two I was using most, I just swapped the keyboard with the 4389-23U. Problem solved. If your W510 exhibits this behavior, don’t worry. A quick call to Lenovo for replacement should gets things resolved asap. Other than that, the keyboard is great.
One other thing for you developers, you can now swap the functions in the BIOS for the CTRL and FN keys. A lot of developers I know use the CTRL key for macros and such in Visual Studio and get annoyed that on the ThinkPads this key isn’t bottom left. The FN key is bottom left so it’s a source of frustration for them. No more. Easily solved now.
The new Calpella laptops really have it all. I would always recommend in the past that if you do a lot of HD video encoding work, you need to purchase a Quad Core desktop machine. That decision is no longer cut and dry. As you can see in the Windows 7 WEI I captured at the beginning of the eval period, this machine really flies with the right equipment inside.
When I did that screenshot I had my Intel SSD drive in the 4389-2UU along with 16GB of DDR3 RAM. The GPU isn’t going to get you top honors on the laptop scene but it’s still a very respectable GPU. I have not tested any games or Blu-ray playback because my eval unit didn’t come with the Blu-ray drive option.
One thing I did pay particular attention to is the speed of the drives and their interfaces. I did a lot of testing moving data back and forth with the latest rotational drives from Hitachi and Seagate as well as my Intel Gen 2 SSD. I tested from the primary hard drive bay to the Ultrabay hard drive adaptor and back. I tested the eSATA connection. I tested the USB 3.0 ports. I was very happy with the results. The I/O I observed was 2-5 times faster than my ThinkPad T61p depending on the hardware combination used. The fastest combination was the SSD drive in the primary bay working with the USB 3.0 enclosure and drive. But the Ultrabay hard drive adaptor and drive was right there in the game as well. So if you want two drives to use with your W510, it’s probably a logical choice for most people.
The Quad Core i7 really shines for CPU intensive chores like video encoding. It actually beat my Dell XPS 630i in some tests I ran and the Dell has the Intel Core 2 Quad Q9400 in it. It only beat the Dell by a couple of minutes in each test. However, the Dell final results were superior. The ThinkPad W510 video captured from my camera was faulty. I’m suspicious of an issue with the IEEE 1394 connector at this point. There are a couple of other strange unresolved issues I observed as well. More later on those.
Battery Life
It’s only appropriate to discuss battery life right after talking about the performance because they are certainly intertwined. I don’t use battery power much but I did several full cycle tests with the W510. This was after setting the CPU performance settings in the BIOS to AUTO instead of max performance. I also used the Lenovo Power Manager to set the performance profile to Maximum Battery Life. This of course sets the screen brightness so low it’s nearly unusable so I did crank it back up to about 12 so I could still use the screen and machine comfortably.
In all of my tests I was getting about 3 hours of battery life. This is doing normal stuff like using email, web browser, Word, Excel, etc. The battery in the W510 has a FRU P/N of 42T4799 with a ASM P/N of 42T4798. It also has 55+ inside a red dot. I assume this is a 9 cell battery but I could not find any information to confirm this.
So there’s a trade-off. You want a powerful machine? Be prepared to pay for it in a couple of ways. Battery life seems to be one of those areas. This isn’t a 10” netbook but the specs in the tabook.pdf do say the 9-cell battery gives you 4.9 hours of battery life. It would be good to know if the battery I have is a 6-cell or 9-cell. If it is a 9-cell, I would sure like to know how to get 1.9 more hours of life, or how 4.9 was arrived at.
What Else?
There were very few surprises with the ThinkPad W510. Most of what I learned and wrote about in the first twenty four hours remains true today. At that time I reported some strange issues with the USB 3.0 ports. So far I have discovered three different devices that prevent the W510 from booting if they are plugged into the USB 3.0 ports at power up. This was reproduced on both of my W510’s as well as another in Seattle. The case is open with Lenovo engineering. The current workaround is to not have anything plugged into the USB 3.0 ports at power on.
Let’s talk about my headset adventure next. Because Lenovo combined the mic and audio out jack, I could no longer use the headsets I’ve been using the past four years. I figured this was not a big deal and it was time to move to the digital age of USB headsets.
I tried a couple of different headsets from Plantronics and Creative but they didn’t work well. I kept getting this buzzing feedback in the recordings. So I tried a different approach. I picked up a SIIG Soundwave Pro 7.1 USB card that allowed me to connect the headsets I’ve been using for years. Same problem. Buzzing in the podcast recordings. I tried everything I could think of for a couple of days. I tried all four of the USB ports and a variety of settings in software. I ran out of time before the MVP Summit trying to resolve that so I returned the headphones and hardware to Fry’s.
The third oddity seems to be the 4 pin IEEE 1394 port. I cannot capture from my Sony HD video camera across firewire to the W510 without the video getting garbled with artifacts. I confirmed the source tape is good. I tried two different i.Link 4 pin to 4pin firewire cables to rule that out. I tried the video capturing product that came with the W510 and Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum Edition 9. The same camera and tape worked fine with my Dell XPS 630i. The Dell has a 6 pin connector for it’s IEEE 1394 interface so the only difference was the cable. Considering most of the video cameras today use an internal hard drive and don’t need to be captured from a raw tape, this probably isn’t a huge issue. If you use firewire devices, be sure to test them.
I haven’t reported the sound and firewire issues to Lenovo but will soon. Hopefully they can reproduce the problems and provide a fix or workaround.
Oh, and I did install SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 so see how that went. As expected, it installed but the NVIDIA video chipset wasn’t recognized, nor were the Intel network cards. With no time left to track those down, I reset the machine back to the factory image for return.
Things Not tested
Since I don’t yet have a 30” LCD flat panel monitor, I could not verify the claim in the specs the machine supports a resolution of 2560x1600 using DisplayPort @60Hz. I have seen at least one report from a twitter follower that indicates he was unable to achieve that resolution across Dual Link.
I didn’t test the ExpressCard slot. I don’t have any 34mm ExpressCard devices and probably won’t have a need for one. With the improvements in Superspeed USB 3.0 throughput, and a built-in eSATA port, I don’t have a big need for anything else in that slot.
I no longer use Bluetooth so that was not tested with mice or anything else. The W510’s I received didn’t have built-in WWAN cards so that was not tested.
The model W510’s I received didn’t come with RAID support although according to the specs and the hardware maintenance manual, the feature does exist. This was really disappointing to me when I noticed it because I would love to test RAID 0 or 1 in this bad boy. Looks like you need to order the W510 4389-24U model or some derivative to get the RAID support.
Since the models I received didn’t have the smartcard reader or blu-ray drive, I obviously couldn’t test them. The smartcard reader compatibility with my Microsoft card is a necessity since they dropped the PCMCIA slot. I would probably need to move to a USB key FOB if the reader doesn’t work. We aren’t yet allowed to use fingerprint scanners as a sole source of multi factor authentication so I didn’t test that either.
The Lenovo ThinkPad W510 is a solid machine. The case and construction are awesome as usual and the engineering around the cooling is unbelievable. Performance is killer with the exception being the video chipset. The NVIDIA® Quadro® FX880M GPU certainly turns in a respectable score but it isn’t going to be the top of the food chain in the laptop market.
This machine runs Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V very well. Windows Server will install and run from the Ultrabay drive so the W510 certainly meets most of my technical needs. There are a few improvements I’d like to see, but all in all it looks like the new Calpella based platform is off to a good start.
I’m due to replace my ThinkPad T61p in the July timeframe but I certainly won’t make a decision until I get my hands on the ThinkPad T410s. I’m considering a thinner and lighter machine for my next full time production machine and on paper the T410s looks attractive. But the W510 has USB 3.0 and other goodies. Decisions decisions.
I hope you found this and the previous two blog posts on the ThinkPad W510 informative. Happy hunting. Let me know if you have any questions.
As many of you are aware, I actually test our stuff to make sure it's working. I signup for my webcasts and test that process. I signup for our live events and test that. I have a TechNet subscription. I do this so I can see what you see and hopefully head off any issues.
So I grabbed one of the Launch 2007 Resource Kits at my show on Thursday and just got around to testing the Office 2007 download. I encountered the following instructions:
Office 2007 Product Download Procedure To install your copy of Office Professional 2007 and Office Groove 2007, please follow these steps: Click on the link below for the product you'd like to download and install - a new window will open. On the product page, click "Try now for FREE!". Log-in to Passport (Windows Live ID). Please provide Registration information and click "Continue". On the download page, click "Download Now". Please use the Product Key provided in the kit you received at the launch event to unlock your product. Disregard the trial Product Key presented on this page*. Product download times will vary. Once the download completes, click "Continue". You will receive an email during the download process – please DISREGARD the Product Key in that email and ONLY use the Product Key provided in the kit you received at launch.
Office 2007 Product Download Procedure
To install your copy of Office Professional 2007 and Office Groove 2007, please follow these steps:
The net net is that the key you received with your kit, is the non time bombed key to use. Sorry for any confusion on this. I guess we decided to leverage the download area which is very very fast. I received the download at 1.8meg per second. Smokin.
I recently had the opportunity to take a look at the Lenovo ThinkPad W500 (model 4061-2KU). This machine is really similar to my ThinkPad T61p in many ways, but there are some improvements that have been made in some key areas. Click the image at right for a high resolution image of the ThinkPad W500.
Video
The W500 I received has the “switchable graphics.” What this really means is that is contains two video chipsets and you can swtich back and forth between them. The W500 I tested has the ATI™ Mobility FireGL™ V5700 and the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD video chipsets. The Intel chipset is used for battery consumption. The ATI chipset is used for high performance graphics.
Screen
The W500 I looked at came with the 15.4" (391mm) WUXGA (1920x1200) color, anti-glare, CCFL backlit, 175 nits, 16:10 aspect ratio, 500:1 contrast ratio LCD screen. This particular screen is slightly dimmer than the WSXGA+ T61p’s I have but frankly I end up turning the brightness down on them anyway.
Making a choice between a screen with a native resolution of 1920x1200 and one with a native res of 1680x1050 is a really personal subjective decision. I’m a firm believer that most people would pick the brighter 1680x1050 screen, but you really need to see them side-by-side and make the decision on your own. The screen on the W500 I received also has an integrated webcam (although I did not test it).
Memory
The W500 uses DDR3 memory and came configured with two 2GB memory sticks for a total of 4GB. For those of you wanting to upgrade the amount to 8GB, keep in mind that means upgrading the OS to 64bit and finding some 4GB PC3-8500 1066MHz DDR3 204 pin memory sticks. Good luck with that. The good news is that those are the same sticks used by the ThinkPad W700. That’s also the bad news because the allocation of those sticks are going to the W700 Quad bad boys right now.
Ports
Lenovo moved the ports around on the machine (as compared to the T61p). A DisplayPort is new for the W500 and like the T61p it includes three USB ports, IEEE 1394, Ethernet, VGA connector, and modem. Oddly, the modem port is now where the T61p USB jacks were. Does anyone still use analog modem? I don’t really get that. I guess if you need a fax it’s there but I can’t remember the last time I used dial-up.
All of the USB ports were moved to the left side of the machine and are now vertical instead of horizontal. This could present some problems for those of you that are using fat USB sticks or cell cards. I am now carrying a USB extender cable for this very reason.
CPU
Back to the meat of the machine. The proc is a Intel® Core™ 2 Duo processor T9600 1066MHz system bus 6MB L2 cache processor. In short, it’s fast. Much faster than my lowly T61p T7500. It’ll be interesting to see if Lenovo decides to add one of the mobile Quad Core CPU’s later. I have no idea if they will but considering how well engineered the ThinkPad cooling is you would think they would want to compete in the 15.4” space. For now, if you want a Quad, you’ll have to step up to the big brother W700.
Case, Keyboard and Power
The W500 case construction is rock solid like the T61p and as usual, the keyboard rocks. For those of you that want the CTRL key where the FN key is, sorry, Lenovo is still doing their lone wolf thing. As I understand it, this mostly affects developers that use the CTRL key a lot. As you might expect, the W500 weighs about the same as the T61p. All of my T61p’s have the 9 cell bateries but considering how little I use battery power, I’ll probably replace them with 6 cells and reduce the weight some.
A lot of emphasis has been placed on green computing with this machine and there are all sorts of power management profiles and “battery stretch” capabilities. I haven’t really had a chance to test how long I could really run on battery power but they advertise 9 hours with the 9 cell battery. If that’s true, you could fly from Dallas to Hawaii on battery power. Now I’m guessing that life doesn’t include DVD playback, but it sounds like you’ll have plenty of email checking juice when using the proper profiles.
OS Checks
As expected, the machine arrived with Windows Vista Business x86. I created the factory disk set and tested that the disks would put the machine back to factory shipped specs. You should be aware that the factory config will partition your drive into three partitions for recovery and rollback purposes.
I flattened the machine and tested that Windows Server 2008 x64 would install and run Hyper-V. It does. I had a bit of an issue getting the Ethernet driver to load for Windows Server 2008, but I managed to force it. I reported this to Lenovo and asked our internal team to look at it and see if they can improve that a bit.
I also flattened it again and installed Windows Vista Enterprise x64 with all of the drivers and software. The goal was to install Vista from scratch and install the drivers and software to see if there were any gotchas. I didn’t see any but my testing was pretty brief. I was mostly interested in making sure the networking worked, video switching worked, power management worked, etc. Like I said, I didn’t spot any glaring issues on the core stuff but I didn’t test over a long term.
I did not test Windows XP or any Linux variants like Novel SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. Sorry, I just didn’t have the time for this round of testing and I need to get this machine in the hands of some other folks.
If you are looking for a new machine and were worried about the replacement for the T61p, there’s no need to worry. As expected the Lenovo ThinkPad W500 is a rock solid machine and will be a contender in the corporate laptop market. It comes with an impressive set of credentials and I’m sure you’ll enjoy the W500 for several years. Buy with confidence.
There's been a considerable amount of discussion lately about Apple, our image, and if Microsoft employees should buy Apple products. There is no official policy that says I can't buy an iPod, iPhone or a Mac.
But how does this look to you?
Do you think more or less of me if I do? Do you care what kind of phone I use? What kind of message am I sending to you if I purchase the 3G iPhone 2? I mean after all, I'm a paid Microsoft Evangelist not an Apple Evangelist.
What does evangelist mean exactly? I always think it means I get to preach the Microsoft gospel. Praise the Lord!!! I like doing that. I have high confidence in our products. But I grew up being a Consultant with one of the "Big Six" integrators where I was a trusted advisor and always recommended the best product or solution for the customer.
I already have a Mac. My MacBook Pro is a Microsoft asset and I use it to understand where we are strong and weak relative to the competition. When I do reporting on that type of analysis, I really try to be fair in my judgements and trust me, the Windows group hasn't been pleased with everything I've said. Neither have the Apple enthusiasts.
So, should I be evil and buy yet another Apple product or drive a stake in the ground and never buy again?
Master Chief Dual-Wields His Way to Windows Vista
February 9, 2006
"Halo 2," the award-winning sequel to the instant classic "Halo: Combat Evolved" to make its PC debut on the Windows Vista platform
"Halo 2," the game that redefined first-person combat and multiplayer action for millions of gamers worldwide, is set to explode onto PCs exclusively for Windows Vista. "Halo 2" for Windows Vista will be developed by a dedicated Microsoft Game Studios team in partnership with Bungie Studios.
Only for Windows Vista, "Halo 2" will offer gamers both the single-player campaign and multiplayer experience of the original, as well as the additional maps offered in the "Halo 2 Multiplayer Map Pack." Gamers will also have the exciting opportunity to build, create and customize their own multiplayer levels.
"Halo: Combat Evolved" and its sequel, "Halo 2," have achieved phenomenal success on the Xbox video game platform as gamers around the world follow the saga of Master Chief in his battle against the Covenant forces. In 2003, the original "Halo" roared onto Windows PCs. In "Halo 2" for Windows Vista, the action picks up where the first game ended. Master Chief, with the help of a small group of marines, has destroyed the religious artifact and artificial world known as "Halo," and is making his way back to Earth. There, he and the last surviving Earth forces will mount a titanic struggle against the marauding Covenant enemy. To date, the Halo franchise has sold more than 14.5 million games worldwide with over 600 million hours of multiplayer action logged across Microsoft’s Xbox Live online gaming service.
See http://www.xbox.com/en-US/press/2006/0206-halo2vista.htm for the complete press release.
See http://www.bungie.net/News/TopStory.aspx?story=halo2vistaannounce for more details on the project, job openings, etc.
Monday and Friday of last week was like Christmas. On Monday I received a HD video camera. On Friday I received the Archos 605 WiFi portable media player. I bought it for a couple of reasons. First, my wife was feeling like a second class citizen because she doesn't have one. And second, because I wanted to.
The Screen, Size and Feel
The Archos 605 I purchased is the 80GB, 4.3" widescreen model. It's slightly thinner than my Zen Vision W. I took some pictures of it next to some of my other players for comparison.
Comparison to the Sony PSP Comparison to the Apple iPod Video Comparison to the Creative Zen Vision W Pictured using built-in stand
Comparison to the Sony PSP
Comparison to the Apple iPod Video
Comparison to the Creative Zen Vision W
Pictured using built-in stand
The 4.3" screen is a touch screen. As a result, the screen does not have a glossy finish like the Zen, PSP or iPod. The screen itself seems rather rigid. I hope that means it's going to last a long time. So far I haven't found a big need to touch the screen much. You can do nearly everything with the menu button and directional keys. Because the screen is big, the unit isn't small. The native resolution for the screen is 800x480 pixels with 16 million colors. That's about twice the resolution of most of my other players and a bunch of colors although I haven't counted them all.
The actual size of the unit is 4.8'' long x 3.2'' wide x 0.75'' thick. It weighs 9 ounces which is twice what my 80GB iPod Video weighs. If you look at the pictures at http://www.archos.com/products/gen_5/archos_605wifi/download.html?country=us&lang=en, you'll notice the unit looks gray metallic (beaded in the close ups) with gray keys. Those pictures must have been an early prototype because my unit is slightly different. The keys on mine are white and the unit itself doesn't have the polished stainless steel finish like you see in flash animation on the main page. That's fine with me because I like the finish my unit has. It doesn't show fingerprints and it is easy to hold.
Video Playback and Battery Life
Out of the box it plays most if not all of the Windows Media Video and AVI files I have. I haven't tried any WMV HD. There are some optional plugins to add support for H.264 or MPEG-2 with AAC and AC3 respectively. I doubt I'll purchase those plugins. I'm ripping everything I have to DivX AVI or WMV and it plays them great.
I'm getting 5 hours of continuous video playback with default brightness and contrast settings. That's also with 2500k bit rate video. I'm wondering if I produce different video bit rates if I can reduce I/O to the hard drive and thus extend the battery life more. I don't think it's a big deal so I'll probably just continue doing what I'm doing. The last time I went to Hawaii, two movies was plenty so this should be sufficient.
Disk Capacity
The Archos 605 I have has the 80GB hard disk. To give you an idea, I already have 35 movies on it and the hard drive isn't even half full. To bring this into perspective, I can load the complete Harry Potter movie set, all of the Star Wars movies, the extended Lord of the Rings set, all of the Matrix movies, all of the Indiana Jones movies, all of the Aliens movies, and about 30 other movies. I'm in the process of doing that right now. Impressive eh? Let's see the 16GB Apple iPod Touch do that. No possible way.
In case you were wondering, the typical two hour movie is ripping to about a 1GB disk file. So I'll end up having about sixty to seventy movies on the disk when I'm done. The Creative Zen Vision W I have will hold a little less. Basically either of the devices will hold a killer collection of pictures, music and video.
Other Features
The Archos 605 comes with an assortment of other features. Some of those features are uninteresting to me, but might come in handy for other people. For instance, the 605 has a DVR Station option that allows you to record television programming. I already have HDTV recordings via my TiVo and Media Center PC so I don't really need yet another source of programming.
My player comes with WiFi and several networking options. For instance, I could purchase Opera and load it on the 605 and turn it into a cute little coffee shop surfing device. This is mildly interesting to me, but since I don't have a nationwide hotspot plan, I don't have a big need for this.
It appears the Archos 605 is running Samba or something to allow network browsing of shares on my homelan. According to the docs and features, it's also supposed to have streaming capabilities. Again, all of this stuff is kewl and all, but I'm using my 605 as a standalone portable media player.
The Archos 605 WiFi is a solid player and lives up to its billing so far. I purchased mine through Amazon.com when they went on sale (10% off). I also had a $35 gift card and got free shipping. I've only been playing with it a few days and so far I only dislike one thing which I plan to fix. The supplied charge cord sucks. The cord I'm talking about is the USB cord that allows syncing, charging or both. It charges extremely slow via USB. I need to find a quicker charging method.
The screen is fabulous and will work in "torch mode". In other words, you can really crank up the brightness and contrast. If you do, you'll knock some of the battery life off. For instance, I turned it up and it knocked the video playback time down to four hours fifteen minutes. If I buy an extra battery or quick charge method, I'll probably run the brightness somewhere less than torch, but something higher than default.
And in case you were wondering about my honey, she's getting the Zen Vision W. So I'm loading it with all of the mushy chick flicks and some of her dance videos. Shhhhhh, keep that a secret. It's a surprise.
You'll notice no comparison and only this brief mention of Zune. My Zune is Microsoft owned and I gave it to Bryan Von Axelson. He promised he was going to put it to good use. I'm waiting for the next generation Zune to show up.
[UPDATE] I spoke with Archos Technical Support about the charge times I'm seeing with this unit. It takes about eight hours to charge (when fully drained) if using the USB cord plugged into my laptop or desktop machines. That is apparently the norm. That doesn't really surprise me because USB doesn't supply that much power. So I ordered the battery dock pictured here at right. This little mini dock serves several functions. First, it does a quick charge of the battery in the unit. It also has a built-in battery which extends the video playback by another 4 hours (or so I'm told). I should know if any of that is true by this time next week. If so, it looks like I'm ready for a trip to an exotic location. Tahiti anyone?
[FINAL UPDATE] I received my Archos mini dock battery charger. bhphotovideo.com sells them for $39. It adds 4 hours to the playback time of the unit. Nine hours of nonstop video playback is pretty killer. Charging now takes less than four hours. I have forty movies on my Archos 605 WiFi player, so far. I think I am travel ready now. Grin.
FYI, I had to correct the link just above because apparently my source sold my battery doc for the wrong price then corrected the online catalog.
Last year I bought the ThinkPad T410s when the model with the Optimus graphics became available. It’s a great little machine so I was anxious to try the ThinkPad T420s with Optimus and compare the two. I’ve done that now and I thought you would be interested in some of my preliminary findings.
If you are looking for a powerful portable computer in a lightweight thin profile, look no further. The T420s is capable of housing three drives and running advanced server operating system software. However, the ThinkPad T420s has fair battery life. If you need to run unplugged for more than five hours, you are going to need to resort to using an additional battery in the Ultrabay.
Specification Notes
The ThinkPad T420s comes in several different flavors and I thought I’d begin by talking about the processor, screen, storage and other features. After I describe some of the technical features we’ll look at some photos then move on to battery life and performance.
The Proc
The processor choices range from the Intel i5 right on up to the dual core Intel® Core™ i7-2620M processor (2.70GHz, 4MB Cache, Intel Turbo Boost 2.0 (3.40GHz), DDR3 memory controller (up to 1333MHz), and Hyper Threading technology. I would have picked a different processor for the eval unit. I realize you want to put your foot forward with the fastest candidate, but fastest isn’t always best. The i7-2620m is extremely fast so for those of you that want something speedy, you won’t be disappointed.
I wonder what the battery life is like with the Intel® Core™ i5-2520M processor (dual-core, 2.50GHz, 3MB Cache), DDR3 memory controller (up to 1333MHz), Intel Turbo Boost 2.0 (3.20GHz), HT technology. Someone that has one needs to run some battery tests and let me know. My details for the tests I ran are below.
The screen that is on this model (4174-A21) is the new 16:9 aspect ratio 1600x900 HD+ native resolution panel. At 250 nits, it isn’t as bright as my T410s but that’s fine by me. I never crank the T410s to level 15 brightness anyway. Like all of the panels in the T and W line, it’s a standard business class screen with a matte finish. I like the 1600x900 resolution but I know my significant other would set the DPI to 125% right away.
There have been a number of internet forum comments on this screen. Some people describe the screen as having a screen door effect. On close inspection I can see some of what they are describing. As a standard viewing distance from the screen I really don’t discern the pixels much. I don’t know if there’s more than one supplier of the LCD screens but if there is, maybe I have the better screen.
For those of you that intend to use this machine with Hyper-V, the loss of vertical screen real estate is going to force you into some unnatural acts. Get used to turning off the toolbars and such on your VM client. You’ll probably need to auto hide the taskbar as well. This is the sacrifice you’ll have to make due to the new resolutions and form factors.
Storage Options
The ThinkPad T420s has three drive bays. Let me repeat that. Three. There are the two typical drive bays, one for a hard drive and one for an optical drive, but Lenovo got creative and added a micro SATA capability to the machine. The Intel Series 310 mSATA drives can be inserted into a micro PCI-E slot. This slot is normally used for a wireless broadband card, but if you have no need for an embedded card like that, now you can use it for high speed storage. More on that later when we talk about performance.
There is one thing to note about the primary storage bay. The bay is a 7mm height bay which does present a problem. Lenovo switched from the 1.8” form factor to a 2.5” wide drive, but it’s only 7mm high. The Intel Series 320 SSD drives can be ordered as 7mm models, or you can take the plastic spacer off the top of the 9.5mm Intel X-25m SSD drives. Warning: the cover screws need to be shorter after removing the spacer and I managed to scrounge four of them up from my stash of screws.
The drive that currently comes with the T420s is the second generation 160GB X-25M Intel SSD. I expect Lenovo will switch over to the Intel Series 320 drives soon but I have no idea when. I didn’t like the way Lenovo slapped the tape on the Intel case in order to give you a Mylar like pull tab for the drive. It really isn’t needed and it was already trying to come off my drive after a couple of inserts.
The third optical bay, also known as the Ultrabay is a standard size 9.5mm bay. Therefore you can use an Ultrabay caddy like the 43N3412. This gives you the ability to put yet another drive in the system. This particular caddy can be used in last years T and W series ThinkPad's as well as this years models. The bezel is quite small and will not cover the 12.7mm bay on the W510, W520, T520, or T420. Expect to see a small gap. Most people will use the 43N3412 with a high capacity hard drive but I’m sure that will change when 600GB SSD drives become more affordable.
There are two DDR3 SoDIMM slots in the T420s with easy access from the bottom of the machine. Today that means a max of 8GB of RAM but I have no doubt you can take the machine to 16GB with the right 8GB SoDIMM sticks. Someone want to send me two? Grin. The are prohibitively expense right now, but who knows, maybe they will be within reach by Christmas. We’ll see.
This time around I didn’t take pictures with my Canon G11. I found a treasure trove of Lenovo albums on Picasa. I downloaded the pics and stuck copies out on my server so they won’t move or disappear. Here are my comments on the chassis, keyboard, ports, etc.
Front - there really isn’t anything special about the front edge other than it’s pretty thin. It isn’t possible to see in the pic, but the front right portion of the machine is the slim battery. For this reason, you can’t simply add a 9 cell battery to the machine to improve battery life.
Right - the right side has the wireless on/off switch, Ultrabay with a DVD burner, and a security latch hole. As you can probably tell be looking at this pic, the machine is pretty darn thin.
Back - the back is interesting. You’ll notice the power port, Ethernet, USB 3.0 in blue, powered USB 2.0 in yellow, DisplayPort and a standard VGA port. Unfortunately Lenovo dropped the combo USB/eSATA port present on the T410s. I’m glad they added USB 3.0 but frankly I’m not that impressed with USB 3.0 speeds. I also hate having the USB ports on the back. It’s inconvenient.
Left - the left side shows a single USB 2.0 port, combo headphone/microphone jack, a spot for an ExpressCard 34mm slot or Ricoh Multcard reader, a smartcard reader slot (thank you!) and just below the smartcard reader slot is the cover to the 7mm drive bay.
Bottom - in the pic of the bottom, the top edge is the front of the machine. Therefore, looking at the top left, you see the 7mm bay cover and tell tale screw. Notice removing the cover provides pretty deep access into the bay. This is good because you don’t need the special mylar tabs and tape to remove drives. I like it. In the top right portion of the pic you see the outline for the slim battery. It’s really slim and as a result there isn’t much storage area for energy. This is probably the biggest flaw of the machine. In the middle of the pic you see the cover for the RAM slots. Inside that cover is also easy access to the mSATA/WWAN PCIE slot. Therefore installing RAM or a micro SATA drive is very easy.
Open - in the pic of the machine laid wide open, you can clearly see the keyboard layout. This is the design that started last year and has now carried over to this years models. I like it. I like the mic mute button. If you look closely at the top bezel of the screen you’ll see the 720p webcam with dual array mics on both sides. You’ll also notice if you look carefully the 16:9 screen size in the lid and the fat bezel below the screen. That honestly doesn’t bother me but some people are particular about such matters.
The speakers on the T420s seem louder than my T410s. That might be my imagination. The keyboard seems nice and quiet with no overly clacky tone and the keys themselves don’t feel mushy or cheesy. In other words, it’s a great keyboard though you Dell and HP users will have to get used to the FN and CTRL placement the first couple of weeks. The trackpad and trackpoint are fine but I still prefer to use a mouse whenever possible.
Lid - this picture is important for several reasons. I want to draw your attention to the thinness of the LCD screen and bezel. If you are in the habit of carrying your notebook by grabbing it by the LCD lid, don’t buy this machine. Either break your habit or you are going to crack a LCD panel. That lid is not designed as a handle. You were warned. Treat this machine with care.
Big Brother - I decided to include the T420 big brother shot. It’s important for several reasons. First, the T420 is really designed for most peoples needs. It’s a great combination of power AND battery life. Because it has standard sized bays, offers a 9 cell battery in that back, better port placement, and is still relatively small and light weight, you should strongly consider this machine. I hope I get a chance to evaluate one like I did the T410. There are a number of good reviews on the T420.
The one place the ThinkPad T420s falls down is battery life. I had been reading a few reviews and early owner comments on this and didn’t want to believe it until I had tested this machine. Unfortunately the machine I have didn’t fare well. On the first two tests I ran the battery life was 2 hours and 15-20 minutes.
I ran nearly identical tests on the T420s as I did on the ThinkPad W520. I made sure the BIOS settings were on Optimus and the battery settings were optimized for saving power. I used the miserly power plan settings in Power Manager and double checked the Control Panel settings for the Intel GPU, IE9, etc.
Like the W520 tests, I set the screen brightness at 10 and looped a .MP4 movie. Looping wasn’t really necessary since you are barely going to get through a single movie.
So what on earth is going on? Well, there are a couple of significant differences between the W520 powerhouse and the thin T420s. The size and capacity of the battery is the main one. The 66+ in the T420s only has 44Wh so there simply isn’t much there for real chores. Sure, you can probably get five hours of battery life with the screen turned off and everything else at idle, but that isn’t a realistic work load.
If you need more battery life, plan on purchasing the Ultrabay battery or another 66+ spare battery. They don’t currently offer a slice battery for the T420s though it is offered for the T420. The battery connector and placement is probably a key factor.
Another potential power suck in the T420s is the configuration I tested. Although I tested with the factory configuration and Windows 7 image, I did already have the mSATA drive installed in the PCIE slot. I don’t yet know how big of an impact this had but considering other reports are in line with mine, I’m thinking it had very little difference. I will eventually yank the micro SATA drive and run another test and report back.
Performance and OS Support
The performance of the dual core i7 is phenomenal. I have just started testing this machine but you can tell right away it’s built to handle some pretty high performance workloads.
This machine is also a good example of where Intel, and the onboard Intel HD 3000 integrated GPU has closed the gap with some of the discrete GPU offerings on the market. For your general computing needs, the integrated GPU is now sufficient for most people. Having Optimus provides more external display support.
In the screen shot at right, I changed the configuration since the battery testing occurred. I pulled the original factory 7mm Intel SSD and inserted one of my own. It too is a second gen X-25M 160GB SSD with the spacer removed to thin it down to 7mm.
You can see the mSATA drive (C:) and the second generation SSD drive (D:). I did a clean install of Windows 7 SP1 x64 to the mSATA drive and applied all patches and fixes. I am storing all of my user data on drive D:.
Notice the performance rating from WINSAT on the mSATA drive. Not bad, eh?
As usual I installed Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and ran some quick checks to verify it would work as a Hyper-V server if needed. In my limited testing, I didn’t see any issues. The network adaptor drivers install and work, the Optimus drivers installed (much to my surprise), and I was able to create and run a 64 bit virtual machine. I have no intention of doing any longer term testing of R2.
And for those of you that are linux fans, I have no intention of testing SLED or any other distros like Ubuntu. Sorry, I just don’t have time for it this time around. Let me know if you do and have a blog entry somewhere.
Final Thoughts
For most people the big brother T420 is a better fit. The T420 adds IEEE 1394 Firewire, eSATA, standard sized bays, longer battery life, etc. The T420 is a little heavier and thicker but I think it offers the best combination of features. If you really must have a lighter and thinner machine to carry from home to the office and back, the T420s should be on your list of considerations. My wife will love a machine like this when she can pry the T410s away from me.
If you want something really small with long battery life, see all of the reviews on the X220. The screen on that machine is a little too small for me, but a lot of people really dig it. With battery life approaching 24 hours it’s no wonder.
[UPDATE for 4/17] Removing the mSATA drive did add some battery life. Only 20 minutes. That puts the max I was able to squeeze out of the battery at 2 hours 40 minutes. Not good.
[UPDATE for 4/21] Yesterday I went back to the drawing board to test the T420s and the W520 with the dock I have (433820U). I tested the configuration at the bottom of http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-76617 to see if the T420s would drive three external monitors. It does.
I was able to drive the Dell E248WFP, Dell U2711, Dell 2407WFP and the T420s LCD all at the same time. The T420s would not drive the U2711 at it’s 2560x1440 native resolution. It would only go to 1920x1080. Everything else was running native.
[UPDATE for 5/5] Yesterday I ran another battery test on the T420s and managed to keep it running over 5 hours. Now before you get all excited, let me first say the scenario was one that some of you might do, but not very often. I went through my Lenovo Power Manager power profile and fine tuned the battery settings to be extremely miserly. There was one exception. I don’t let the LCD screen turn off. However, the dimmer timeout was set so that after 5 minutes the screen would dim to 30%. Thirty percent of the brightness while on battery is really dim. Swipes on the trackpad or keyboard would brighten the screen back to the 13 brightness level. I didn’t do that very often.
The actual test was pretty simple. Start Microsoft Word and open a document. Leave Word and the doc open (as if you are reading it). In this state, the 6 cell battery lasted well over 5 hours. I actually grabbed it at the 5 hour 5 minute mark and started recharging it. Power Manager said it had 29 minutes left.
So there you have it. Some battery tests ranging from 2-5 hours. That is a wide spectrum so your action item is to really make sure you understand the Lenovo Power Manager profiles, their settings, and the effect of what you are doing and it’s power use.
Ready to order? Head on over to http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/renew.aspx then just enter the Promotion Code: TNITE06
Last August rob and I were trading barbs about the pink PSP and other pink stuff. Well, this evening I stumbled across the Hello Kitty Hell blog. Of course I thought of rob since he's a fanboy, and I wanted to make sure and bring this to his attention. I doubt it's needed since he probably already has the site in his favs or RSS feeds. But just in case...
Some of the categories are shall we say... interesting. For instance, see some of the posts at http://www.hellokittyhell.com/category/hello-kitty-strange/. Might want to wait until you are not at the office, else your peers may wonder about you. You were warned. :)
I personally thought the laptop at left would be a great choice as a TechNet demo machine. I mean, nothing says performance quite like pink. I'm sure Longhorn Server will be radical on one. I worry the boa might catch on fire though.
Anyone out there have an Apple MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM? No? Don’t tell me you are going to let a Microsoft Windows evangelist totally beat you to the finish line on this one!!!
All kidding aside, I decided to pull the two Kingston 4GB SoDIMMs out of my Lenovo ThinkPad T61p and test it with the machines I thought could handle it. Since nearly all of the laptops I have are Intel “Santa Rosa” PM965 or GM965 mobile chipset based machines, unless the OEM did something specifically to block it I had high confidence they would work.
This includes the 15.4” Apple MacBook Pro I have. Here’s a screenshot from my Mac showing it all booted up and running. My Mac booted without issue and ran perfectly well. This is the original .tiff created by Grab.
For those of you running Parallels, Fusion or other memory hungry applications, I’m sure you’ll be interested in the implications. Now you can run a number of virtual machines with some pretty large memory allocations. I would imagine an application like Final Cut Studio would really dig the extra memory as well.
A couple of things that come up when I post stuff like this you can’t verify. First, you won’t find this in the specs at apple.com. That doesn’t mean I’m a liar or trying to pull some stunt with Photoshop. I mean think about it, why would I do such a thing?
Second, more memory doesn’t automatically equal more speed from the machine. The 4GB modules are still running at the same speed as the Samsung modules that are normally in my mac. However, because you have more capacity, you now have the ability to run certain applications in a more efficient manner. For instance, now you could allocate considerably more memory to a Windows Vista, Windows XP or Linux virtual machine. That is going to make them run faster.
[UPDATE for 7/6/2008] The model MacBook Pro I have is the late 2007 machine. It's model MA896LL/A and the exact specification for it are at http://support.apple.com/kb/SP13. Your MacBook Pro will need to be this machine or later to support more than 4GB of memory.
[UPDATE for 7/7/2008] I have had so many emails from internal and external that I have decided to do a long term test on my MacBook Pro. Yep, I pulled the 4GB sticks back out of my ThinkPad and they're back here in my MacBook Pro. So I'll run with them for a couple of weeks or longer and see if I encounter any issues. First up, run some virtual machine testing with some large allocations...
There are a number of levels in the key hierarchy, but you’ll spend most of your time with database level certs and symmetric keys. See the SQL Server 2005 Encryption Hierarchy article for a detailed description of certificates, asymmetrical and symmetrical keys. You’ll also notice at the bottom of that article is a link to the SQL Server 2005 Permissions Hierarchy. I would recommend reading and digesting both. It’s a short read and will be a good use of your time as we review the following scripts and demos.
Watching the Demos
My team is now disseminating information using a variety of publishing techniques. See the following scripts demonstrated using Windows Media Video format. The videos of the demos are now posted at http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=139794 in both Windows Media Video format as well as Macromedia Shockwave Video format. See the buttons at the bottom of that post for the full screen versions.
Setting Up To Use Encryption
In our first script and demo, we are going to create a number of objects. We’re going to create a user id, login id, a sample database, and a sample table. Later, we’ll create and use some views into the data along with a helper function that will allow us to control access to the data. I’m going to cut a lot of the comments from the original script(s). I will however highlight or link (links are in red) important function calls and features in the scripts. You’ll notice that this first script is fairly straight forward. You’ll also notice that the definition for CardNumber doesn’t reveal anything out of the ordinary. It certainly doesn’t indicate the contents of that column will be encrypted. This provides a little bit of stealth but not much. The real power is in the encryption which you see soon.
Setup.sql – it’s purpose is to create a sample database, id and table to use. Nothing fancy.
CREATE DATABASE [DataEncryptDemo]go USE [DataEncryptDemo]go CREATE LOGIN [login_low_priv] WITH PASSWORD = 'Login1 Password!'CREATE USER [user_low_priv] FOR LOGIN [login_low_priv]go CREATE TABLE [dbo].[CreditCards]( CardId INT PRIMARY KEY , CardNumber varbinary(256) )go
CREATE DATABASE [DataEncryptDemo]go
USE [DataEncryptDemo]go
CREATE LOGIN [login_low_priv] WITH PASSWORD = 'Login1 Password!'CREATE USER [user_low_priv] FOR LOGIN [login_low_priv]go
CREATE TABLE [dbo].[CreditCards]( CardId INT PRIMARY KEY , CardNumber varbinary(256) )go
Key and Certificate Creation
CreateSecrets.sql – now we are starting to get into the good stuff. You’ll notice we are going to create a master symmetrical key to start things off (hyper linked below). The next few lines of the script create the certificate and symmetric key we’ll use to encrypt and decrypt data we’ll add or retrieve from the demo table.
USE [DataEncryptDemo]go -- Create the DB master key. -- Notice that the password may be subject to password policy verification, depending on your system.CREATE MASTER KEY ENCRYPTION BY PASSWORD = 'DB Master key password!'go CREATE CERTIFICATE [cert_SecretTable_SecretData_Key] WITH SUBJECT = 'SecretTable_SecretData_Key protection'go -- You can also use other encryption algorithms like AES_128 if your system supports itCREATE SYMMETRIC KEY [SecretTable_SecretData_Key] WITH ALGORITHM = TRIPLE_DES ENCRYPTION BY CERTIFICATE [cert_SecretTable_SecretData_Key]go
-- Create the DB master key. -- Notice that the password may be subject to password policy verification, depending on your system.CREATE MASTER KEY ENCRYPTION BY PASSWORD = 'DB Master key password!'go
CREATE CERTIFICATE [cert_SecretTable_SecretData_Key] WITH SUBJECT = 'SecretTable_SecretData_Key protection'go -- You can also use other encryption algorithms like AES_128 if your system supports itCREATE SYMMETRIC KEY [SecretTable_SecretData_Key] WITH ALGORITHM = TRIPLE_DES ENCRYPTION BY CERTIFICATE [cert_SecretTable_SecretData_Key]go
CREATE CERTIFICATE [cert_SecretTable_SecretData_Key] WITH SUBJECT = 'SecretTable_SecretData_Key protection'go
-- You can also use other encryption algorithms like AES_128 if your system supports itCREATE SYMMETRIC KEY [SecretTable_SecretData_Key] WITH ALGORITHM = TRIPLE_DES ENCRYPTION BY CERTIFICATE [cert_SecretTable_SecretData_Key]go
Encrypting Data and Testing Encrypted Contents
EncryptData.sql – in this script we start to do the fun stuff. You’ll notice we first open the keys created in the prior script. We are going to call key_guid() to get the symmetric key GUID from the database. Now that we have it, we’ll call the encryptbykey() function with that GUID and the data to be encrypted on the two inserts into the table. After that occurs, the credit card values are safely locked inside the table rows. You can see in the script we try to retrieve those rows using a standard select. This fails to display the credit card numbers because we didn’t call a decryption function. The next test in the script calls the decryptbykey() function. This of course works nicely.
USE [DataEncryptDemo]go -- In order to use the synmmetric key, you need to open it firstOPEN SYMMETRIC KEY [SecretTable_SecretData_Key] DECRYPTION BY CERTIFICATE [cert_SecretTable_SecretData_Key]go -- Now insert some secret data into the tableDECLARE @KeyGuid AS UNIQUEIDENTIFIERSET @KeyGuid = key_guid( 'SecretTable_SecretData_Key')IF( @KeyGuid is not null )BEGIN INSERT INTO [dbo].[CreditCards] VALUES ( 1, encryptbykey( @KeyGuid, N'4388-1234-1234-1234')) INSERT INTO [dbo].[CreditCards] VALUES ( 2, encryptbykey( @KeyGuid, N'4549-5678-5678-5678'))ENDELSEBEGIN PRINT 'Failed to obtain the symmetric key GUID'END SELECT * FROM [dbo].[CreditCards] SELECT CardId, convert( NVARCHAR(100), decryptbykey( CardNumber )) as 'Card Number' FROM [dbo].[CreditCards]go -- A good recommendation is to close the key after you have finish to encrypt dataCLOSE SYMMETRIC KEY [SecretTable_SecretData_Key]go -- Without the key open, the unencrypt function returns NULLSELECT CardId, convert( NVARCHAR(100), decryptbykey( CardNumber )) as 'Card Number' FROM [dbo].[CreditCards]go
-- In order to use the synmmetric key, you need to open it firstOPEN SYMMETRIC KEY [SecretTable_SecretData_Key] DECRYPTION BY CERTIFICATE [cert_SecretTable_SecretData_Key]go
-- Now insert some secret data into the tableDECLARE @KeyGuid AS UNIQUEIDENTIFIERSET @KeyGuid = key_guid( 'SecretTable_SecretData_Key')IF( @KeyGuid is not null )BEGIN INSERT INTO [dbo].[CreditCards] VALUES ( 1, encryptbykey( @KeyGuid, N'4388-1234-1234-1234')) INSERT INTO [dbo].[CreditCards] VALUES ( 2, encryptbykey( @KeyGuid, N'4549-5678-5678-5678'))ENDELSEBEGIN PRINT 'Failed to obtain the symmetric key GUID'END
SELECT * FROM [dbo].[CreditCards]
SELECT CardId, convert( NVARCHAR(100), decryptbykey( CardNumber )) as 'Card Number' FROM [dbo].[CreditCards]go
-- A good recommendation is to close the key after you have finish to encrypt dataCLOSE SYMMETRIC KEY [SecretTable_SecretData_Key]go
-- Without the key open, the unencrypt function returns NULLSELECT CardId, convert( NVARCHAR(100), decryptbykey( CardNumber )) as 'Card Number' FROM [dbo].[CreditCards]go
Using A View to Access Encrypted Data
CreateView.sql – this script creates a view that allows our lowly privileged user access to the encrypted data. The view calls the cert_id() function to retrieve our cert id number. That number is then used to open and use the symmetric key for decryption of the credit card number. The problem with this script is that it grants way too much authority and access to the keys used in the decryption process. We’re going to change that in a minute when we revoke those permissions but use a helper function to provide access to the data.
USE [DataEncryptDemo]go CREATE VIEW [dbo].[CreditCardsView]AS SELECT CardId as CardId, convert( nvarchar(50), decryptbykeyautocert( cert_id( 'cert_SecretTable_SecretData_Key' ), null, CardNumber )) as CardNumber FROM [dbo].[CreditCards]go GRANT SELECT ON [dbo].[CreditCardsView] TO [user_low_priv]goGRANT CONTROL on certificate::[cert_SecretTable_SecretData_Key] TO [user_low_priv] goGRANT VIEW DEFINITION on symmetric key::[SecretTable_SecretData_Key] TO [user_low_priv] go
CREATE VIEW [dbo].[CreditCardsView]AS SELECT CardId as CardId, convert( nvarchar(50), decryptbykeyautocert( cert_id( 'cert_SecretTable_SecretData_Key' ), null, CardNumber )) as CardNumber FROM [dbo].[CreditCards]go
Using the View to Access Data
UseView.sql – this is a simple script that impersonates the user we created. Keep in mind for the moment, the user has too much authority over the cert and key. However, you’ll also notice the view is doing all of the work to decrypt the data and present it. Nothing fancy here.
USE [DataEncryptDemo]go EXECUTE AS USER = 'user_low_priv'SELECT * FROM [dbo].[CreditCardsView]REVERTgo
EXECUTE AS USER = 'user_low_priv'SELECT * FROM [dbo].[CreditCardsView]REVERTgo
Creating Helper Functions to Access Encrypted Data
CreateView2.sql – now things are starting to get interesting. Here we start things off by creating a helper function called Cards_decrypted_Helper. This functions executes temporarily with elevated privilege as DBO. You’ll notice this function takes the data passed to it and decrypts it using the cert and symmetric key. So how does the helper function get called? By the new view of course!!! The new view is called CreditCardView2. The view iterates through the rows in the table, calls the helper, decrypts the data, then shows the result.
You’ll also notice we revoke the permissions for user_low_priv to the cert and symmetric key. After the revocations, we’ll grant access to the view.
USE [DataEncryptDemo]go CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[Cards_decrypted_Helper] ( @SecretData VARBINARY(256))RETURNS NVARCHAR(50)WITH EXECUTE AS 'DBO'ASBEGINRETURN convert( NVARCHAR(50), decryptbykeyautocert( cert_id( 'cert_SecretTable_SecretData_Key' ), null, @SecretData ))ENDgo CREATE VIEW [dbo].[CreditCardsView2]AS SELECT CardID as CardID, [dbo].[Cards_decrypted_Helper](CardNumber) as CardNumber FROM [dbo].[CreditCards]go REVOKE CONTROL on certificate::[cert_SecretTable_SecretData_Key] TO [user_low_priv] goREVOKE VIEW DEFINITION on symmetric key::[SecretTable_SecretData_Key] TO [user_low_priv] go GRANT SELECT ON [dbo].[CreditCardsView2] TO [user_low_priv]
CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[Cards_decrypted_Helper] ( @SecretData VARBINARY(256))RETURNS NVARCHAR(50)WITH EXECUTE AS 'DBO'ASBEGINRETURN convert( NVARCHAR(50), decryptbykeyautocert( cert_id( 'cert_SecretTable_SecretData_Key' ), null, @SecretData ))ENDgo
CREATE VIEW [dbo].[CreditCardsView2]AS SELECT CardID as CardID, [dbo].[Cards_decrypted_Helper](CardNumber) as CardNumber FROM [dbo].[CreditCards]go
REVOKE CONTROL on certificate::[cert_SecretTable_SecretData_Key] TO [user_low_priv] goREVOKE VIEW DEFINITION on symmetric key::[SecretTable_SecretData_Key] TO [user_low_priv] go
GRANT SELECT ON [dbo].[CreditCardsView2] TO [user_low_priv]
Testing the Helper Function
UseView2.sql – now that we have all of the access controls in place, we can test CreditCardView2 to see if it really works. In the first test we are using View2. It of course works correctly and displays the data. Our little helper function did all the work and more importantly, we reduced the permission footprint for our lowly user. The second test, the one using our first view fails due to the fact there is no access to the certificate and key used to decrypt the data. HA!!!
USE [DataEncryptDemo]go -- access through new view works without unneeded permissionsEXECUTE AS USER = 'user_low_priv'SELECT * FROM [dbo].[CreditCardsView2]REVERTgo -- no access through the old viewEXECUTE AS USER = 'user_low_priv'SELECT * FROM [dbo].[CreditCardsView]REVERTgo
-- access through new view works without unneeded permissionsEXECUTE AS USER = 'user_low_priv'SELECT * FROM [dbo].[CreditCardsView2]REVERTgo
-- no access through the old viewEXECUTE AS USER = 'user_low_priv'SELECT * FROM [dbo].[CreditCardsView]REVERTgo
As you can see, there are some powerful capabilities in SQL Server 2005. This was a brief look into the encryption functions, view usage, permission models, and help functions. That ought to get your appetite going.
Caution, we are getting into rant territory with this one. You were warned. Grin. What make and model notebook are you using? What is the size of your screen? What is the native resolution of the screen?
I really wish I had kept track of all the notebook computers I've used or tested over the years. Somewhere about 2003 I became a high resolution screen snob. I mean really. Remember the first time you saw a 14.1" SXGA+ 1400x1050 screen? Pure bliss. How about a 15.4" WSXGA+ 1680x1050 screen? Bliss again.
By the time these competing standards were pervasive, it was official. I became a high resolution snob. Is it any wonder I detest the current crop of notebook computers?
Resolution isn't the only issue. The aspect ratio movement has really screwed everything up. Somewhere along the line someone decided notebook computers needed to have widescreen formats so they all switched from 4:3 ratio screen and resolutions to 16:10 ratio screens and resolutions. That switch by the screen suppliers and OEMs wasn't terrible. In fact, it gave us my favorite screen. The 15.4" 1680x1050 WSXGA+ screen. Perfect vertical and horizontal real estate for business professionals and technical personnel. The font size is on the small side for the elderly and my wife certainly doesn't dig it, but adjusting the DPI up to 125% is a pretty good workaround for most people.
Around the same time things started to get a little overboard. Suppliers and OEM's started making and supplying 15.4" high resolution WUXGA 1920x1200 screens. If you have really good eyes, and the screen is good and bright, this was a great resolution for coders or spreadsheet fanatics that need more horizontal resolution. My first notebook with this screen was the legendary Dell Latitude D820. The fonts were too small so upping the DPI to 125% was pretty much mandatory for me and my poor eyesight.
Then comes the 16:9 revolution. I totally get that we need killer HDTV screens at this aspect ratio. I can almost understand consumer notebooks and netbooks might be more attractive with this widescreen ratio, but business computers? Not so much.
I've heard and read some of the arguments on the internet. Supposedly it's cheaper to manufacture 16:9 screens. I'm not sure I buy that. Even if I do, what's up with the crazy screen resolutions on the market? You basically get three choices now. 1366x768, 1600x900 and 1920x1080. If that isn't bad enough, the actual quality of the screens being made seems to have eroded, too. I am referring to the "mainstream" "business class" screens for 13, 14 and 15" notebook computers. Combine a 1366x768 resolution with a matte screen with poor viewing angles and you have a recipe for dissatisfaction.
I really hope the notebook makers do something creative with the ultra thin and mobile machines coming out. The ThinkPad X220 with the 12.5" IPS screen was a step in the right direction but I'm still concerned about the resolution for the machines being made now. You should be too.
[UPDATE for 6/6/2011] Here's a real good example. Look at the new Acer TimelineX Series information at http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/07/acer-announces-redesigned-aspire-timelinex-series-laptops-price/. 1366x768 resolution across the 13.3", 14" and 15.6" models. What? Really?
I've had my Dell XPS 420 six months now so I thought I'd give you an update on my impressions of the machine and changes I'm made to it since the initial purchase. In reality, it just now does everything I want correctly. Windows Vista SP1 fixed the last issue I had with the machine. So once again for all of you that want to stick with Windows XP, this machine is a really good reason to go with Windows Vista.
My XPS has been running Windows Vista Ultimate x64 since nearly day one. All of the applications I use work really well on the 64 bit platform, even though most of them aren't native 64 bit compiled apps. I am using two main video editing tools. Sony Movie Studio Vegas Platinum Edition and Expression Studio 2. Vegas is my workhorse and I am getting ready to create my first high definition DVD on Blu-ray. I don't yet have a Blu-ray disk burner, so if someone has a good recommendation, let me know.
A few weeks ago I pulled the two 512MB RAM sticks and replaced them with two 2GB sticks. I have a total of 6GB of memory now in the machine. I don't really need all of that memory but the memory at dell.com went on sale and I had a $200 gift card waiting to be burned. So I got some memory, a Zune charger for my wife, and some other stuff.
The one thing that hasn't worked correctly until recently is the machines ability to wake up from sleep and record a program. If you are buying one of these to be a DVR, then that would be a key feature that needs to work. Mine didn't. It would sleep correctly. It would wake up on time and attempt to record. But the machine wouldn't record. It had something to do with how long the tuners need to wake up before they were ready. I guess they need strong coffee like I do.
A few days ago I upgraded the firmware on my ATI TV Wonder Digital cable tuners. Here are the links to the new updates:
32 bit: http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/vista32/ocur-vista32.html 64 bit: http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/vista64/ocur-vista64.html
32 bit: http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/vista32/ocur-vista32.html
64 bit: http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/vista64/ocur-vista64.html
After I upgraded the tuners, I installed Windows Vista SP1. I was told after applying SP1, I should re-apply the NVIDIA video drivers for my 8600 GTS so I did that as well. Magically everything works now. For the past three or four days it has woken from it's slumber, recorded whatever I had scheduled, then gone back to sleep ten minutes after doing the recording. Yaaay !!! It has never done that correctly until this week. I don't know exactly what fixed the issue. It was probably the combination of the firmware upgrade, and SP1.
Now keep in mind my XPS 420 is a pretty lowly model by XPS standards. It has the Intel Q6600 quad core processor. The video card is a good video card, but it is by no means a top of the line card. But my machine is very quiet and does exactly what I want it to do, and I have high confidence it will continue to do so for the next three to four years.
If you are considering one of these, buy with confidence. Rock solid. Nice looking. Good price.
If you've been paying really close attention, you noticed Dell quietly began to sell Windows Vista 64 bit Precision M6300 workstation class laptops. They've actually been selling them for a while. What's new is that they are shipping them with Windows Vista x64 and 8GB of RAM. As you can see at right, this machine doesn't come cheap.
Or if you have some real bucks to blow, checkout the PC MicroWorks Edge.
Now you might be asking yourself how much those rare 4GB SoDIMMs cost, and where to get your hands on some. I have good news. A number of memory makers are getting ready to start shipping the 4GB wonders.
If my information is true, the 4GB sticks will be about half the price of what the 2GB sticks were when they released. As you'll recall, when 2GB sticks first started shipping, they were about $1000 each. Not many people bought them at that price. We certainly didn't. We bought a second laptop instead.
If you dig around on the grid you won't find them just yet, but they are coming. Dell obviously has a supply. You won't see them in the accessories area just yet. At least I could not find them.
My information indicates the street price for a 4GB DDR2-667 SoDIMM will be in the $400-550 range. Looks like Dell is offering them on the Precision M6300 at the top end of that scale. Surprise Surprise.
When?
If the information is accurate, in the next few weeks. This is good timing for my team. We are penniless and at the end of our fiscal year end budget. But a whole new budget starts July 1. I know what I want for Christmas.
What on earth do I need 8GB of RAM in a laptop for? Virtual Machines of course. Just think, I could run approximately eight instances of Windows Vista at one time. A Vista Fest. Obviously I'm more interested in a virtualization environment that includes a broader portfolio of our products. Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V, System Center Virtual Machine Manager, System Center Configuration Manager, System Center Operations Manager, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Exchange, etc. all running on a single laptop.
Think I'm crazy? Yea, probably. But by doubling the amount of memory, we certainly have the ability to create some fascinating configurations to mimic very real solutions. Unless you are pushing the virtualization limits, or have a very advanced workstation requirement, you are unlikely to need 8GB of RAM. But for those of us that do, it's about time.
[UPDATE for 5/28] Kingston is now selling the 4GB sticks. See http://shop.kingston.com/partsinfo.asp?ktcpartno=KTL-TP667/4G. Hope you have some bucks if you want them right now.
This morning I installed Windows Server 2008 Enterprise x64 VL on my Lenovo ThinkPad T61p. The VL stands for volume license and it allows me to activate via our corpnet KMS server or through MAK key activation. The bits I installed are likely the RTM bits. They are still being hammered and the build I installed has not been declared the shipping version just yet. Patience grasshopper.
The installation is really painless. In fact, if you are doing a Core install, you simply won't believe how fast the installation actually is. We interviewed some candidates for my team on 1/22 and I had proposed to the interview team that we should hand my HP 6910p to them, the Windows Server 2008 DVD, and tell each one of them to install and activate a Core installation. I thought it would be a great test since it only takes 20 minutes but I guess the other members of the team thought it would freak out the candidates.
So how easy is the install? Here are the steps I go through:
Other Optional Installs
At this point you have a pretty functional Windows Server 2008 machine with full audio, video and networking. I usually stop here because I don't really worry much about Bluetooth support, the fingerprint scanner, etc. We have a few people running Windows Server 2008 on their T61p's as a full time production machine. I'll probably get some other instructions from them on the remainder of the drivers they install.
In case you are wondering, the Desktop Experience and audio driver installs are required if you plan to capture any demos with Camtasia 5.
Enjoy Windows Server 2008 on your smoking Lenovo Thinkpad T61p !!!
In the initial first day of use with the Verizon Samsung Omnia, I was pretty frustrated. Much of that frustration was misplaced and was a hold over of the HTC Touch Pro I now have boxed and ready for return. What lowered my frustration with the Omnia? The first is clearly seeing that a device with no keyboard must be used differently. If it weren't for the ability to assign key commands for two keys, I would have already boxed the Omnia back up as well. So let me give you a run down on what I've learned and unlearned in the past three days.
The OS and a few tricks
I've been using the Windows Mobile operating system for a pretty long time now. Now to be perfectly clear, I've always been a Smartphone guy, not a Pocket PC guy. I prefer single handed operation without a stylus. So as you might imagine, using Windows Mobile Professional 6.1 on a device with no keyboard, four buttons, and an optical mouse presents a huge challenge for me. What I realized after using the Omnia for three days is that Windows Mobile really needs a very different UI for devices like this. Thankfully Samsung did something about that and built an extension to the WinMo Today screen (pictured at left).
As you can see in the screenshot at left, the Samsung Today screen has twelve easy to use icons that allow you to launch an application or take you to another set of panels to run programs or change system settings. So far with the Omnia I haven't even cracked open the stylus and used it with the device because there's no need for one. The screenshot at left is doctored. It's the standard Samsung Omnia pic with the Samsung Today screen (actual) layered over the top of it. So about the only difference in the pic and the real unit sitting in front of me is the lack of the VZ logo and the fact the VZ unit doesn't have a front facing camera.
I made several subtle changes to the the settings of the device that helped enormously. There are two buttons on the right side of the Omnia. One for the Main Menu and one for the Camera. I decided to change the Main Menu button so that it's press action is actually <OK/Close> instead. This change is very useful for going back, or closing an email message without exiting Outlook. It's nearly impossible to press the little X in the top right hand corner of the screen otherwise. The UI for Windows Mobile will need to be changed in the future to account for difficulties like this.
Since the Main menu is frequently used, I also changed the Camera button action so that it goes to the Main menu when pressed. You can still get to the camera functions via this button but you must press the button and hold it to do so. Now with both of those changes, one handed operation of the device is MUCH easier.
I also decided I like the optical mouse button to act like a mouse. The default setting is four way navigation but after making the button changes above, I decided having a mouse was more useful for that button. We'll talk about a couple of other matters regarding input in a few minutes when we talk about the soft keyboard. But first, let's talk about the overall device looks, screen, battery life, etc.
Groundbreaking Looks?
This phone looks familiar to another device on the market. Hmm. I wonder which one? The Samsung Omnia shell is slightly smaller than the iPhone. Not much smaller though. The screen on the Omnia is 3.2" while the iPhone is 3.5". In other words, the form factor is nearly identical. Coincidence? I doubt it.
The Omnia is a nice looking phone. Chrome edges around the screen in the front are a nice touch. The black back has a slight texture making it pretty easy to hold on to and cut down on fingerprints. The pic just below is from the Samsung stock of photos and lacks the Verizon logo on my unit.
The screen is nice and bright although it suffers from a relatively low resolution. It isn't bad. It just isn't a super high resolution screen. Regarding the brightness, the screen comes dangerously close to being unusable in bright sunlight. Regarding the resolution, colors and contrast, I am withholding judgement until I've had a chance to watch some video on it. More on the video later.
So while the unit isn't probably breaking any new ground here, it's a nice looking and feeling phone. I don't think the screen material is nearly as nice as the iPhone or other phones I've seen and seems to be a common complaint in the reviews I've read before I received mine. I guess it remains to be seen how well the material will hold up to the wear and tear of a touch screen.
So far the battery has been doing a good job. I have not really put it though it's paces yet, but it doesn't appear that the usage of the screen sucks the battery as badly as the HTC Touch Pro. I am running a series of battery tests this week and will have a much better idea in a few days on any shortcomings if they become apparent.
Regarding the battery testing, I do plan to run some sustained video playback tests with this phone. I figure if you are going to include DivX decoding support and a large screen, you are certainly inviting folks to use it to watch movies and video from the Internet or your private collections. So I'll be torturing the little guy this week in your honor and report back on how well it faired, or not.
Until that happens I'll be doing the usual battery tests with Exchange ActiveSync set to check for messages every fifteen minutes during prime time, and every thirty minutes otherwise. After I get done running some of those tests, I set things to Direct Push always connected and see if it has a material impact.
The Applications
The application mix is pretty much the standard set for a Windows Mobile Pro 6.1 device. Noticeably absent compared to the Sprint Touch Pro device is the Live Search and GPS apps. In fact, the GPS capability on the Omnia appears to be locked to the Verizon VZ Navigator GPS application. The problem I have with the application is the additional $9.99 USD they want per month for using the feature. It probably isn't a show stopper for me, but I won't be paying the extra money for the feature.
The Omnia comes with two web browsers. Pocket IE and Opera. Opera is pretty nice and easy to work with on the screen. Panning and zooming is straightforward. I won't be spending hours reading the news on this screen, but it certainly gets the job done in a taxi or train.
With the large screen of the Omnia, reading and responding to email is pretty easy. Portrait mode is great for looking at the list of messages. Flipping over to landscape for replies is super easy and the soft keyboard seems to work nicely. The screen size is also going to come in handy while viewing spreadsheet data with Excel.
The Verizon Omnia also comes with a Touch Player audio/video playback application. I copied a DivX .AVI video from my Archos 605 WIFI PMP to the Omnia and it would not play. I am now looking for the precise video specifications the Omnia supports. I was surprised it didn't play the video. If someone spots the video specs that are supported, let me know.
The Phone
The phone functions of the Verizon Samsung Omnia are very good. Call quality and clarity is excellent. I have no problems using the phone in single handed operation with one very big exception.
With my previous phones, finding a contact in my contacts list is very easy. Press a couple of characters on the keypad to filter the list on last name, or simply scroll the list quickly with a navigation pad. Neither technique is easy on the Omnia, especially if driving. If you are driving it's really rather impossible. I am going to have to investigate voice commands more deliberately as a result. Or simply don't attempt to use the contact list while driving.
For those of you that like to use headsets, you'll notice there is no 2.5 or 3.5mm jacks on the phone. You can however use one of the adaptors that came in the box for both sizes of headphones. The adaptor for 3.5mm also includes a volume adjuster, microphone and mute button. I thought that was a nice touch. However, the phone really needs an equalizer. I could tell by listening to the FM radio with my Omnia it's going to be needed. Not enough bass for me and my Shure earphones.
The Camera
Finally someone decided to produce a WinMo phone with a decent camera. The 5 megapixel camera shoots in still or video camera modes, and has a variety of settings. Two of my favorite still camera modes are the Smile Detection and Panorama options.
Smile detection takes a picture when the subject being shot has gone from their usual bah humbug frown face to a nice fake smile. This is actually a great mode to use for babies and other subjects that are hard to grab that perfect shot with. I have no idea how it does with dogs but I can tell you my dog Elvis was not happy when his Mommy put an angel costume on him this weekend. You weren't going to get a smile outta him. No way.
I need to go skiing in Colorado or something to put the Panorama mode to the test. That mode automatically stitches eight pictures into one huge picture. Really cool stuff. You don't have to use all eight to create a widescreen shot. Two or more works.
The Verdict?
The jury is still out right now and deliberations aren't expected to be complete, at least not in this household, for another week. I am now used to the navigation nuances and have gotten used to using the application mix. A trusted friend hates the phone but he doesn't have the shipping Verizon version. I'm liking it more and more. It's small, light weight and powerful. It doesn't display any problems with performance and it appears the battery will last a couple of days.
After I figure out what video formats it will accept, I will torture the battery more and report back. Until then, if you are looking for a Windows Mobile Pro 6.1 device that looks similar to the iPhone and will work well with your corporate Exchange email, look no further. You'll get used to the software based keyboard in a few days and will be able to peck out short responses to burning email in no time. Just don't expect to write a novel on the thing and your expectations will be set appropriately. More later in about a week or so. By then I'll know if it's a keeper or not. Happy Holidays.
[Update for 12/2/2008] I am now using Voice Command very effectively for calling contacts instead of using the soft keyboard. I am no longer worried about using the device in an automobile. See http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/en-us/help/more/voice-command-tips.mspx for some great tips.
And on the battery life front, things are looking really good. So far my Omnia has been unplugged from the charger for two days (about 40 hours) at this point. I'm pretty confident it's going to pass the 48 hour mark later this morning. Usage during the past 40 hours has been pretty light but I have made a few calls, read a few articles on msnbc.com off and on during the past couple of days, read a lot of email from the phone, messed around with various properties and settings, etc. I guess it's been a little heavier than light but it hasn't been a big voice call day, nor have I performed any video playback. That's coming later this week.
I did spot one bug yesterday morning. Our corporate EAS policies force PIN protection after fifteen minutes of idle time. It stopped doing that on my Omnia yesterday morning until I rebooted. Shhhhh. Don't tell our IT folks. Grin.
[Update for 12/3/2008] After fully charging my phone today, I unplugged it from the charger at 6pm and ran off for dinner with my wife. After I got back home, I transferred some movies to the phone (.wmv format) and kicked off the sustained video playback test. For this round, the phone was able to handle 4.5 hours of sustained playback before it started complaining about remaining battery juice. Basically it has enough juice right now to make a short call and that's about it. Not bad. That's better battery life than my Zune 30 or Zune 120. I'll run another test later today and see if I get the same mileage. After that I start running Exchange direct push tests to see if that changes any of the times I've observed.
So far the only reasons I've spotted for a return is the fact my contract with Verizon is 24 months. The lack of a keyboard isn't bothering me and frankly we all need to get used to it. I have a feeling the voice recognition and control revolution is getting ready to really take off. Telling your phone what to do seems very natural. 14,000,000 iPhone users can't be wrong, right? Night.
After sleeping on this overnight, I'm beginning to wonder how important the GPS feature is to me, and the fact I can't use it with Live Search. The more I think about it, the more I dislike being locked into a phone like that for 24 months. Is there any such thing as a perfect phone? My search hasn't turned one up yet.
[Update for 12/5/2008] Exchange direct push cut the battery life nearly in half on my Verizon Omnia. I still got well over a work day with it turned on, but it's certainly a consideration. I have my prime hours set from 7am to 10pm M-F. When I have ActiveSync set to grab email every 15 minutes during prime hours, and every 30 minutes in off hours, I get a little over 50 hours of battery life. It was about 27 hours with direct push enabled for prime hours.
[Update for 12/7/2008] I have good news and bad news. The good news is it appears after testing fours devices since 10/24 I have reached a decision on what to use as my smartphone for the next 12 months. The bad news is that it isn't going to be the Omnia.
If you are a regular on my blog you know I started with the Palm Treo Pro on ATT. I then tested the HTC Touch Pro on Sprint. After that is was the Samsung Omnia on Verizon. And now I am testing yet another Palm product, the Treo 800w on Sprint. All I have to say is that it's good to go home. The Palm Treo really fits my style very well. I'll write an article about the 800w so let me wrap this one up.
In the end on the Omnia there were a couple of things I didn't like. The 24 month contract was the deal killer. I didn't like the contract duration, price for voice and data, and the incremental $9.99 for using VZ Navigator and the GPS chip. It just added up. I can use the Sprint Palm Treo 800w for half the price and only lock myself to a 12 month contract.
Second, I don't think the current version of Windows Mobile does the device justice. The Omnia is simply the best WinMo competitor to the Apple iPhone on the market I've tried but it isn't enough. A year from now I hope we'll have a better Windows Mobile OS out the door that a screen only device like the Omnia can really take advantage of. Until the, I am sticking with my keys, buttons and simplicity. That and real work needs more of my time.
I think a lot of people are going to be very happy with the Omnia. It has a lot of great features and it taught me to use Voice Command. A slightly larger, higher resolution screen with an improved UI will make it a very strong competitor. I figure in 12 months that will be the case. Cheers.
Here are my notes on how I install Windows Vista Ultimate x64 to a Lenovo ThinkPad T61p. There are a number of features present in Windows Vista I do not install or use. Therefore, you will need to make changes to the procedures where applicable for things like BitLocker partitioning, domain joins, etc. The focus of the following notes are to have a machine that will run lean and mean, allow for access to Microsoft's corporate network via VPN, and be the starting point for application installs.
The reason you see me disable a number of features below is to free up resources for the virtual machine environments I run. You can certainly experiment with some of the adjustments I make below and decide for yourself.
PREREQUISITES
You will of course need media. I use the Windows Vista Ultimate retail media. I also set a few BIOS setting the way I prefer. Here’s the setting preferences I have:
Config | Display | Brightness = High Config | Serial ATA = AHCI Config | CPU | Intel Virtualization = Enabled
Config | Display | Brightness = High
Config | Serial ATA = AHCI
Config | CPU | Intel Virtualization = Enabled
Although I am recommending the AHCI setting above, please note there is a bug associated with that setting if using an Ultrabay hard drive adaptor and second hard drive. In that situation until the bug is fixed, you must flip the Serial ATA setting to Compatibility and add the second hard drive to the boot order of the machine. If you don't, you will see one or more bugs we've already identified and reported to Lenovo. They are working on BIOS fixes at present.
OS INSTALLATION
I use retail media for all of my installs. I want to see what you see. The following installation is based on the full Windows Vista Ultimate DVD kit. I am of course using the x64 disk and product key that comes with it.
DOWNLOADS and INSTALLS
I only install a small subset of all of the available drivers and software for the T61p from Lenovo or Microsoft. My reasons are multifold. I want to squeeze as much performance out of the machine as possible in order to run my applications and virtual machines. I also tend to reinstall my world every few months. I was doing weekly installs during the Windows Vista development cycles. I am also getting ready to install Windows Vista SP1.
Don't let this concern you. I have actually installed everything via the nice Lenovo System Update client. Lenovo does a great job of testing the drivers before they put them in the Support and Download area. I trust the drivers there more than I trust the drivers coming off update.microsoft.com. In fact, if I see a driver pop up in Windows Update, I will check the Lenovo area before I install it. If it isn't on the Lenovo/IBM site, it doesn't get installed.
OS CUSTOMIZATIONS and NOTES
As I mentioned at the beginning of this, my goals for the installation of Windows Vista are to run lean and mean. In order to accomplish that, I modify or disable several services in Windows Vista. I am trading functionality, for a reduction in disk I/O, disk space conservation, and reduced CPU load. I want to make sure I give as much performance as I can to the virtual machines I run on a daily basis for my job. The Lenovo ThinkPad T61p is a very powerful machine and you should consider running Windows Vista with it's default settings before you start disabling functions.
Here are the modifications I make:
That’s how I install things. It’s a core OS install and I’m sure there are a number of other applications you might be interested in like the fingerprint reader. You’ll find before you start installing applications that the T61p is fast, very fast. Pay close attention to performance hits from other software and applications. I would recommend a Complete PC, Ghost 12, True Image or some other backup before you start installing and changing the configuration above.
APPLICATION INSTALLS
Your operating system is ready at this point for application installs, domain joins, etc. Before installing applications, I enable the administrator account and set a strong password for it and the ID originally created above during Vista installation. I use the admin id for my application installs. After your application installs are complete, you should consider disabling administrator. I rarely if ever use it again after doing the installs.
I hope you find this information useful. Enjoy.
Apple has enjoyed a tremendous amount of mindshare and market share the past few years. Many people think they are the innovation leaders and their stock price reflects that. But there are a number of companies that have had Apple in their sights for quite some time and the market is getting ready to shift.
Windows 7 is getting ready to ship. It’s a good OS. Maybe great. But it is made better by the quality hardware products that run it, or the applications that run on it. We all know this. The Microsoft partner channel is critical to the success of Windows. The laptop market is getting ready to go white hot again. I’ve been talking with hundreds of customers and nearly everyone I talk to is waiting for a key date, 10/22/2009. Why?
Because everyone is waiting to buy a new computer. Upgrading from Windows XP? Nope. Buying a new machine with Windows 7 already on it. Want to see a machine on my short list? Look no further.
HP Envy
HP is pretty cocky to name a machine Envy. But then again HP is doing pretty well and the specs for the Envy look great. I would trade my ThinkPad today for this machine. That should not be surprising. It’s been a loyal servant but it’s 2.5 years old and that is getting ready to make it positively ancient compared to the crop of new machines coming out.
So what’s so hot about the HP Envy? How about a Quad core processor and up to 16GB of RAM for starters. And that’s in a slim package. In the picture above you can seeing the Envy all snuggled up to the MacBook Pro. As you can see, it compares nicely. Click the link just above or the pic and head on over to the gallery on gizmodo.com.
Plug in a nice eSATA drive and we are ready to rock Hyper-V virtualization or Hi Def encoding. The rest of the technical specs are very respectable. According to a few articles on the internet, the HP Envy 15.6” model starts at $1800. The 15.4” Apple MacBook Pro starts at $1700 so it would appear we have an interesting horse race here.
So what should you do? Get a bag of popcorn because the show is getting ready to start. First up this week are the new Windows Mobile Devices. After that, there should be a steady parade of laptops and netbooks showing themselves before Black Friday. Game time.
Just making sure you are properly focused this week... click the pic above for the big version.
In the past 48 hours I tested a couple of different Lenovo ThinkPad T61p’s with Windows 7 Ultimate x64 Beta 1. Both of the machines have 8GB of Kingston memory. Both have the same GPU and video RAM. One has the Intel T7500 Core 2 Duo CPU. You can see the post I did on it at http://blogs.technet.com/keithcombs/archive/2007/09/06/windows-vista-x64-on-the-lenovo-thinkpad-t61p.aspx in September of 2007. At that time there was no such thing as a 4GB SoDIMM.
The other ThinkPad I have is a more recent version. It’s one of the last T61p’s made with the T9300 CPU. It was going to be my corporate domain joined legacy Windows Vista machine. At least until a little package arrived in the mail this afternoon. It was from Kingston. Sweet!!! Christmas in January. First CES now this.
So I took my new little goody out of the box, dropped it into the Lenovo primary drive cage and stuck it into the T61p. I popped the Win7 install disk in the DVD drive and installed Windows 7 Ultimate x64 onto my new friend. Fifteen minutes later I was hitting update.microsoft.com looking for the NVIDIA WDDM 1.1 video driver.
Uh, Hello Keith? Did you just say 15 minutes? Yep. It happened so fast you would think I just installed Windows Server 2008 Core. I’m actually going to have to go back and run a couple of tests on that again to make sure I’m not lying. It was the fastest Windows client install I’ve ever done I think. Might have been 20 minutes but I don’t think so.
The Kingston Connection
As you might recall, my group is sponsored by Kingston this year. Kingston supplied memory for each of the US IT Pro Evangelist on my team. Only one machine mind you, but hey, that’s a heck of a lot better than nothing. Making the jump from 4GB to 8GB on a demo machine is a big jump. It has helped immensely this year and in many ways kept me from having to travel with two machines.
Our Kingston representative introduced me to a number of her colleagues while we were at TechED 2008 in Florida. One of those introductions was with executive in charge of the SSD line of drives they were working on. He asked me if I’d be interested in testing some samples when they became available. I of course said yes, and the first of the evaluation units arrived today.
Kingston SSDNow M Series
The drive that arrived is the Kingston SSDNow SNM125-S2/80GB. Here’s the marketing blurb from the website:
“Kingston's new line of SSDNow solid-state drives (SSD) rounds out its suite of enterprise products. The SSDNow M Series uses Intel's solid-state drives, which are the best-performing drives on the market. By improving a computer's performance and durability, SSDNow M Series drives help increase the productivity of power users.”
Hey, I’m a power user and if the scores in the screenshot above are any indication, this baby is going to absolutely smoke anything I’ve had in the past. There’s only one problem. I’d like to use this drive fulltime for a couple of weeks and I’m currently using 81GB of disk space on my old tired legacy platter hard drive. Legacy. Grin.
The other problem is that I’m just getting my Windows 7 (almost said Vista) environment ship shape. I’m a little over half way through the installation and testing of all of my drivers and applications with Windows 7. But when the going gets tough, the tough use Ghost. Yea, that’s right. Old habits are hard to break. So I’ll probably just finish up what I’m doing then take a Ghost snapshot and restore the image to the new SSD drive. I’ll probably have that done before the weekend is over.
Bring It People !!!
In the meantime, if any of you happen to have a Lenovo ThinkPad T61p and manage to break my record above, let me know. Sure looks like Kingston has a fast drive and you simply would not believe the boot times with Windows 7. I’ll take notes over the next few days and weeks and report back on install times, boot, suspend/resume times, etc. I’ll also measure some big copies, virtual machine loads and other fun stuff.
For more information, see http://www.kingston.com/ssd/m-series.asp. You can also get more information on the technical specs at http://download.intel.com/design/flash/nand/mainstream/mainstream-sata-ssd-datasheet.pdf.
Contrary to recent pontifications, black is still the elegant device color of choice for many of us. Over the past couple of weeks, I have been converting DVD's to my black PSP, iPod, Zune and Zen. Although many people feel it's terrible difficult to move video around, it's getting easier. Here's some information on my adventure.
Background
I've been using a Sony PSP since they launched. Come to think about it, my PSP will have a second birthday in March. Although I'm a console and PC gamer, I didn't buy the PSP for gaming. I bought it to be a travel companion so I could watch videos during my "spare" time. It was my key requirement then, and still remains my main requirement today. My audio interest is relatively low although it will pick up some in 2007 as we shake down the podcast tools. That's another blog post down the road.
The Cream of the Crop
There are a bunch of kewl devices on the market, but I believe I have four of the top five or six devices. If you read my previous blog post on the Portable Media Players (PMP) that I was interested in, you'll see I managed to acquire all but the top Archos players. In my stable of players, I now have the Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP), Creative Zen Vision W, Apple iPod Video, and the Microsoft Zune. Each player has it's strengths and weaknesses. I will not give you in-depth analysis of each, but will offer some observations from my testing.
For those of you unfamiliar with the PSP, it has one of the largest screens on the market (4.3"), but does not have a hard drive. The PSP uses Memory Stick Duo media for storage and I consider this to be a key downside for the PSP. The upside to the memory stick is the miserly power consumption. Power is a key factor for extended use in situations like a flight of three hours or more. I've never actually run out of power with my PSP and have used it on flights from Texas to Hawaii and Texas to Alaska. Those flights are 10+ hours although the PSP was not in use the entire time.
The second addition to my device portfolio was the Creative Zen Vision W. I wanted the same size screen as the PSP and a hard drive. My Vision W has a 4.3" screen and a 60GB drive. I'm getting about 4.5 hours battery life out of the Vision W. The Vision W has a rare feature. Like the PSP, it has a removable battery. This of course means you have the option to carry another battery for those long flights. The Vision W uses a Lithium Ion battery so I'm sure the spare isn't cheap.
The most recent additions to my device mix are the iPod and Zune. They were purchased by Microsoft for a podcasting and screencasting project we kick off in a couple of weeks. The iPod is the 80GB Video player and of course the Zune has a 30GB drive.
The iPod has a 2.5" screen and has excellent battery life. I was astonished to see it run non-stop for 9 hours. The Zune has a 3.0" screen and the worst battery performance of the bunch. My Zune will only play video for 3 hours. My son managed to get 3.5 hours one day on his. Compared to the 9 hours of the iPod, I was disappointed to say the least. I'm hopeful better battery performance can be addressed in firmware updates down the road, but who knows. Time will tell.
DVD Conversion Tools
There are a million utilities on the Internet for converting from one video format to another. My first taste of transcoding was using the Sony PSP software to convert Windows Media Center 2005 recorded TV to the MPEG4 format used by the PSP. See the old blog post at http://blogs.technet.com/keithcombs/archive/2005/04/02/403248.aspx for that information. Next came the need to convert DVD video to the PSP. Again, there are lots of tools that can be used to convert DVD to a variety of formats. PSPVideo9 turned out to be a handy little tool for that, but it was the second phase of a two step process. See http://blogs.technet.com/keithcombs/archive/2006/02/14/ripping-dvd-s-to-the-playstation-portable-psp.aspx for more detailed information on using PSPVideo9.
What I really needed was a tool that would convert to all of my devices. It just so happens, I stumbled across a great software program that met my needs perfectly. Let me highlight that last phrase again. MET MY NEEDS. As I see people rant and rave on this subject, one thing become very clear to me. Most people want a free tool that does everything quickly and efficiently. They want batch processing. They want it to work with all forms of DRM.
Reality check!!!
I have yet to see a tool do everything. My primary need was to be able to convert DVD video to my player(s). Since the Zen Vision W is my new personal workhorse, the utility must obviously work with it. As it turns out, the Xilisoft DVD Ripper Platinum (XDRP) worked the needed magic across all of the players. I made up the XDRP acronym and will use it for most of this post. You can download the XDRP trial version and create five minute video segments to test the output. After I did initial testing to all of the players, I forked over the $45 to purchase the product.
Using Xilisoft DVD Ripper Platinum
If your collection is like mine, then you have a variety of movies in 4:3 and 16:9 formats. In fact, I'm sure you also have 1.85:1 and 2.35:1 widescreen formats. For this reason, my testing included using all of those formats and outputting them to the four players I have. The only corner I cut was on the PSP since I've been doing that on it for almost two years, and it's getting close to end of life (for me).
XDRP comes with a variety of profiles already predefined for the various players. Since the Vision W is new to the market, they did not have a profile. So, copied the existing Creative Zen Vision profile and added some widescreen resolutions.
I had a few videos with some juttering, so I queried the support folks at Xilisoft. They suggested some settings changes. I went into the Settings | Preferences | DVD (Global) tab pane and turned on Detect progressive 24Hz, Force progressive 24 Hz, and Audio/Video synchronization. This solved the juttering and audio sync issues nicely.
Creative Zen Vision W Output Details 4:3 Full Screen DVD - I used the base Creative Zen profile, 640x480 resolution output, 1200bit rate, Pan Scan Zoom setting. This produces a nice .AVI file and although you can see some blockiness, the result is very good. Since the Vision W is a widescreen, the output is pillar boxed with black bars on the left and right. The Vision W lets you stretch the screen to use all of the pixels resulting in fat characters. I prefer to watch that way but it annoys other people. 1.85:1 Widescreen DVD - this is the best format DVD for most home theatre HDTV's as well as the Vision W. The resulting output does not have the black bars above or below the picture. I used the custom profile I created although the base profile will work as well. I used the 480x272 output resolution, default bit rate, pan scan zoom. 2.35:1 Widescreen DVD - this is the prevalent widescreen format. It has a wide field of view and black bars above and below the picture. I prefer to crop the output on this type of video, or at least crop the black portion thus giving me the option to stretch the screen with the player. For this reason, I created a custom profile, but could have just added the needed resolutions to the existing Creative profile. I output the .AVI file in 480x210 resolution with pan scan zoom.
Creative Zen Vision W Output Details
4:3 Full Screen DVD - I used the base Creative Zen profile, 640x480 resolution output, 1200bit rate, Pan Scan Zoom setting. This produces a nice .AVI file and although you can see some blockiness, the result is very good. Since the Vision W is a widescreen, the output is pillar boxed with black bars on the left and right. The Vision W lets you stretch the screen to use all of the pixels resulting in fat characters. I prefer to watch that way but it annoys other people.
1.85:1 Widescreen DVD - this is the best format DVD for most home theatre HDTV's as well as the Vision W. The resulting output does not have the black bars above or below the picture. I used the custom profile I created although the base profile will work as well. I used the 480x272 output resolution, default bit rate, pan scan zoom.
2.35:1 Widescreen DVD - this is the prevalent widescreen format. It has a wide field of view and black bars above and below the picture. I prefer to crop the output on this type of video, or at least crop the black portion thus giving me the option to stretch the screen with the player. For this reason, I created a custom profile, but could have just added the needed resolutions to the existing Creative profile. I output the .AVI file in 480x210 resolution with pan scan zoom.
XDRP comes with a Windows Media Video (WMV) profile. I copied it and changed the description, then added some resolutions I wanted to test. I have read a number of complaints about this tool from people trying to use it. Now I know why. The WMV transcoding takes three times longer than the transcoding for other formats. Since I began my adventure looking for a tool that would handle the Vision W well, I couldn't understand what all the bitching was about. Three times as long is a big difference but heck, it still works nicely. I'm using a dual core machine for transcoding, so your mileage will vary.
[UPDATE] I altered some comments in the paragraph above and changed the wording from Zune, to Windows Media Video (WMV) which is much more accurate. By the way, my son has five movies on his Zune now and off showing off his Christmas present to his friends. I'll let you know in a few days what his peers think. I'm betting his iPod buddies will be impressed as hell.
Zune WMV Output Details For 4:3 Full Screen, 1.85:1 Widescreen, and 2.35:1 Widescreen DVD, I used my Zune WMV profile and the 320x240 resolution, pan scan zoom, and either 1200 or 1500 for the bit rate. This produced a nice .WMV file. iPod Output Details Like the Zune, the XDRP software comes with an iPod profile. Also like the Zune, I used 320x240 as the output resolution and pan scan zoom on the 4:3 Full screen and 2.35:1 Widescreen DVDs. However, I found that the Letterbox zoom setting worked best for the 1.85:1 Widescreen DVDs. The output was a rich MPEG4 format that looked very nice on the screen. The MPEG4 format that was produced was also the smallest in the base testing. It was hard to see blockiness or other defects on the small screen, but I was actually pretty happy with the results. The video results combined with the long battery life and 80 freaking gigs of disk space... no wonder Apple stock is where it is. PSP Output Details I did not transcode a bunch of DVDs for the PSP. I did however do a speed and size test with one DVD and targeted all of the above platforms. The XDRP tool comes with several PSP profiles and I used the Excellent Quality profile with 368x208 resolution, 768 bit rate video, pan scan zoom, etc. The base DVD I used for the timings was transcoded the quickest using this profile at 1 hour 4 minutes.
Zune WMV Output Details
For 4:3 Full Screen, 1.85:1 Widescreen, and 2.35:1 Widescreen DVD, I used my Zune WMV profile and the 320x240 resolution, pan scan zoom, and either 1200 or 1500 for the bit rate. This produced a nice .WMV file.
iPod Output Details
Like the Zune, the XDRP software comes with an iPod profile. Also like the Zune, I used 320x240 as the output resolution and pan scan zoom on the 4:3 Full screen and 2.35:1 Widescreen DVDs. However, I found that the Letterbox zoom setting worked best for the 1.85:1 Widescreen DVDs. The output was a rich MPEG4 format that looked very nice on the screen. The MPEG4 format that was produced was also the smallest in the base testing. It was hard to see blockiness or other defects on the small screen, but I was actually pretty happy with the results. The video results combined with the long battery life and 80 freaking gigs of disk space... no wonder Apple stock is where it is.
PSP Output Details
I did not transcode a bunch of DVDs for the PSP. I did however do a speed and size test with one DVD and targeted all of the above platforms. The XDRP tool comes with several PSP profiles and I used the Excellent Quality profile with 368x208 resolution, 768 bit rate video, pan scan zoom, etc. The base DVD I used for the timings was transcoded the quickest using this profile at 1 hour 4 minutes.
If you are looking for a fast utility for the Zune, you might look elsewhere. However, if you are looking for a tool that can handle the Microsoft Zune, Sony PSP, Apple iPod and the Creative Zen Vision W players, then your search is over. The Xilisoft DVD Ripper Platinum utility will convert your DVDs in a single pass to the desired format. Download it from http://www.xilisoft.com/dvd-ripper-platinum.html and try the trial version before you buy. Good stuff.
ROFL !!! If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you should. Too funny. This is Norman’s expression after his most excellent delivery to Simon. Ha ha ha. The expression on Ryan Seacrests face later was priceless.
[UPDATE for 2/15/2009] I still can't believe he made it to the Top 36, but if you've been watching the other contestants you know things are starting to get serious now. How far will Nick actually make it? Only Simon knows...
I’ve been discussing various aspects of the developer world with Andrew Kass lately and as you know I am not short on opinion. So I thought I would ask you a couple of questions. I know a lot of you are either developers, used to be developers, or know and have to deal with developers. Grin.
What is the best laptop for a developer, and why?
Sounds like a simple enough question but there are a lot of variables. And if you were going to buy a machine today, what would it be?
What operating system would you run? What would the toolset look like?
For the past couple of years I’ve been on our hosted Exchange services for my personal email. Because it was the dogfood service, it isn’t exactly the same service that you can buy at microsoft.com/online.
I decided to take the plunge and purchase a real production subscription to Exchange Online. I’m glad I did. It’s only been a few weeks, but so far it’s been a good ride. Best of all, my wife likes her new hosted mailbox. Priceless.
Why is this worthy for your consideration?
Cloud computing and services aren’t just a fad. Frankly some of the concepts have been around for several decades. Remember Ross Perot? He started a company called Electronic Data Systems (later EDS) and the whole goal of the company was to run applications and services in huge information processing centers for customers. They served many virtual markets like Healthcare, Banking, Manufacturing or Insurance. Big systems and big integration challenges. That hasn’t changed.
The Internet continues to morph and evolve. Networking to your business, home and smartphone is pervasive or soon will be. We all enjoy information discovery, sharing, email and social media. Five years ago you would not think twice about buying a server and running your email from it using Microsoft Exchange, Small Business Server, or a host of other products on the market. Publishing to the web from that server was pretty easy and allowed you to share information with partners, customers, family and friends.
But bad stuff happens. Where do you house the server? Who will support it when you are 35,000 above ground on a flight to an important business meeting? How quickly could you respond to a hardware problem if you are 1,600 miles from the server?
With cloud services, you can have someone else make sure the hardware and software is working properly and providing common or custom application services. Microsoft has packaged some of our industry leading products into online cloud based services. Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS) and Exchange Online are two such offerings. Exchange Online is actually part of BPOS but can be purchased separately if you chose. So why build an expensive email server when there’s a low cost alternative in a state-of-the-art data center?
Getting Started
So how do you get started and how much does it cost? Getting started is really easy. There are three easy steps initially to create an account and link some services. First, head on over to the Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS) or Exchange Online product areas of microsoft.com. In each of those sections you’ll see some pricing information and the “Try It Out” button. Click the button to start a 30 day trial.
From there, it’s pretty straight forward. I actually have two accounts. I started by buying Exchange Online for my personal email. I figured $5 per person for a 25GB mailbox hosted in the data center with SPAM block and quarantine was a no brainer. The minimum number of mailboxes you can order is five and that’s exactly how many family members I knew I could put online immediately.
Like I said, this was a no brainer. Sure beats buying and running your own server. I did that when I first started using a Verizon FIOS Business plan and although it was a great learning experience, something would always go wrong with the server while I was traveling or unavailable. Besides, what does it cost you to buy and run a server? I can’t buy a server and run Exchange for $300 per year, can you?
Last week I decided it would be prudent to have a different domain for testing and demo purposes so I purchased a domain from my web hosting provider (1and1.com), then started setting up a BPOS demo environment. The BPOS product folks let me have the account at no charge for a limited period of time, so that is what we’ll use in the following screencast.
Because DNS propagation times are unpredictable, I provisioned the keithcombs.org domain prior to capturing the screencast. I could certainly have hit the pause button and waited, but that tends to stretch your day so I took the safe route. In my experience with 1and1.com and the verify steps, you can verify a domain within minutes. The sole exception I’ve seen so far was my wife’s personal domain, but that’s a long story.
So here’s the first screencast. It should give you an overview of the initial setup, some of the administrative pages, steps and tips. If you are watching via the embedded Silverlight player below, be sure to double click it for a full screen 1440x900 resolution view. The full screen button is also the far right button on the player controls.
Exchange Online Screencast Part 1 - Account Logon and Domain Setup (14:45)
Screencast File Download - if you would like to download the Windows Media Video file and watch with Media Player, by all means right mouse click Part1.wmv and save the file locally.
If you would like to start looking at the online documentation, see http://www.microsoft.com/online/help/en-us/helphowto/Exchange-Online.htm for a great starting point. The screencast above demonstrates portions of the steps in the Add a Domain to Microsoft Online Services section. The complexity of adding and using a domain with Exchange Online will depend on your domain registrar or hosting provider.
Adding Domains and DNS
I am using 1and1.com as my web hosting provider. Adding, changing and deleting DNS records via their web based control panel is pretty easy. In fact, the Exchange Online team has written some specific instructions for a variety of popular registrars and hosting providers. See the instructions for 1and1.com Domain Verification as an example. You’ll see other instructions at http://www.microsoft.com/online/help/en-us/helphowto/Exchange-Online.htm under the Setup | Domains area of the page. Click the More arrow to expand the section.
Keep in mind you don’t have to use one of your personal or business domains during the trial. When you created the account, the domain that was created is fully registered and ready. If you do a whois lookup on the domain, you’ll see it has the appropriate DNS and mail exchange (MX) records assigned. For instance, here’s the dump of the DNS records for cowboykeith.
I just decided to add another domain so that you can see it’s easy to use one or more domains in the BPOS and Exchange Online provisioning panels. I could have just used the domain above, created a mailbox, and started testing with it. It’s up to you. Speaking of which, lets see how to add a user and configure an email client to send and receive email. You won’t believe how easy we’ve made that.
Exchange Online Screencast Part 2 - Adding and Testing Users (16:33)
File Download - http://msinetpub.vo.llnwd.net/d1/keithcombs/screencasts/exchange_online/part2/Part2.wmv.
Adding Users and Importing Email
See? I told you it was easy to create a mailbox, Outlook profile, and start sending and receiving email. The Online Services Sign In application makes all of that easy on your users. Be sure to grab it from the download center at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=5c2ca866-4107-4ae5-98d5-76bf1b18ff87&displaylang=en or on the Home tab of the admin.microsoftonline.com portal.
If you need to add users in bulk, that import process is fully supported so be sure and checkout the documentation for steps on how to do that. See the file format specifications for details on the .CSV layout, examples and other steps in the online help.
After you have the initial Exchange Online user Outlook profile created and working, don’t forget it’s easy to add an existing .PST file for use in the client. If you have important email in the .PST file, I would recommend importing it into Exchange Online via the import wizards that are part of Outlook. Sure beats drag and drop unless you have a small amount of email.
Like I mentioned in the screencast, importing a bunch of data into Exchange Online is a time consuming process and your mileage will vary depending on the amount of data, and the speed of your network connection. Synchronization takes time so test and plan accordingly. And please, communicate this to your family members, customers, or business associates. The last thing you want them to do is kick off the import, then try to run catch a flight or some other urgent appointment.
In summary
This was an overview of how to get up and running fast with BPOS and Exchange Online. You don’t have to commit any of your production domains to this process for testing. You can jump into a 30 day trial for Exchange Online right now and don’t forget, the Exchange Online subscription is month-to-month so you can make a change at any time.
We obviously didn’t cover a lot of other topics like co-existence, directory synchronization, disaster recovery planning, or other mundane chores like creating contacts and distribution lists. That’s ok, we have plenty of topics to cover coming up. I hope you found this post informative.
Other Key Resources and Links
AutoDiscoverRedirect-Red001.Mail.MicrosoftOnline.com
[NOTE] The screencasts above were captured, encoded, and wrapped with Silverlight using Expression Encoder 4 Pro. No other tool was used. I used the VC-1 codec settings for Screen Capture, then set the VBR range from 1MB for average bitrate, to 3MB at the peak.