Ramblings from another nerd on the grid
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.
In order to do a blog real justice, I am a firm believer you really should want to have a conversation with the internet community, and put some serious energy into it. It’s been a privilege to be a Microsoft spokesperson for many years and I hope I earned your respect.
But it had to take a back seat. My wife Nacheska and I discovered in late 2011 she had a stage four Gliosarcoma brain tumor. Needless to say this was terrible news. Survivability for this type of cancer is practically nil. There are rare exceptions, but really really rare.
Nacheska passed away on March 29, 2013. She is no longer suffering. The quality of her life the past year and half was pretty good. As good as it could be under the circumstances.
Over forty years of professional dancing helped her in many ways. She had some miraculous recoveries from the various surgeries and episodes. She spent quite a lot of quality time with everyone in our family and I am extremely thankful for all of the support from them, our friends, customers, the medical community and the first responders here in Southlake, Texas.
I will write more about Nacheska. I shot some excellent video of her last fall. It was a beautiful time of year, and it was really good to see her healthy, happy and in her element, dancing!
My family and I are healing. It’s going to take some time but we are all getting back in the saddle again. I still have some pretty big tasks to settle various aspects of her estate, but I promise some high quality blogging soon.
On the bright side, I’ve changed some habits and as a result have dropped forty pounds. Fruit and vegetables are good for you! Who knew?
Anyway, I thought I should at least tell you where the hell I’ve been and why. As I said on twitter, I’m back.
Last week I received a Lenovo ThinkPad W530 evaluation unit. I am always thankful for the opportunity to get an early look at a machine that will likely be used by quite a few people inside and outside my company. I was especially interested to kick the tires on the W530 because of the hype around Ivy Bridge, the Intel HD 4000 integrated GPU, and other changes to the 15” portable workstation. I won’t be recommending this machine just yet for reasons I’ll get to later. Lets start with the good stuff first, then we’ll work our way towards the items that need improvement.
Battery Life
If you read my blog you’ll know I already did some fabulous battery tests. The tests I conducted aren’t designed to peg the machine performance and kill the battery quickly. I used to do that but I find that when I travel I am doing quite the opposite. So I first tested the machine as if I was on a long flight with WIFI. You travelers know the drill. The red eye home from some conference and a backlog of email after all of your meetings and presentations.
The Lenovo W530 did excellent on those battery tests. The ThinkPad W510 routinely gives me 3-4 hours of life on a 9-cell battery. The ThinkPad W520 nearly doubled that and would run for 6-7 hours. This years model, the ThinkPad W530 eclipsed those times and survived for nearly 12 hours on my last test. See http://blogs.technet.com/b/keithcombs/archive/2012/07/05/nearly-12-hours-on-battery-with-the-lenovo-thinkpad-w530.aspx for more details. Incredible improvement.
In short, there are some pretty big improvements in this model on power management. I need to dig in more deeply on how this is being accomplished, but I was happy to see the results. International flights can now be productive on battery assuming of course you are in business class and have elbow room.
Your battery life is going to vary but if you study the settings available in Lenovo’s Power Manager as I have, you can create a power profile that will manage the power effectively. Getting 11-12 hours all this time will be nearly impossible, but achieving 7-10 should be pretty easy for most people. The default configuration from the Lenovo factory is not optimal.
GPU Changes
There is good news for those of you that want to run more than two external monitors with this machine. I have tested five different displays in an extended desktop display with Windows 7 Ultimate x64. In the blog post at http://blogs.technet.com/b/keithcombs/archive/2012/07/03/lenovo-thinkpad-w530-optimus-quad-multimon.aspx, you notice four different external LCD panels on my desk. This morning I slapped myself and realized I neglected to open the lid on the docked ThinkPad. When you include the notebook LCD panel, it will drive five displays. At the time of the test this morning, there was another unused port on the notebook (VGA) so I might dust off yet another LCD panel in the satellite garage on my property and see if it will drive six. That would be quite a feat.
The model I was shipped has the Intel HD 4000 integrated GPU along with a NVIDIA® Quadro K1000M discrete GPU. They are combined to form the Optimus™ video chipset.
The Intel iGPU drives only the laptop LCD panel. The NVIDIA dGPU drives the remainder of the ports and displays. This is one reason the machine gets excellent battery life. The NVIDIA dGPU is not used as far as I can tell when the machine is undocked, set to Optimus in the BIOS Display configuration, and not attached to any other monitors. The K1000M does all the heavy lifting only if needed. The Windows 7 WEI score for the Optimus setting is 6.8 on both Graphics and Gaming Graphics for the K100M.
One of the other complaints with the ThinkPad W520 is the lack of support for flipping to different display configurations on the fly while using Optimus. The most cited complaint is the inability to clone or mirror the laptop display across a projector connection. This is fixed in the W530. The ThinkPad W530 is more like my W510 in that regard. Because all of the display ports are being handled by the K1000M, a discrete processor, it handles these changes as expected using the built-in Windows 7 key sequences. Unfortunately Lenovo still has a design limitation I have already reported.
By default, all of the POST messages go to the Intel HD 4000 and the laptop LCD panel. If you run docked with the lid down, you won’t see any hard drive passwords prompts, or BitLocker PIN prompts. You won’t be able to stop the boot sequence and change the device you are booting from. In order to see POST messages, you must flip the BIOS display setting from Optimus to Discrete if you want to see those messages on any display other than the laptop LCD panel. As you can see, Lenovo fixed part of the problems inherit to the ThinkPad W520, bit not all of them. This was never fixed with the W520 and I don’t know if it’s going to be possible with the W530.
Performance and Throttling
There are quite a few items I haven’t tested, but one of the areas I wanted to investigate is performance on battery. There’s a whole slew of people that think the quad processor portable workstation market should have no governors on the machine, and it should be able to run at maximum performance until the battery runs out. For example, lets say you ride a train to work each morning and evening for 90 minutes. That commute is enough time for you to run a simulation, but the simulation requires full processing power out of the CPU’s and possibly the GPU. Or in another example, lets say you want to demonstrate something to a client on battery power with the full processing power so your demo looks good.
So far in my testing the ThinkPad W530 will not run at full performance on battery power. To test this I fired up an encoding job with Sony Vegas while on AC power. Video encoding can be a taxing chore for a notebook computer but the quad core machines these days handle it pretty well. During the encoding, the CPU utilization was at 70% across all cores. The CPU clock speed across the core settled in at 3.40GHz. The fan RPM was intially at 3800-3900rpm and as you might imagine, that gets pretty noisy. When you set Maximum Turbo+ in the Lenovo Power Manager, the fan RPM jumps to 4300. This is too loud and I didn’t see the extra 500 rpm offer any additional cooling. The temp for the CPUs was 70-75C which isn’t bad at all.
Then I pulled the plug. As soon as the machine was running on battery, the CPU clock speed dropped to 1.20GHz. As you can see, the performance was cut in half on battery power. If I hear of a workaround to the throttling, I will update this blog post.
For those of you curious about the Windows Experience Index (WEI), see the screenshot below. These are pretty respectable scores. This is not the top of the line ThinkPad W530 but it should be pretty mainstream. Sorry, I am not doing any gaming testing of the machine.
Precision Keyboard
The internet has been ranting for months about the change to the ThinkPad keyboards. Lenovo dumped the classic keyboard for a new keyboard they call the “Precision” keyboard. It’s a chiclet style board and is available with backlighting. I see this as a positive change but there are plenty of people out there that won’t.
The biggest source of complaints seem to stem not from the feel of the keys, but the layout. I must admit, when I look at the layout the key size for some of the keys and their positions do make me wonder a bit. This would have been the perfect time for Lenovo to swap the Fn and Ctrl key positions to the layout used by the rest of the planet. Unfortunately they didn’t make that change on the Precision keyboard.
Other Changes
Lenovo tweaks stuff here and there every model year with new chassis construction, plastics, carbon fiber, etc. I haven’t really studied the materials manifest for this model but it feels like a ThinkPad. Good solid construction and the typical black finish. Lenovo did change the port layout for the W530 and in my opinion it didn’t need to be changed. The palmrest on the evaluation unit I have has a slight imperfection. There’s a dent just to the right of the TrackPad. It’s really minor but it’s like the first time you see a really minor door ding on your car. You know it’s there and you don’t like it.
Lenovo changed from the full size DisplayPort connector to mini DisplayPort. I’m fine with that change since mini DP is becoming a defacto standard. I wish mini DP was a requirement for the Intel Untrabook logo. There is still a VGA port on the left side to support the analog world.
One change I dislike is the dropping of eSATA. The model I have has a USB 2.0 port instead. I am a pretty heavy user of eSATA and in particular eSATAp so this change is not welcome for me anyway. I need to investigate if eSATAp is completely gone in the W530 models. I think you can still get a eSATA port, but the eSATAp combo port is gone for good.
If you have some batteries from a W510 or W520 you’d like to use with the W530, you can’t. Although the batteries can be inserted and will power the machine, the W530 will only recharge the new batteries that are designed for the new ThinkPads. I have no explanation for this change though I read one reason might be to prevent substandard after market batteries from being used in the machine. This appears to mean genuine Lenovo batteries can only be used. I’m ok with that.
One change that you were probably hoping for is a change around the AC adaptors that are compatible. I am sorry to say little has changed. You can still use the 135W AC adapter from the the W510 with the W530, but the 90W adaptors from so many other models can’t be used. Therefore, your travel choices for the ThinkPad W530 are still the 170W or the 135W brick.
Operating Systems
The timing for this evaluation is poor. On the upside, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 run great on the machine. I had no problems running either including the Hyper-V role for R2. R2 installs the Windows 7 ThinkPad W530 ethernet and wifi drivers with no issues.
I can’t say that for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. I had driver issues and asked the Lenovo team for some help identifying better drivers. The response I received was totally expected. They will iron all this out with the released version of Windows 8. Considering we just announced today that Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 are on track for RTM next month, I am totally cool with that.
So I will not be testing Windows 8 and WS 2012 extensively with this machine. I did however install the Hyper-V role on both Win8 and WS2012, create a test VM, confirm network connectivity from the VM, etc. So the important cursory checks were made and I’m sure the video driver challenges will get ironed out over time.
No Linux testing this time around. There are a number of people running various Linux distros on the X230, T430 and W530s with their reports already on the grid so seek them out for answers to any questions you may have.
Included Software
Lenovo is starting to move back to the dark side. There were a lot of programs installed on the factory image of the machine I received. You can still prune back the programs by uninstalling them via Control Panel | Programs and Features, but it’s now at the point where many people would consider the image bloated. There are other colorful names for it but you should lobby for Lenovo to get back to a cleaner image. There are 74 programs listed as installed on this factory image.
If you opt to clean install Windows 7, your activation key is on the COA under the battery. All of the core drivers needed are at support.lenovo.com.
Miscellaneous Stuff
You might have noticed I didn’t mention the screen and other details about the ThinkPad W530. The unit I am getting ready to send back has the 1920x1080 FHD screen. It’s bright and colorful. It comes a little over saturated for my liking but I almost always calibrate the notebooks I use heavily. The screen is the same screen on the W510 and W520 so you can look at the technical analysis all over the grid if you want to understand it’s properties and characteristics.
I didn’t test the machine fully loaded with RAM. The quad core ThinkPad W530’s have four sodimm slots so you can load it up with 4x8GB of high speed DDR memory. In fact, if you look at the specs, Lenovo is supporting higher speed memory in the W530.
The machine I received didn’t come with the RAID option so that wasn’t tested. I also didn’t test SATA speeds and throughput in the Ultrabay or from the mSATA PCIe slot. I’m pretty sure the mSATA slot is still SATA II speed and the Ultrabay is full SATA III. It would be nice to have SATA III in all three especially with the emerging SATA III 256GB mSATA drives.
The trackpad seems to be the same as what was on the W520. The trackpoint seems different to me. It appears to be a little lower in the keyboard than I am used to. I don’t really use either much. I am a mouse guy.
I have not tested the sound with movie playback but DolBy Home Theatre v4 did come installed on the factory image. The speakers do sound better than my W510. The Dolby app has a lot of configuration options.
Lync support was not tested. In order for me to do that means adding the machine to my production workflow and I am much too busy during the day for that right now. For those of you that do test this, let me know how it works out.
And Finally
Last year when I evaluated the Lenovo ThinkPad W520, I didn’t spot some issues or design challenges that cropped up in the platform until much later. You don’t always see the full character of a platform for months.
One of those design issues was the Optimus design in the W520. I underestimated how people would react to having to run in Discrete video mode for display mirroring and projection. Lenovo has improved this, but we aren’t there yet. The POST messages need to display in Optimus mode.
The second more serious issue was the famed sudden death syndrome reported in the Lenovo support forums. The challenge with the issue was that it didn’t impact everyone and it could be very intermittent in nature. Some folks plagued with the issue only saw it on thirty to forty five day intervals. Others would see it multiple times per day. Unfortunately I don’t think the root causes have been identified and fixed. Needless to say that isn’t a good situation.
For that reason, I am going to hang out and watch to see how the ThinkPad W530 does in the market before I give the ThinkPad W530 a thumbs up, a sideways thumb, or a thumbs down. I want to be really sure this time. For those of you that decide to be early adopters, by all means let me know how you are liking the machine.
[UPDATE for 7/13/2012] Sean Furguson, Microsoft Exchange Software Engineer, has the ThinkPad W520 now and tells me the CPU will clock above 1.20GHz if the BIOS is set to Maximum Performance instead of Maximum Battery Life. He’s doing some testing on this. I didn’t have the setting written down in my notes but I’m pretty sure I was on the max battery life settings from the battery testing that had been performed prior to the Throttle test. I should have tested both settings. More later.
[UPDATE for 8/18/2012] notebookcheck.com published their review at http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Lenovo-ThinkPad-W530-N1K43GE-Notebook.80062.0.html. In their review they indicate the CPU is throttled on battery which matches my findings. In addition, you might want to keep an eye on the thread at http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/W-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/W530-Windows-2008R2-andy-HyperV-won-t-work/td-p/830777 if you plan to run Hyper-V with Windows Server 2008 R2 , Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012. Apparently this gentlemen is having all sorts of problems. Seems like the jury is still out on this machine.
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.
Executive Summary
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
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.
Photo Tour
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.
Today Microsoft ushered in a new era of virtualization management. Want to know more? Take a 15 minute video tour with me as we take a look at System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2007, System Center Operation Manager (SCOM) 2007 and the Virtual Machine Management pack.
Over the past few weeks I created and tested a demonstration environment on my machines using the RTM bits of Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2, Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1, SQL Server 2005, SQL Reporting Services, PowerShell, WinRM, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007, System Center Operations Manager 2007, and capturing tools to record all of this. I built this from scratch and although it takes some time, you can save your time by downloading a pre-built image. Details below. But consider this, all of the products listed above are now shipping. None of it is beta. That means you can build this yourself and start learning right away.
So what's the big deal?
Have you tried to manage a bunch of virtual machines with the Virtual Server 2005 administrative website? It doesn't scale very well and there's no real collection of performance data. The new management capabilities provided by SCVMM will really help you get a grip on consolidation of underutilized servers via physical to virtual migrations, efficient management of the VM's after they are there, and excellent analysis and reporting. The tour I recorded touches on most of these subjects but obviously I can't go super deep in fifteen minutes. So lets talk about a few areas.
The VMM Console
Simple to use. I like it. It's very well thought out and has nice visualization of the servers in your org, the virtual machines executing on those servers, access to properties and settings, etc. As with many of our management tools, the actions pane is present and is context sensitive. For those of you using UNDO disk files in Virtual Server 2005, you'll notice right away this console doesn't like that. We'll talk about why in a minute and do a deep dive into that area on the next blog post and screencast this morning.
You'll find some cool new features in the console. As you'll see in the screencast, we can tag virtual machines. After tagging, we can change the view to group by tag. This will come in very handy if you want to tag VM's by customer, project, cost center, geography, etc. Partners and hosters will love this.
The VMM Console also includes nice little thumb nail views of the VM when it's selected. This will come in handy for installs or other type of activity you just want to see at a glance. If needed, double click the thumbnail to launch a VMRC session with the VM. Easy. Secure.
Got Your Library Card?
When was the last time you went down to the public library to check out a book? Or a book on tape or CD? Did they have it? Unless it was super popular most likely what you were looking for was there. SCVMM has a library. Use it to store virtual machines, hardware profiles, virtual hard disk files, etc. Think of all of the building blocks you use to build virtual machines with. When you go to start building a virtual machine, take advantage of your internal building blocks and standards stored on the Library. I think you are going to find this to be invaluable especially in a large environment with many potential virtual machines.
PowerShell is Everywhere
Much like Exchange Server 2007, nearly all of the tasks are executed via PowerShell commandlets. When you are using the VMM Console, and do something like a virtual machine migration (move from one host to another), PowerShell is doing the work behind the scenes. You can go to the jobs area in the console and see this progress. If you are a command line commando, then fire up a PowerShell console and take advantage of tons and tons of script and commandlets to do chores in the SCVMM environment. You'll see me demo moving a VM with a simple script file in the screencast. We have a commandlet reference guide that will be published today or very soon and as soon as I get the link, I'll make sure to provide it.
You'll love using PowerShell for automation of creates, moves, etc.
Checkpoints and State Management
Now that UNDO disk files aren't supported in SCVMM, what do you use? Checkpoints to the rescue. You'll quickly fall in love with the new checkpointing mechanism and forget all about UNDO before you know it. I have recorded a screencast on this topic and will be posting detailed information in another blog post in few minutes.
See http://blogs.technet.com/keithcombs/archive/2007/09/06/system-center-virtual-machine-manager-2007-screencast-checkpoints.aspx for more information on that subject.
Self Service
How do your users manage and use virtual machines? The new SCVMM Self Service Portal of course! Check out the screencast (right at the end) or get more detail from Tony Soper in his blog post at http://blogs.technet.com/tonyso/archive/2007/08/20/drive-through-vms-scvmm-self-service-portal.aspx.
Monitoring and Reporting
If you already have a bunch of virtual machines, what do you really know about them? What do you know about the host running them? Now you'll be able to answer those questions and much more. System Center Operations Manager 2007, also known as SCOM, with the combined management packs will allow for the most comprehensive VM monitoring you've ever seen. Monitor and report against the host running the workloads,the virtual machine, and the applications inside the virtual machine. End to end reporting rocks and you won't get a better solution from anyone else right now.
The Screencast
Take a look at the screencast and go on a tour of SCVMM and SCOM 2007. The video is a little over fifteen minutes in length and I tried to hit most of the key areas of the product mix so you can get a quick technical overview of the products. If you want to save this local and review it offline, please right mouse click the second link and "SAVE AS".
Streaming - http://msinetpub.vo.llnwd.net/d1/keithcombs/scvmm/15MinuteTour.wmv Save Local - http://msinetpub.vo.llnwd.net/d1/keithcombs/scvmm/15MinuteTour.wmv
Streaming - http://msinetpub.vo.llnwd.net/d1/keithcombs/scvmm/15MinuteTour.wmv
Save Local - http://msinetpub.vo.llnwd.net/d1/keithcombs/scvmm/15MinuteTour.wmv
Other Resources
A number of websites are going live through the course of today. Here are a few of my favorites. The TechNet area will have a SCVMM virtual machine you can download. This will save you the time and trouble of setting everything up from scratch (although I recommend the "from scratch" approach for training).
http://www.microsoft.com/scvmm http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization http://technet.microsoft.com/scvmm
http://www.microsoft.com/scvmm
http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization
http://technet.microsoft.com/scvmm
Outside Sources and Reviews
http://news.com.com/Microsoft+aims+at+VMwares+virtualization+lead/2100-7339_3-6206641.html http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9034818 http://weblog.infoworld.com/virtualization/archives/2007/09/here_comes_micr.html http://www.virtualization.info/2007/09/release-microsoft-system-center-virtual.html
http://news.com.com/Microsoft+aims+at+VMwares+virtualization+lead/2100-7339_3-6206641.html
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9034818
http://weblog.infoworld.com/virtualization/archives/2007/09/here_comes_micr.html
http://www.virtualization.info/2007/09/release-microsoft-system-center-virtual.html
Downloads
will go somewhat live on 9/7 with the downloadable virtual machine. This VM will allow you to test drive the product without setting it up from scratch. The SCVMM evaluation bits should be on the download center next week.
Have you had a chance to look at the most recent announcements we've made about the Microsoft Genuine Software Initiative (GSI)? How about the Microsoft Software Protection Platform (SPP)? Well, here's a heads up on some rather significant changes that are steaming your way and will be featured in Windows Vista.
First, check out the press release at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2006/oct06/10-04SoftwareProtection.mspx. Make sure to download and read the Software Protection whitepaper. It discusses some of the history and mechanics behind GSI and SPP.
Here's a couple of snippets from the presspass announcement:
"Today we are announcing the Software Protection Platform –a new set of technologies that will help Microsoft make software piracy harder, help protect consumers from the risks of counterfeit software, and better enable small to large businesses to manage their software assets. The Software Protection Platform has been under development for several years. It brings together new anti-piracy innovations, counterfeit detection and tamper-resistant features into a complete platform that provides better software protection to programs that leverage it. Initially, the upcoming releases of Windows Vista and Windows Server “Longhorn” will be the first two products to ship with this technology included, and eventually more Microsoft products will adopt this technology. In addition, the Software Protection Platform enables the next generation of genuine validation programs such as Windows Genuine Advantage (product differentiation). In short, it introduces new ways for Windows Vista and Windows Server “Longhorn” to activate, validate as genuine, and behave when tampered with or hacked." "One of the things the Software Protection Platform enables is enhancements to the genuine experience in Windows Vista, thereby differentiating it from the non-genuine experience. Customers that use genuine Windows Vista product should expect, and will get, an enhanced set of features that will not work on non-genuine or unlicensed versions of Windows Vista. Customers using genuine and licensed copies of Windows Vista will have access to Windows Aero and Windows ReadyBoost features, as well as full functionality of Windows Defender and extra optional updates from Windows Update. Computer systems that do not pass validation will not have access to these features, although they will still have access to critical security updates. Aero offers Microsoft’s best-designed, highest-performing desktop experience and is available in Windows Vista Home Premium, Windows Vista Business and Windows Vista Ultimate. ReadyBoost lets users use a removable flash memory device to improve system performance without opening the computer to install additional memory. Both are key features that a user of non-genuine software will quickly realize are not running. Windows Defender helps protect a user’s PC against pop-ups, and security threats caused by spyware and other malware. In addition, users of non-genuine Windows Vista software will be notified if their copy of Windows Vista is determined to be non-genuine with the appearance of a persistent statement in the lower right hand corner of their desktop space that reads, “This copy of Windows is not genuine.” "
"Today we are announcing the Software Protection Platform –a new set of technologies that will help Microsoft make software piracy harder, help protect consumers from the risks of counterfeit software, and better enable small to large businesses to manage their software assets. The Software Protection Platform has been under development for several years. It brings together new anti-piracy innovations, counterfeit detection and tamper-resistant features into a complete platform that provides better software protection to programs that leverage it. Initially, the upcoming releases of Windows Vista and Windows Server “Longhorn” will be the first two products to ship with this technology included, and eventually more Microsoft products will adopt this technology.
In addition, the Software Protection Platform enables the next generation of genuine validation programs such as Windows Genuine Advantage (product differentiation). In short, it introduces new ways for Windows Vista and Windows Server “Longhorn” to activate, validate as genuine, and behave when tampered with or hacked."
"One of the things the Software Protection Platform enables is enhancements to the genuine experience in Windows Vista, thereby differentiating it from the non-genuine experience. Customers that use genuine Windows Vista product should expect, and will get, an enhanced set of features that will not work on non-genuine or unlicensed versions of Windows Vista. Customers using genuine and licensed copies of Windows Vista will have access to Windows Aero and Windows ReadyBoost features, as well as full functionality of Windows Defender and extra optional updates from Windows Update. Computer systems that do not pass validation will not have access to these features, although they will still have access to critical security updates. Aero offers Microsoft’s best-designed, highest-performing desktop experience and is available in Windows Vista Home Premium, Windows Vista Business and Windows Vista Ultimate. ReadyBoost lets users use a removable flash memory device to improve system performance without opening the computer to install additional memory. Both are key features that a user of non-genuine software will quickly realize are not running. Windows Defender helps protect a user’s PC against pop-ups, and security threats caused by spyware and other malware.
In addition, users of non-genuine Windows Vista software will be notified if their copy of Windows Vista is determined to be non-genuine with the appearance of a persistent statement in the lower right hand corner of their desktop space that reads, “This copy of Windows is not genuine.” "
What does this mean?
Microsoft is developing and now releasing the first new technologies that form part of the Software Protection Platform (SP Platform). The platform will help fight piracy, protect consumers from the risks of counterfeit software, and better enable volume license customers to manage their software assets. The Software Protection Platform brings together new anti-piracy innovations, counterfeit detection practices and tamper resistance into a complete platform that provides better software protection to programs that use it.
So what do you think?
I'm guessing Cyrus at http://www.engadget.com/2006/10/04/microsoft-will-cripple-pcs-running-pirated-copies-of-vista/ doesn't like it too much. The folks at http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=339 seem to think it’s going to help promote open source adoption. Hmmmm….
Remember that Windows Vista SP1 blog post about “I have your back!” ??? Well, apparently nobody had mine so my last day with Microsoft will be April 11, 2008. I probably won’t post many more blogs posts here. The empire is obviously nervous about anything I do so I’ll be nice until then. Until then…
What about after?
Well, that’s a different story. I am taking a couple of weeks vacation after that, then I start work for Apple. Yep, you read that correctly. My role will be very similar to the one I have now, except I get to evangelize all things Apple. They want me to focus on OS X integration with AD, cross platform identity management, desktop management, security, etc. In short, stuff right up my alley.
What about blogging as Apple?
I wrote that into my employment agreement. Yep, Steve had to sign off on it. I’ll be blogging, screencasting, webcasting, doing live events and stirring up the usual amount of trouble.
And the good news is that I won’t have to move to Cupertino. I’ll obviously be spending a lot of time there especially to begin with, but I don’t have to pick up and move my family, have my wife sell off her business, etc.
So, it’s been a wonderful 12 years at Microsoft, but it’s time for a change. Before I’m really gone I hope to have a new email address, blog domain and other contact information worked out. If not, just keep and eye out for http://blogs.apple.com. It’s coming. Finally.
Ok, APRIL FOOLS SUCKAS !!! :)
Do you really think I would switch? Come on, even I’m not that evil.
During the conference call my team had on Friday, we were discussing the upcoming content we are planning for the August-December timeframe. One of my team members who shall remain nameless stated that most of the customers he has talked to aren't upgrading existing Windows XP machines to Windows Vista. Instead, they are just buying new machines with Windows Vista as the old XP machines roll off the books and are re-purposed, or die.
Is that accurate? Is that what you are doing?
None of the security, network, search, etc. improvements warrant an upgrade of an existing machine, even with Aero glass turned off so that it performs on par or better than Windows XP?
[UPDATE for 5/18] For those of you that want to call me a confused idiot and other derogatory remarks, or want to spit venom at Microsoft in the form of comments here, don't bother because I am unlikely to publish your art. If you want to be polite, courteous and offer some insight into the decisions you or your customers are making, then that is welcome.
My wife thinks you are all crazy. The says Spider Solitaire alone is worth the upgrade to Windows Vista. Grin.
[UPDATE for 5/19] I watch referrals to my blog and noticed a few of you have picked up on what you think is a story here. First of all, you should know this article has no basis in fact. The person on my team that made the comment was offering an opinion but he has hardly spoken to every Microsoft customer and gathered any empirical data to support such a statement. Second, the small smattering of comments don’t indicate any particular fact or trend either. My questions were posed to initiate some dialog on the subject, nothing more.
I am always perplexed at why people go looking for dirt. I guess dirt sells. I’d rather have a conversation about what we are doing right and wrong. Offer an opinion on which way I think people should go. So here’s mine.
Buying a machine with Windows Vista is a smart move. If the OEM has done their job, then the out-of-box experience should be good. Your experience is going to vary depending on the OEM and of course they know if they do a sub par job, your return business is at stake.
As for the upgrade question, this is something you’ll have to decide but it should not be too terribly hard to test. We worked hard to provide you an array of hardware and software compatibility tools.
Windows Vista offers a lot of benefits, even for older machines. I’m running Windows Vista Enterprise on a Compaq Evo n620c and it runs very nicely. The machine is nearly five years old and only has one gig of RAM. Your experience will vary and I respect the decisions you make.
I just want to know why you make the decisions, and what we can do better down the road. That’s what blogs are for. Having that conversation.
I received a flurry of questions via email when I posted information the other day that I had 8GB of memory in my Apple MacBook Pro. At the time of my post, I had only intended to boot the OS and see that it appeared to work correctly, recognize the updated amount of memory and shutdown cleanly. In other words, a short cursory test.
But the questions kept coming so I decided last night to reinstall the memory and do more testing. This time I decided to put my ThinkPad T61p back to it’s original configuration of 4GB RAM and do some longer term testing on the MacBook Pro.
Now For The Bad News
Unfortunately after running the MacBook Pro for almost 24 hours, it isn’t looking good. One of the key scenarios for wanting to move to 8GB isn’t working worth a damn. I’m talking about virtualization.
VMWare Fusion Testing
I started my virtualization testing using VMWare Fusion. It’s my preferred Mac desktop virtualization product and considering I purchased it last October, it seemed to be the logical place to start. I already had several virtual machines built and waiting in the wings for testing. To be specific, I tested Windows Vista Enterprise SP1 x86, Windows Server 2008 Enterprise x64 and Red Hat Linux Desktop 5.1 x86.
The very first test I ran was to increase the memory allocation on the Windows Vista virtual machine from 1GB to 3GB. Seemed like a simple enough test. I mean after all, if that ran well, then it would be time to run Windows Server 2008 with a similar memory allocation, thus proving Fusion and OS X could handle the memory above the 4GB 32bit line. Bad idea. Booting the VM with 3GB of memory slowed the entire system down. I mean really slow. Firefox and Entourage were almost unusable to the point that they wouldn’t respond to mouse clicks.
When I booted up the Windows Server 2008 virtual machine, the overall system performance ground nearly to a halt. That’s not good. The Windows Vista VM was set to 3GB and the Windows Server 2008 VM was set to 2GB. Clearly something was wrong. At the suggestion of one of our internal Mac enthusiast, I removed VMWare Fusion 1.1.3 and installed VMWare Fusion 2 Beta 1. No change in the results. So I’m thinking at this point there are still a number of variables to consider and we don’t yet know who the real culprit of the problem performance is. How do we remove a variable?
Parallels Desktop for the Mac
In order to remove one of the variables, the simplest solution seemed to be removing VMWare Fusion and installing and testing Parallels Desktop for the Mac 3.0. If by a stroke of luck Parallels worked flawlessly, then we would at least know there’s a bug in Fusion and it needs to be reported to the VMWare team.
Unfortunately it doesn’t look like Parallels is going to fair any better than Fusion. The maximum amount of memory you can allocate to a Windows Vista virtual machine is 2GB. I didn’t look to see if there was a hack to allow for more. I created a Windows Vista Ultimate x86 VM and allocated 2GB of memory. The install was fairly painless and execution of the VM after installing the Parallels Tools was pretty good. The overall OS X and system performance was no where near as bad as the Fusion experience.
But that was only one 2GB virtual machine and we need more. So I decided to create a Windows XP Pro x86 virtual machine. So far it’s been installing for about five hours. Now keep in mind nothing else is running on the system other than Parallels and this install. The Windows Vista virtual machine isn’t fired up and running yet. This isn’t looking good.
So where does this leave us?
Good question. I don’t have a good answer yet. When the XP install finishes, I’ll certainly run it and Windows Vista to see if they’ll behave and work correctly. If they don’t, the next thing I’ll do is pull the 8GB of RAM back out of the machine and reinstall the 4GB of memory to see if the virtual machines work properly (with smaller memory allocations). I don’t see much point in testing a 6GB configuration by mixing a 2GB SoDIMM with a 4GB SoDIMM. That is unlikely to solve the performance problem although it is probably an interesting configuration choice for a few of you.
Assuming by pulling the memory out of the box, things settle down and perform properly, then Apple, VMWare, Parallels and Kingston have some work to do. At that point it would not be apparent if the 4GB sticks are in fact faulty, or OS X needs a fix, or Fusion and/or Parallels need a fix. This would certainly be out of my hands for any further testing.
I’ll update this post tomorrow and as needed over the next few days to give you updates on my observations but I wanted to let you know things aren’t looking good at the moment. On the bright side, the 4GB sticks have performed absolutely flawlessly in my Lenovo ThinkPad T61p with Windows Vista Enterprise and Ultimate x64, Virtual PC 2007 SP1 x64, Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 x64, Windows Server 2008 Enterprise x64 and Hyper-V, and a whole boatload of applications.
It’s a shame I can’t say the same for the Mac. Hopefully Apple will come out with a “certified” sku or configuration soon. I have already informed Kingston and have requested an Apple SME if they have one.
[UPDATE for 7/10] As expected, Parallels ran slightly better but took a nose dive off the cliff when I started two virtual machines. I pulled the two 4GB sticks out and reinserted the two original 2GB sticks from Apple and everything ran MUCH better. At this point it looks like there is some sort of compatibility issue. I’ll let the makers of the products figure it out. Sorry, until they do you are better off running a good Windows machine with an x64 version of our OS if you need more than 4GB of memory. Sad but true. I tried.
[UPDATE for 7/11] I configured my Mac for bootcamp and installed Windows Vista Enterprise x64. I also installed Windows Server 2005 R2 SP1 x64 and ran three virtual machines with the 4GB of system memory configuration. No issues. That ran well. I shut things down gracefully and installed the two Kingston 4GB sticks bring the total system memory up to 8GB. The machine would barely boot Windows Vista and run. It is now apparent to me the memory sticks I have have some sort of incompatibility with the MacBook Pro I have. My testing of this has now concluded. It’s up to Kingston and Apple to resolve.
Out with the old, in with the new. I’ve been selling a few items on my wife’s costume ecommerce site. I sold enough stuff so far to purchase the recently announced Intel® X25-M Mainstream 160GB SSD drive.
This particular drive has been getting rave reviews and I am looking forward to receiving it sometime this week. It already shipped from newegg.com.
Strangely, newegg deactivated the part number at http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167017. I think they realized all of the other Intel SSD drives were going to collect dust if they didn’t sell them first. Duh. They’re like two hundred more dollars. Earth to newegg, discount the hell of the first generation and get rid of them. Take the loss and move on.
But I see a storm on the horizon. Some of the laptop makers have been advertising 3.0GB SATA speeds in the specs for their laptops for years and it doesn’t look like those machines support the advertised spec. I’m not going to name names right now, but you can imagine this isn’t going to make their customers happy when they start buying drives like this.
By the way, anyone know what the maximum Windows 7 rating is for a hard drive in the WINSAT tests? Should be fun to find out. To be continued…
[UPDATE] Apparently my drive never made it out the warehouse door and got stopped due to the firmware issue described at the engadget.com article. Sigh… Now I’ll probably have to wait weeks for the next one.
Microsoft is pleased to announce the availability of Windows Virtual PC and Windows XP mode Release Candidate. RC is an important milestone in our path to final delivery of Windows Virtual PC and Windows XP Mode.
Please make sure to read the Release Notes and the Installation Guide before installing. Also please note that a Beta to RD upgrade is not supported. You must uninstall the Beta before installing the RC product binaries.
Here are just a few highlights for the product:
Go get Windows Virtual PC @ http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=4c3a0944-a2e6-4f01-9c57-5b55885875cc.
Go get Windows XP Mode @ http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=487f1e8b-f868-4c1e-a047-1b2306c0f592
You’ve seen me do literally hundreds of Camtasia captured screencast demos. One of the screencasts I did on Windows Server 2008 was captured using the Windows Media Encoder x64 product. That product has now been depricated and the screencast below was captured with a new product called Expression Encoder Screen Capture 3. This product ships with and is designed to run with Expression Encoder 3.
This new screen capturing tool does a great job of capturing high quality work you might like to demonstrate via a blog or webpage. The screencast below was captured where the source machine was running a display resolution of 1920x1200. In the demo I also execute and run a Halo 3 720p HD video. That Halo 3 video is 30fps and the data rate for the video is right at 6MB. Try duplicating this capture with other products on the market or the internet. Let me know how successful you were. Grin.
The following demo requires the released version of Silverlight 3. Install from http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/get-started/install/default.aspx. I haven’t quite figured out the code to force that check in the blog post. So for now, there’s a little manual human intervention required. You can handle it. Smiles.
The Demo
Download Location
If you want to download the Windows Media Video file that was produced by Expression Encoder 3, right mouse click the following link and SAVE TARGET AS to a location local to your machine.
http://msinetpub.vo.llnwd.net/d1/keithcombs/screencasts/ee3/CaptureDemo/EncoderCapture.wmv
Some Notes on the Source and Output
The captured file size ended up being slightly less than 800MB. After selecting the Expression Encoder 3 VC-1 Screen profile and making some slight adjustments, I encoded to the Silverlight VC-1 format with a resulting file size of 40.5MB. That’s some serious crunching and compression folks.
The most impressive aspect is the quality of output. To truly appreciate this, run this screencast on a 24” monitor that has a native res of 1920x1200 and go full screen with the Silverlight 3 player control. The full screen button shows up if you move your mouse into the lower portion of the player and the controls pop up. The button I am referring to is bottom right. When full screen on a 24” monitor, the clarity should be nearly perfect with very little blurriness, artifacting, or other noise.
If you are using a smaller LCD panel like I am at the moment (15.4” laptop LCD at 1680x1050), you will see some blurriness but it should not be too bad. I haven’t yet decided what ot use in the future for my recordings so feedback now would be VERY welcome.
Since the data rate for this screencast is 4MB, those of you with slower internet connection may see some issues with playback buffering before the file is progressively downloaded. I am not using the adaptive bitrate streaming for this example.
Software locations
Be sure to install the released version of Silverlight 3 at http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/get-started/install/default.aspx. After that, be sure to download the trial versions of the Expression Suite 3 products at http://www.microsoft.com/expression/try-it/#PageTop when they come out (soon). Expression Blend 3 with Sketchflow is available now.
Other References
One of my blog readers just sent me a message about a recommendation for a machine. Let’s talk about the current state of the market. It’s a pretty interesting time to be buying a machine. Here’s the message I received:
how is it going..Love your webcasts by the way..I was wondering if you could help me out with a question. I am in the market for a new laptop..powerful enough to run VM's ...testing microsoft products...training etc.. I love the sony Vaio z570 however it is limited to 4gb max ram...Personally i think the new lenovos are not nearly up to the standard of the old ibm thinkpads..However i am asking for your opinion of what laptop you think is a solid machine.. Would you suggest a laptop that can handle say up to 8gb RAM or is 4gb enough..Also, do you suggest windows Vista Ultimatw or Business (64 bit or 32 bit).. I know windows 7 is on its way..not sure when the release will be and obviously it is on its way because of the poor marketpace attention vista has gotten...I am assuming it is basically a more stable vita...Also, would the upgrade from windows vista to 7 be easy in your opinion or should i want for 7 to be released.. I have looked at the Dell precision m2400 and the vaioz570. what laptop would you suggest given my RAM concerns processor etc.. Thanks for your help
There are a lot of questions and requirements in there so let’s answer a few of those so some objective decisions can be made. First of all Brad indicates the Sony Vaio Z570 is limited to a max of 4GB of memory. Says who? Who has actually tested that and confirmed it? That’s a really important point because it’s nearly impossible to test at the moment. The specs in the data sheet and all available online documentation tell you it’s limited to 4GB but so does all of the information on the Lenovo ThinkPad T61p I’m using right now. And it has and uses 8GB.
Unless Sony specifically blocked using more than 4GB of memory in the BIOS, then the Z570 should be able to use up to 8GB if running a 64bit version of Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008. Keep in mind I said should. That is not a guarantee. The Z570 uses the Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor P9500. If you look at the Intel processor specs at http://www.intel.com/products/processor/core2duo/mobile/specifications.htm, you’ll notice a couple of interesting things.
First, there appears to be an error in the Sony data sheet specs. Sony lists the processor speed at 2.53 GHz with a front side bus speed of 1066 MHz. Intel says the processor speed is 2.60 GHz and the front side bus speed is 800 MHz. I’m inclined to believe the Intel specs. Second, the processor supports the Intel 64 Architecture. This is a good clue that it will run and use more than 4GB of memory. The Intel P9500 processor also supports Intel VT so it will likely run Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.
The problem with this particular machine and most of the new machines on the market right now is the lack of available 4GB SoDIMM memory sticks for the 800 and 1066 MHz bus speeds. Therefore you can’t order the machine with 8GB of memory, nor can you load it with 8GB of memory right when you get it. That’s starting to change, but very slowly. This presents a problem. You will run through your return period before you can actually test it. For that reason, I would not buy a machine without some sort of assurance in writing from the maker.
So what do you do?
Good question. Brad indicates above he is interested in the Dell Precision M2400, too. When you take a look at the specs for that machine at http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/workstation_precision_m2400?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd, it’s clear they support 64bit versions of Windows Vista and 8GB of memory is also listed. Cha ching!!! At least it appears you can buy it fully loaded and ready to go.
There are other machines on the market that you can purchase with a 64bit operating system, 8GB or more of memory, and ready to run. Dell offers a whole bunch of different machine and I know Consultants in this company using some of the new Latitudes and Precision machines with Hyper-V.
I would not discount the quality of the Lenovo machines. We have a bunch of people using them and the typical comment from people getting their hands on one is that it’s the best machine they’ve ever owned. The Lenovo ThinkPad W500 is a really nice machine with a ton of power and can be ordered with a 64 bit version of Windows Vista and 8GB of memory. It’s bigger than what Brad appears to want with a 15.4” screen, but the little brother ThinkPad T400 would be a great machine with a 14.1” widescreen to fit his needs.
But does Brad need the memory?
Does Brad need more than 4GB of memory? I don’t really like to be judge and jury on that question but let me describe briefly how handy it becomes. When my team had laptops with 3GB of memory, we struggled to run and demo the Microsoft server products. We typically need to run 2-4 VM’s and sometimes more. Some of those VM’s really like 1GB of memory or more. As you can see by running the math, that means you end up needing a couple of machines to split the load. We used to travel with two laptops. What fun that was.
Now that we have 8GB machines, we have a lot more memory to work with and the VM’s perform MO BETTER!!! If I am running a hungry Exchange or SQL Server VM, I allocate 1, 2 or 3GB of memory. No problem. But this is where it gets really dicey. Many of our products are starting to ship as 64bit only products. Windows Server 2008 R2 will be the product that really forces the issue on laptops. There’s only one Microsoft product that executes 64bit VM’s today. That’s the Hyper-V role of Windows Server 2008. This is obviously a problem for folks like Brad because we don’t have a solution for him at the moment. Until we have a desktop virtualization product that executes 64bit VM’s, he either needs to use Hyper-V or another product on the market like VMWare Workstation. Hopefully we’ll have a different story soon.
So while Brad might not need the memory immediately, the 64bit path is guaranteed. The two machines he’s picked should be plenty powerful. Ultimately it’s his decision. I don’t have any personal experience with the Dell or Sony he listed, but at least the Dell has what he’s asking about in writing. Let us know how things go Brad.
This ad and video is pretty funny. Lauren, you rock!!!
Regardless of the hiccups today on activation of the Apple iPhone 3G, you have to hand it to Apple and at&t on what appears to be a pretty decent product launch. I mean after all, how many people played “sick” or “hookie” today in order to stand in line all day and buy an iPhone?
Let’s see, what was the temperature at the Apple store today in Southlake, Texas where I live today? 101 degrees baby. What was the temperature of my home office today where I was at? 74-75. Ahhhhhh. Unless you’ve attended a Texas Jam in the summer here, you have no idea what 101 will do to your mind over the course of… wait for it… ALL DAY. Line waits were 5-6 hours all over the country. No thanks, I’m not into that kind of pain for any technology. Maybe in the winter, but not the summer.
Things I like about the iPhone 3G and I don’t even have one:
Things I hate about the iPhone 3G and I don’t even have one:
I could probably nit pick on a few other things, but it looks like the unit covers my main two requirements. It is a phone and has a good screen for video. That’s attractive to me. Not enough to go buy one, but still interesting.
It’s always fun to see enthusiasm for a technology or device and Apple has it going on right now. Gotta give them credit. But we aren’t sitting still and there are some devices coming in the next few weeks and months I have my eye on. Let’s hope they are competitive.
Until then, rock on at&t and Apple.
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.
If you are going to run web workloads, you'd be remiss not to evaluate Windows Server 2008 and IIS7. In fact, Windows Server 2008 includes a Core installation option that is an excellent platform for a variety of computing workloads. One thing you might not have thought about is using open source software on our platform. Well think again.
In this screencast series, I'll show you how to take advantage of Internet Information Server 7 as a premier platform for some popular products including PHP, MySQL and Wordpress. Now you might be thinking I've gone off the deep end. No worries, I'm still sane (at this moment in time). If you are going to run those products, we'd rather have you run them on Windows than Linux or UNIX.
We don't really go into hosting provisioning, management and performance but you'll get an idea of how to setup and configure the products. The screencasts were recorded using Windows Server 2008 Core. I plan to record a similar screencast series in the next day or so on Windows Vista to give you an idea of how a developer workstation could be configured with open source software. I hope you enjoy both. It's always funny to listen to yourself after the fact when I record these things. Sometimes I sound like such a Texas hick from the sticks. Oh well, it's me. I'll try and work on my grammar pardner.
For this screencast series I decided to go through a brief description of each section and then I provided links to all of the videos later in the post. I have also provided links to the non-streaming versions of the videos in case you want to download them and watch them offline.
Part 1 - Installing IIS 7 Roles and Features in Windows Server 2008 (video length = 7:42)
In this section we introduce you to Windows Server 2008 and the Core installation option. Installation of the IIS7 web server roles and features are demonstrated and discussed.
InstallCGI.cmd contents:
Start /w pkgmgr /iu:IIS-WebServerRole;IIS-WebServer;IIS-CommonHttpFeatures;IIS-StaticContent;IIS-DefaultDocument;IIS-DirectoryBrowsing;IIS-HttpErrors;IIS-ApplicationDevelopment;IIS-CGI;IIS-HealthAndDiagnostics;IIS-HttpLogging;IIS-LoggingLibraries;IIS-RequestMonitor;IIS-Security;IIS-RequestFiltering;IIS-HttpCompressionStatic;IIS-WebServerManagementTools;WAS-WindowsActivationService;WAS-ProcessModel
Part 2 - Configuring PHP (video length = 7:34)
We need to configure IIS7 to use PHP as a CGI execution environment. All of the .cmd files in this section were created by me to ease the typing pain in the webcast. We'll first configure FastCGI to use PHP with the demonstrated PHP1.cmd script.
PHP1.cmd contents: appcmd set config /section:system.webServer/fastCGI /+[fullPath='C:\php\php-cgi.exe']
PHP1.cmd contents:
appcmd set config /section:system.webServer/fastCGI /+[fullPath='C:\php\php-cgi.exe']
The next thing we need to do is setup the handler and module mapping for IIS7 so that it understands the available verbs and how to call PHP for request processing. This is demonstrated in the video by executing the PHP2.cmd file in the video.
PHP2.cmd contents: appcmd set config /section:system.webServer/handlers /+[name='PHP-FastCGI',path='*.php',verb='*',modules='FastCgiModule',scriptProcessor='C:\php\php-cgi.exe',resourceType='Either']
PHP2.cmd contents:
appcmd set config /section:system.webServer/handlers /+[name='PHP-FastCGI',path='*.php',verb='*',modules='FastCgiModule',scriptProcessor='C:\php\php-cgi.exe',resourceType='Either']
And finally for the PHP configuration section, we setup IIS7 default document processing with PHP3 and PHP4.cmd
PHP3.cmd contents: appcmd set config "Default web site" /section:defaultDocument /enabled:true PHP4.cmd contents: appcmd set config "Default Web Site" /section:defaultDocument /+files.[value='index.php']
PHP3.cmd contents:
appcmd set config "Default web site" /section:defaultDocument /enabled:true
PHP4.cmd contents:
appcmd set config "Default Web Site" /section:defaultDocument /+files.[value='index.php']
You'll notice in the commands above we are using the IIS7 appcmd.exe program to modify the settings and therefore the behavior of IIS7. In the screencast we also modify the INI file that contains the PHP configuration settings so that we can turn on the needed PHP extensions. Lastly for this section we open the MySQL firewall port ahead of the actual installation and configuration of that product.
Part 3 - Installing and Configuring MySQL (video length = 5:36)
Wordpress needs a database for its operation and MySQL fits the bill nicely. In this screencast section, we install and configure MySQL by creating the wordpress database, granting permissions to the database, assigning passwords, etc.
Part 4 - Configuration of WordPress (video length - 5:37)
The last screencast is short and sweet as we create and modify the wp-config.php file which contains the userid, password and database configuration information. Then it's time to test the WordPress interfaces from another virtual machine to see if everything above actually worked. In the webcast I delivered, I left off a single ; in the MySQL configuration so the databases weren't created properly. A one character error can do that to you. Be careful and take your time.
Screencast Video Downloads - please right mouse click the links below and SAVE AS
http://msinetpub.vo.llnwd.net/d1/keithcombs/ws2008/Part1_IIS7_Install.wmv http://msinetpub.vo.llnwd.net/d1/keithcombs/ws2008/Part2_PHP_Config.wmv http://msinetpub.vo.llnwd.net/d1/keithcombs/ws2008/Part3_MySQL_Config.wmv http://msinetpub.vo.llnwd.net/d1/keithcombs/ws2008/Part4_WordPress_Config.wmv
Program Downloads and Links
Windows Server 2008 - http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/try-it.aspx PHP - http://www.php.net MySQL - http://www.mysql.com WordPress - http://www.wordpress.org
Windows Server 2008 - http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/try-it.aspx
PHP - http://www.php.net
MySQL - http://www.mysql.com
WordPress - http://www.wordpress.org
The Windows Vista SP1 image rollout continues and at this point TechNet Direct subscribers can download the Enterprise x86 DVD image. I'm sure the x64 image will arrive in the next day or so. Keep your downloader warmed up.
For those of you with subscriptions, you know there are VL MAK keys available so you can begin some serious testing with the 32 bit platform.
Enterprise has nearly all of the feature set you would ever want, but it lacks the Media Center shell and a couple of other features found in Ultimate.
See http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/editions/default.mspx for more information on the different versions of Windows Vista.
Enjoy!
[UPDATE] The x64 .ISO file is now posted. Subscribers, go get it!
Another of the top end machines on the market is now available for your config to order enjoyment. I am referring to the eagerly awaited HP Elitebook 8540w. This machine has it all and if you want it all, be prepared to drop some coin for the privilege of owning a highly engineered speed demon like this.
I configured an Elitebook 8540w with the following configuration: HP EliteBook 8540w Mobile Workstation, FreeDOS, Intel® Core™ i7-820QM Processor (1.73 GHz, 8 MB L3 cache, Mobile Intel QM57 Chipset, 15.6-inch diagonal LED-backlit FHD (1920 x 1080) Antiglare w/2.0MP Camera, NVIDIA Quadro FX 1800M with 1GB GDDR5 video memory, 16GB 1333 MHz DDR3 SDRAM, 160GB SATA 2.5 Solid State Drive (I’m assuming Intel Gen2 but unconfirmed), BluRay DVD+/-RW, Full- sized keyboard with numeric keypad and dual pointing devices (touchpad and pointstick) with scroll zone, HP Integrated Module with Bluetooth® 2.1 Wireless Technology, Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 (3x3), HP Mobile Broadband (powered by Gobi™) with GPS Verizon Wireless, 56K v.92 high speed modem, Integrated Smart Card Reader, 150W Hardware Kit 8540w, 8 Cell 73Whr 8540w Battery 1 year warranty), Limited 3 year standard parts and labor warranty (3/3/3).
This came to $5722 on the public buying site this evening. I believe I’ll have an evaluation unit in a few weeks and will put it through it’s paces when I get my hands on one. Let’s hope the price of DDR memory drops like a rock, soon.
Sorry Steve, you didn’t convince me. A free case doesn’t get it done either. Maybe if you would have extended the warranty to 2 years or offered a soft recall, I would have hung on to the art. But I don’t need art. I need networking and for heavens sake, I need Exchange to work consistently. It doesn’t.
So I considered my options and cast my ballot. I returned my iPhone 4 to the local ATT store.
Maybe I’ll reconsider later. I’m going to use my collectors Palm Treo Pro until the fall crop is harvested. Then I’ll be able to see all of the devices from Apple, HTC, LG, Motorola, etc. with iOS, Android and Windows Phone 7 on full display. Now is the best time to wait.
I don’t know if the image at http://www.lenovo.com/images/products/nps/laptops/W530.png is a prototype or of the coming Ivy Bridge based ThinkPad W530, but it’s causing quite a stir in the ThinkPad community. Gone is the traditional keyboard. From the picture it appears Lenovo has gone with a keyboard similar to the one you find on the ThinkPad X1. Hope it is backlit.
I am not sure how Apple determined Mountain Lion is “the world’s most advanced desktop operating system”. Anyone know? Nice looking Puma. Here kitty kitty.
I have two of Lenovo’s latest and greatest machines sitting here side by side. If I were forced to choose between the two of them, it would be a hard choice. Since I already did a short review of the ThinkPad W500, let’s focus on the T400 for this article. The ThinkPad T400 I have is model 2767-R9U. Click the picture for a high resolution image.
Video
The T400 I received has the “switchable graphics.” What this really means is that is contains two video chipsets and you can switch back and forth between them. The T400 I tested has the ATI™ Mobility Radeon™ HD 3470 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 T400 screen is a beautiful 14.1" WXGA+ (1440x900) color, anti-glare, LED backlight, 250 nits, 16:10 aspect ratio, 300:1 contrast ratio screen. This screen is much brighter than the W500 I have. I also like the clarity, color and contrast much better. It is very similar in quality to the T61p screens I have. Probably better. Like I mentioned in the W500 article, picking a screen is a really subjective decision but I can tell you this screen and the 1680x1050 T61p screens I have are much better than the 1920x1200.
Memory
The T400 came configured with 2GB of DDR3 memory. It uses PC3-8500 1066MHz DDR3 204 pin memory sticks. You can see from the Windows Vista WinSAT results those memory sticks are fast.
In fact, you can see the ThinkPad T400 puts up some impressive performance numbers. For comparison purposes, take a look at the numbers for my T61p. The T400 whips the T61p handily on the CPU and memory scores. That means it’s going to be faster at encoding video and other CPU intensive chores. The speedy memory is going to help ship those bits around the express bus.
As with the W500, finding 4GB memory sticks is going to be a bit of a challenge. We’re at the beginning of the technology curve for DDR3 laptop memory so you’ll have a tough time finding sticks from any supplier at the moment. Kingston and I traded email on the subject today so see the update at the bottom.
Ports
If you look closely at the high resolution picture (click the thumbnail above) of the ThinkPad T400, you’ll see two vertical USB ports on the left side of the machine. You’ll also notice there is no DisplayPort connector like the W500 has. The VGA, ethernet and modem ports are also on the left side. The model I received also has the 7in1 media card reader on the left instead of a smartcard or PCMCIA slot. Some people I know would prefer a smartcard slot. Other folks would like a PCMCIA slot. Those are all options from Lenovo.
On the front of the machine you’ll notice the IEEE 1394 firewire port and plugs for headphones and a microphone. On the right side of the machine (not in the picture) is another vertical USB port. I wish Lenovo had engineered the W500 in the same manner considering this is my preferred location to plug in a mouse. Keep in mind all of the USB ports are in a vertical configuration so if you are using USB connected cell devices for internet connections, make sure to carry a USB extension cable.
CPU
Back to the meat of the machine. The machine I received has the 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. Plenty of horsepower for just about anything you plan to throw at it. In fact, the model T400 I am using has the same proc as the W500 sitting next to it.
Case, Keyboard and Power
The T400 case construction is rock solid like the T61p and W500. The keyboard rocks. I have seen some complaints on the internet about the T400 keyboard but the one I received seems identical in every way to the other ThinkPad keyboards I have. Therefore I am not sure what is going on with the complaints. I certainly don’t have one.
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. This machine advertises up to 9.8 hours of battery life with the 9cell battery. I am going to test that this weekend and see how close I get to that number.
Which brings me to my first complaint about the T400, or rather, the battery. The 9cell battery is big and sort of ugly. Since I don’t use battery power very often, I would rather order this machine with the flush 4cell battery and maybe keep a 9cell around for long trips.
See http://forums.lenovo.com/lnv/board/message?board.id=T400_series_ThinkPads&message.id=393&query.id=70292#M393 for a deeper discussion of the batteries that are available, weight, what they look like, etc. See the full specifications on the Lenovo.com website or in the tabook.pdf for the other models available from Lenovo, their specs and available options.
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 runs Hyper-V very nicely. I also flattened it again and installed Windows Vista Enterprise x64 and all of the drivers to make sure everything that was needed was present on Lenovo’s download area. There’s only one device I haven’t figured out yet (simple communications driver). I see some posts on the Lenovo forums that indicate I am not alone.
I am going to do a completely separate post(s) on the OS installations for Vista x64, Windows Server 2008 x64, and possibly SUSE Linux. So check back on my blog for those in a few days.
Things Not tested
There were a couple of things I would have liked to test that didn’t make it into his review. First of all, I would have preferred to receive both the T400 and W500 with 8GB of PC-8500 memory. I know several employees in Microsoft will want to run this way. But that wasn’t in the cards for this go around. I’m sure I’ll hear plenty if there are any issues. If there are, I’ll update this blog post with that information.
I also have not received the Ultrabay Hard Drive Adaptor II that is supposed to allow for full SATA II 3.0GB throughput from a second hard drive. Hopefully it will arrive before they need the machine back. If it does, I plan to do some I/O tests to see how big a difference it really makes.
Summary
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 T400 is a rock solid machine. It’s a smaller slightly less powerful (video card) version of the W500 and for those of you that travel a lot, this machine should be on your short list. Considering it is every bit as powerful as my ThinkPad T61p, I’m sure you are going to be happy running whatever operating system you choose. The backlit LED screen is awesome. 1440x900 is the perfect resolution for the 14.1” widescreen and it is bright and clear.
Have fun trying to pick between the T400 and the W500. I prefer the wider 15.4” screen and the 1680x1050 resolution. But that means a slightly bigger and heavier machine. I think if most people could play with them side-by-side, the T400 would win it’s share of the sales. Enjoy either.
[10/20 Update] FYI, I received some email from Kingston (Jason Grubb). He is trying to get some 4GB sticks over to me as soon as he can but I don’t know if I’ll get them before I have to send these machines back. When I have public information on parts and pricing I’ll share it at the bottom of this post or another post.
[10/20 Update] I just completed a couple of interesting battery tests. On the first test, I set the T400 in battery stretch mode then made a few tweaks like not allowing the machine to sleep, turned of indexing, defrag, etc. It ran for 13.5 hours at idle. I then recharged the battery and did a sustained DVD playback test using the extended Lord of the Rings DVD set. The T400 played for nearly 5 hours. Right at 4 hours 45 minutes. That puts you well into the Two Towers. Not bad. Won’t get you from Dallas to Honolulu, but certainly well into your backlog of email.
I guess “old” is relative to many of us, but considering the processor in my Dell Latitude D820 is the T2500 Core Duo, it is positively ancient. I complained about the performance of the machine in the past with Windows Vista. Performance got better with Vista SP1 and the perf tweaks I did to the machine. The performance with Windows 7 is really very good right now, but I am totally cheating to get it there. Take a look at the following screenshot and you’ll see how.
As you can see, the processor falls down as expected on the Windows Experience Index (WinEI). The memory is fine. The GPU is just ok. Probably just above the borderline. You’ll also notice this particular video chipset is using a WDDM 1.0 not 1.1 driver. The driver flowed off the update.microsoft.com website post Windows 7 installation.
The interesting score, for those of you keeping score is the disk score. 6.7 is pretty freaking fast. It should be. It’s using the Kingston SSDNow evaluation drive I have. I figured this would be a good place to run some tests to see if new technology could breathe some life into an older machine. Not surprisingly it does. You can really see the I/O advantage when launching applications. They zoom off that SSD drive.
Anyway, I thought you might be interested in the impact fast I/O can really have on the overall “feel” of the operating system, applications and environment. Now if we could just get 256GB drives for say… $100. At least we know what the future holds.
Now you might be wondering what Windows 7 will do for your machine. Good question. The current Beta seems to be performing really well on the machines I’ve tried it on. Unfortunately the Latitude D820 is now the oldest machine I have and it won’t be three years old until this summer. Any of you tried the beta on older machines? How does it compare to Windows XP and Windows Vista? Keep in mind this is just a beta so performance is very likely to get better as we finalize the product. Enjoy.
[UPDATE for 1/19] I backed up the environment and have restored it to a regular Hitachi 100GB 7200rpm drive. Hard drives are so noisy compared to SSD. Spotted a Win7 bug doing this. Time to send some feedback.
Interesting timing. See http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/01/19/engineering-the-windows-7-windows-experience-index.aspx.
Windows Vista RC1 build 5600 is complete. My download is in progress from Seattle and I’ll be flattening my laptop over the weekend to begin running this important milestone. This will be available to TechNet Plus Direct subscribers next week BEFORE everyone else. Warm up those fiber connections and DVD burners.
See http://blogs.technet.com/windowsvista/archive/2006/09/01/453491.aspx for a post and information from the Windows Vista team.
Have a wonderful holiday weekend everyone!!!
No, we aren't talking about the sleek Italian sports car, but we are talking about a kewl Acer Ferrari laptop. In fact, we are giving away several and you'll have a chance to win one by checking out the webcasts listed at http://www.microsoft.com/events/newballgame.mspx. As always, please check out the official rules at http://www.microsoft.com/events/officialrules_newballgame.mspx.
I don't know about you, but the Acer Ferrari laptops look pretty cool to me and I'd be happy to win even the "lowly" Acer Ferrari 1000. I'm teasing about the 1000 because it has decent specs. See http://us.acer.com for more details on their laptops. Too bad Microsoft employees and family are ineligible to win. Why is that anyway? If my son sits through a webcast and earns the right to be entered into the drawing, why can't he win? Appearances I guess... baa Humbug.
Here's an excerpt from the official rules:
How to Enter/Prizes: You will be automatically entered into each monthly sweepstakes drawing when you complete and submit an evaluation form following a live or on-demand TechNet 2007 Office webcast during the Entry Period (“Webcast Series”). See landing page for webcasts. The available webcasts are subject to change at the sole discretion of Microsoft. On or around the last day of each month during the entry period, three winners will be selected in a random drawing from all entries received during that month to win one of three prizes: • 1st prize: Acer Ferrari laptop (Estimated Retail Value $2000) • 2nd prize: Windows Mobile powered Smartphone (Estimated Retail Value $500) • 3rd prize: Creative MP3/video player or Microsoft Zune (Estimated Retail Value $250) In addition, winners will also receive one 2007 Microsoft Office Beta 2 CD. Once the final RTM version is released, past and future winners will receive a copy of 2007 Microsoft Office professional via mail or download. 2007 Microsoft Office will be preloaded on the Acer Ferrari laptop, and original media will be included with the prize.
How to Enter/Prizes: You will be automatically entered into each monthly sweepstakes drawing when you complete and submit an evaluation form following a live or on-demand TechNet 2007 Office webcast during the Entry Period (“Webcast Series”). See landing page for webcasts. The available webcasts are subject to change at the sole discretion of Microsoft.
On or around the last day of each month during the entry period, three winners will be selected in a random drawing from all entries received during that month to win one of three prizes:
• 1st prize: Acer Ferrari laptop (Estimated Retail Value $2000)
• 2nd prize: Windows Mobile powered Smartphone (Estimated Retail Value $500)
• 3rd prize: Creative MP3/video player or Microsoft Zune (Estimated Retail Value $250)
In addition, winners will also receive one 2007 Microsoft Office Beta 2 CD. Once the final RTM version is released, past and future winners will receive a copy of 2007 Microsoft Office professional via mail or download. 2007 Microsoft Office will be preloaded on the Acer Ferrari laptop, and original media will be included with the prize.
Last weekend was typical. I was preparing for a couple of seminars for this week on some pretty intense topics. The wireless security session I delivered today was attended by some influential IT Pros from around the Dallas/Ft. Worth metro area. I also had the pleasure of having a number of people from the United States Secret Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
There’s more to this story…
My preparations for these types of session usually involve research, printing, unpacking or uncompressing archived content, tests, etc. It’s a long process and eats time. Fortunately, uncompressing a huge virtual machine leaves time to multi task.
So I was surfing some of my favorite internal distribution lists. Someone posted a link to a blog post from gapingvoid.com. There was an excerpt from the blog and it’s obvious from what I’m reading that someone is pretty pissed off at Microsoft. I didn’t recall at the time anything about gapingvoid.com, but I did notice the cartoon style. I had seen those somewhere.
So I followed the link to Hugh’s blog and dug around a bit. It was already March 5th so I noticed there was a newer and more pointed post. Hugh had posted a challenge, so I figured I’d respond and see what happens. He didn’t really notice my first comment, or he probably ignored it because it was the typical Nick Burns the Computer Guy style post. Someone inside my company mentioned it may not be apparent I was offering to help to I blasted off a quick email directly to the gapingvoid.com email address.
Hugh called me back in five minutes. We talked briefly and he wanted me to use Skype to call him back. So I downloaded the software, grabbed a headset and five minutes later I was talking to Hugh Macleod in London from my palacial Texas ranch. You’re allowed to say that if you have an acre and can at least hear a cow or horse nearby. One of the reasons I wanted to help was because I liked the picture in the post at http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/002369.html although the Red Axe picture probably expressed his frustration better.
We messed around for a bit and compared the drivers and software he was using to the way I am setup. It so happens that two of my laptops use the same Intel wireless chipsets as his tablet pc. That was pretty much a waste of time because we didn’t spot anything apparent. I then started to ask some of the key questions that helped determine at least one fix. We got one of his components, a D-Link wireless bridge to reset and start providing a wireless network signal. Hugh was happy. I didn’t really know all of this until later because you see, there’s a small time difference between London and Dallas. Hugh needed to crash and get some sleep, and I needed to cook for my family. So I typed up some instructions and shot them of via email. I checked my smart phone the next morning at 6am to see if there was a black cloud or nuclear mushroom cloud cartoon waiting for me… Fortunately my instructions worked and he was a happy camper.
I got another email Thursday and apparently his wireless is down, again. There are a number of possibilities left. He could be cooking some popcorn in a microwave oven and cooking his signal at the same time. The 2.4gHz spectrum is crowded with interference and his access point uses that spectrum.
It could be that because we reset the wireless bridge to default settings, the name the bridge is broadcasting is also used by another wireless access point in the area. This can wreak havoc because it is assumed that the access points are on the same network.
It could be a number of other possibilities like:
We’re going to change the SSID (network name) as soon as I can get in touch with him Friday or Saturday. Any suggestions? How about darkcloud?
I started this story talking about wireless security, my session on Thursday with the feds in the room, and the email's I got. Sorry, I could tell you about the session, but I’d have to shoot you. I’m teasing of course. You can see the session I delivered in April and I promise to add a bunch of stuff I learned from the federal agents.
I’m sure many of you read the blog by the Windows 7 product group and early this morning they posted an extremely interesting article about the Release Candidate (RC) milestone changes that are coming. Here is an excerpt from the beginning of the article:
“The theme of “choice and control” has been applied in many aspects of how we have designed Windows 7. We’ve certainly received lots of positive feedback about the theme and about the choices we’ve made in the design, and we’ve also received a few suggestions for how we might continue to implement this theme in the future. We’ve received feedback for features that should be even more customizable (such as Explorer or the logon screen) or features that should be added to Windows (such as a PDF format reader, security tools, or disk utilities). And we’ve received feedback that some users might prefer to run Windows without certain features. This post is about a point of choice and control in the Windows 7 control panel called “Windows Features” which is where you can choose to turn various features of Windows on or off. This continues our discussion of changes we have made based on feedback from the Beta as we progress to the Release Candidate. This post is by Jack Mayo who is the group program manager for our Documents and Printing team and also worked on Internet Explorer 8. –Steven”
See the rest of the post @ http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/03/06/beta-to-rc-changes-turning-windows-features-on-or-off.aspx.
Keep your desktop clean or else…
In case you haven’t heard, Ensemble Studios is shutting down after they ship Halo Wars. This is a sad development for gamers everywhere but I guess it underscores the dominance of the special purpose gaming consoles over the desktop computer and gaming machine of the home. Is this the beginning of the end for powerful home computers? Who knows. But when was the last time you considered a desktop over a laptop?
I've been hearing for months and months how great the Apple MacBook Pro is at suspending and resuming from sleep, and how Windows Vista sucks. Don't believe it. My Lenovo ThinkPad T61p thumped the MacBook Pro handily in my testing yesterday afternoon.
Just like my previous testing, I decided to time a series of tests that seem pretty real world to me. This time around I didn't test Windows XP. I tested the Apple MacBook Pro and OS X against the Lenovo ThinkPad T61p with Windows Vista x64 SP1. For this round, I decided to do nothing but sleep/resume testing. I tested the time it took to sleep by closing the lid with and without applications running. Resume times were tested by opening the lid with and without applications running. I also tested sleep/resume times with the lid open.
Both machines are set to sleep if the lid closes. No password was needed on resume. The ThinkPad was set so that power button presses put the machine to sleep.
Who owned who?
I never expected the results I saw yesterday. I was a little worried about it because of the great Apple hype machine. But man, the Lenovo ThinkPad T61p obliterated the MacBook Pro in some of the tests. I'll get to the actual data points in a moment.
Before I did the testing, I asked our internal Lenovo discussion alias for advice on what I should be using in terms of drivers and software before the testing. I was being pretty cocky about it, but as usual our dedicated Lenovo engineer offered up what turned out to be great advice. I updated the BIOS on my ThinkPad, and also updated the system interface, wireless, power management, and sata disk drivers. In short, my 64 bit machine is performing extremely well from a power management perspective. All of the drivers came from the public download area. I reset the Windows Vista Power profiles to default settings and set my machine on the Power Saver.
OS Only
With no applications running other than the operating system, the ThinkPad T61p took on average 13.5 seconds to fully sleep. The MacBook Pro took on average 27.6 seconds to full sleep with no apps running. With no applications running, the ThinkPad T61p took 7.8 seconds to resume. The MacBook Pro took 3.2 seconds to resume.
When I added applications to the mix, things changed pretty drastically. I didn't fire a lot of applications up, but I did make sure to run Outlook 2007 and IE7 on Windows Vista. On the Mac, I had Safari and Entourage 2008 running. Both of the email clients were fully synced prior to testing.
Running Applications
With the applications running, the ThinkPad T61p took only slightly more time to sleep, but the MacBook Pro took a pretty big time hit. The T61p took on average 15.5 seconds to sleep. The MacBook Pro nearly doubled it's time to 47.4 seconds on average to sleep.
Here's the strange part. With the applications running, the T61p resumed from sleep more quickly than if no apps were running. Don't ask me why. Strange. It took on average 3.7 seconds to resume. The MacBook Pro also improved with applications running and averaged 2.75 seconds.
The results weren't what I expected. I fully expected the MacBook Pro and OS X to dominate the ThinkPad T61p and Windows Vista. That didn't turn out to be the case as the Lenovo ThinkPad did very well on all of the suspend timings, and was right there with the MacBook Pro on resumes. Congrats to the Lenovo and Windows teams. You rock.
Like I mentioned in the previous round of file copy tests, the differences weren't drastic. Even if we are looking at the extremes for putting one of these machines to sleep, there was still only a 30 second difference. The gap on resume times was much smaller and frankly, both machines wake up and display a screen near instantly. I was also impressed at how quickly the network was available and in use by the email clients.
You might be wondering if I did any special tweaking of the ThinkPad. Nope. The Thinkpad T61p is running the retail version of Windows Vista Ultimate x64 and all of the drivers or system software came from either the Lenovo download area, or the update.microsoft.com servers. Now granted this is not the OEM image Lenovo ships, but it is basically a stock Windows Vista x64 system.
The next round of tests I have planned will be more subjective. I'm going to describe my likes/dislikes of OS X, Windows Vista and SUSE 10. I plan to look first at the graphical interface in each OS, then probably the apps that ship with the OS. I'm also thinking about doing a comparison of Apple Final Cut and Sony Vegas on these two machines with my HD video camera.
To be continued...
It’s pretty apparent to me the design engineers for some of the coming laptops have never used a USB cell phone data card. I see a number of new machines coming out and they’ve decided to turn the USB ports so that they are no longer horizontal.
Lenovo has certainly done this with the soon to be released ThinkPad T500. See http://shop.lenovo.com/ISS_Static/merchandising/US/PDFs/t400_and_t500_datasheet.pdf. This is no big deal for the typical wired mouse, but what about the cell sticks, memory sticks, etc? Lots of those devices aren’t going to work with the USB port in a vertical orientation.
There are a couple of other things I dislike already (on paper) about the new ThinkPad T500. They switched back to ATI for the video chipset. What the heck is going on? They change the chipset maker every model year. I don’t like that.
And then there’s the Intel Active Management Technology (iAMT) stuff. I don’t want any “active” management taking place. I want to set the darn thing on full performance with injected nitrous.
Oh well, I’m sure it’s a killer machine in person. I wonder if they’ll send me an eval unit in the next few weeks. Lenovo, if you have a 17” model coming, please send me one. I would assume the model would be a ThinkPad T700 or something.
Anyone notice in the specs is says, “Memory - Up to 8GB of PC2-8500 1066MHz DDR3” ??? Ok, that’s pretty cool. HDMI is cool. And I would imagine a nice 17” backlit LCD at 1920x1200 would be kewl. We’ll see.
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?
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.
The Apple 8GB iPod Touch is $229, the 16GB is $299 and the 32GB is $399. Those are the prices at the Apple Store. Anyone running out to buy one? Somebody wake me up when the 32GB is discounted to $299 (at least).
You can get a new generation 120GB Archos player for $399 and although that isn’t exactly cheep, it does store many more movies.
While we’re on the subject, why not go ahead and get the new Zune 120 for $249? Now there’s a deal. I just wish we’d bump the screen size a little larger and wider.
And next week we start rolling out a bunch of new features in the Zune 3.0 software release. Here are some of the goodies coming:
More Ways to Discover Music: Channels and Picks
The new Zune software update taps expert sources, recommendations from the Zune service and online music community, and the user’s own play data to create a dynamic, digital music experience where discovering music is easy and seamless.
Powerful Software
The Zune PC software is a free download at http://www.zune.net that provides rich discovery and media management capabilities to help consumers make the most of their existing music collections, in addition to providing access to the Zune Social and Zune Marketplace so they can add to it.
There’s an acronym from the past for you. Run Time Improvements (RTI). I am always looking for ways to squeeze another speed improvement out of Windows Vista. In fact, a few weeks ago I made some changes to my Dell Latitude D820 and it made a very real difference in how the machine performed.
Before I list out all of the stuff below, keep in mind I am willing to sacrifice some features for the sake of overall system performance. I’m usually looking for all of the horsepower out of my machine for a couple of reasons. Video encoding or virtualization workloads.
I don’t need eye candy for those two purposes. I don’t need a search index. I don’t need the system to anticipate what the next ten programs I am going to launch are going to be.
If I dial back some of these features in Windows Vista, am I losing some key features? Absolutely, positively yes. However, information is power so get ready because I’m going to arm you with some of my tricks and you can decide what you like and dislike. One thing before we move on… I don’t recommend turning off security features but I do make one exception to this rule. More on that later.
Fast And Easy
I like to keep things simple so we’ll start with the easiest first. Remember the dialog box just below? I know you’ve probably stumbled across it. It’s in nearly all of the operating systems we’ve produced yet most people don’t make any changes to it.
I do. These settings alone can have a rather profound change to the way application windows and dialog boxes display, move, minimize or disappear. Eye candy takes horsepower and don’t underestimate the visual impact. Before we get to the disable list, lets talk briefly about two of them.
Animation and fading take cycles from the CPU and GPU. When you have a weak CPU or GPU, the animation and fading effects end up looking like they are slow motion. I’m exaggerating a bit, but your eyes are actually very good at picking up motion changes. I have several machines ranging in age from less than a year old to more than five years old. And the speed of the CPU and GPU in those machines varies greatly. Therefore the new fast quad core machine can drive these effects the way they were designed to be seen. But even the quad machine will show a noticeable improvement.
The Performance Options Hit List – turn these off
Now you might be wondering how to get to these options since I neglected to tell you. You can get to them in a similar manner across most of our operating systems and as usual, there’s more than one way.
Now that you have made these changes, you should see the difference in how the applications behave. This made a dramatic difference on my two slowest machines. It was very helpful in particular on on my Dell Latitude D820. Now that we’ve made some changes to the user interface responsiveness, lets look at disabling some optional features and services in Windows Vista.
Optional Windows Vista Services
An astute observer of Windows Vista will notice the operating system is always doing something. The most visible activity involves the hard drives of your system. If you haven’t changed any of the default settings for Windows Vista, you’ll notice those hard drives are constantly reading and writing.
What services are using the disk that much? The obvious first guess is the indexing service. Or more accurately, the Windows Search service. When you first install the OS, it would seem reasonable to take the indexing hit for all of your documents and email. After all, that’s what gives you the instant access to nearly every document on your hard drive. But if you’re a highly organized person like myself, do you really need it?
Then there’s the Superfetch service. SuperFetch monitors which applications you use the most and preloads these into your system memory so they'll be ready when you need them. Windows Vista also runs background programs, like disk defragmenting and Windows Defender, at low priority so that they can do their job but your work always comes first.
This all sounds great on paper, but the reality is that those disk reads and writes use electricity, generate heat, and take away disk performance from other applications. The developers of the features will challenge that the services run as low priority I/O and will not impact the computing environment. My experience differs and frankly it really doesn’t matter what they say. I want the I/O gone so that I am not generating heat, beating up my hard drives, reducing their life, and taking any performance away from my other applications. Now to be fair, Windows Search 4.0 just came out and I haven’t installed and tested it yet, but I will. I’ll give it a shot at changing my mind. Until then, it’s time to disable some services, help save some electricity and reduce the heat my machine generates. Heat is evil.
Disabling the Optional Windows Vista Services
Like before, there are several ways to navigate to the Windows services and change the properties, or start and stop them.
There are a few other services you can safely stop if you aren’t using their services. An example is the Distributed Link Tracking Client. However, you aren’t going to see a noticeable improvement in performance of the system from that service change alone. By stopping the Indexing service and disabling it and Superfetch, you should see a dramatic improvement in performance and boot times. But like I said, you are doing this at a cost and the cost is the inability to use instance search in Windows Vista and Outlook. That’s a pretty high price to pay and it’s probably too high of a price for many people.
A Couple of Last Changes
There are a couple more changes I recommend making, then a therapeutic reboot will clean house on all of the processes and memory. The first change is disabling the disk defrag service. Now keep in mind that I regularly flatten my machine and rebuild from scratch. In fact, if I go as long as six months without re-installing the OS, apps and data I’m doing really good. Therefore, this particular trick isn’t recommended for the masses. Only for the nerds that are rebuilding every few months.
The last change involves a security change. I like to turn off one of the UAC features. I turn off the highly annoying “Switch to a secure desktop when prompting for elevation”. I know, I know. This should really be left on to prevent a malicious virus from impersonating a portion of the OS (also known as a shatter attack). To be honest, I originally started doing this in the Vista beta cycles because this feature was causing havoc with the LiveMeeting program and my ability to do desktop sharing during webcasts. I should probably turn it back on to see if I can live with it now. Maybe not.
How do you turn this UAC feature off? If you are using the Windows Vista default Control Panel settings, go to Control Panel | System and Maintenance | Administrative Tools. From there you are going to double click the Local Security Policy and respond to the UAC prompt since this requires administrative privilege. Expand the Local Policies node in the tree control and click the Security Options node. Scroll all the way to the bottom of the list and you see the secure desktop setting as the second to the last item. Go into the properties for the settings and disable it. Now would be a good time to reboot your machine and let all of the changes above take effect.
One Last Bombshell
I like to save a juicy tidbit for last in some of my articles. Larry Garcia, a friend and colleague hates that. He wants all the key stuff at the beginning in an executive summary so he doesn’t have to read the article. Ha! What fun is that? So here’s the last little “tweak” I like to do to my machine. I run in workgroup mode. Ok, pick your jaw off the floor. Speed is the primary motivating factor and giving the MSIT management policies the bird is the other. There are several reasons I can get away with this.
First of all, I always have two or more laptops/desktops for my job. Frankly, every technical person in my company needs more than one machine. I can do my job with one, but I am going to take a serious productivity hit. For instance, I downloaded 50GB of content yesterday from one of my machines, while I used another for different stuff.
By having more than one machine, I can always have a corpnet joined machine that is part of the Microsoft Active Directory forest and take the performance penalties associated with Active Directory lookups, System Center Configuration Manager inventory and patch management processes, etc. But that doesn’t mean my main production machine has to be that machine. In fact, it isn’t. Now the folks that are Microsoft employees reading this are wondering how I get away with that. Simple. Desktop OS virtualization.
Up until recently, virtualization wasn’t required. Our MSIT org would implement a new restriction for remote user connections, and I would find a way around it without violating our corporate security policies. But now they are starting to lock down the IPSEC policies more fully and with that, change the internal proxy server policies. Our internal Mac users are all too familiar with those policies.
So when the going gets tough, the tough virtualize. I have a virtual machine that is joined to our forest and in my time of need can be used to connect and use an internal application. Since our desktop virtualization products don’t today offer access to the smartcard reader, I use a handy trick. Once the VM is up and running, I establish a RDP connection to the VM and can use the smartcard with the RDP session. I only use this VM for applications that REQUIRE a machine account joined to the forest, or when a networking issue otherwise prevents connectivity to a resource on the corporate network. Those are few and far between. When I need long term use of a connection for something like downloads, I use my second machine that is joined to the forest. When I need to use an internal line-of-business application for a few minutes, I fire up the VM on my main production machine.
So there you have it. Some of my favorite runtime improvements to Windows Vista. Some are obviously controversial but like I said early in this article, my main motivation is speed from my system so that I can give that capacity back to other virtual machines I use to do my day job. It also makes Windows Vista very snappy and fun to use. I hope you enjoy the tips.
I am considering moving to Windows Server 2008 as my full time production environment. One of the hurdles to doing this has been lifted. I am referring to the fact that up until recently, Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum Edition didn’t run on Windows Server 2008. The latest version (version 9) now runs nicely.
However, I have another unique requirement. Actually it’s probably not that unique. I need to be able to take a full image backup and restore it to another hard drive. With Windows Vista, I have a lot of different options. Symantec Ghost, Acronis True Image Home, the built in Complete PC feature, etc. are all options for a relatively low price.
But when you switch to Windows Server 2008, add a decimal point or more to the price of a backup solution. So needless to say I’m looking for a solution on the cheap. The lowest cost route appears to be using the built in backup feature. Unfortunately that feature brought some Windows Vista baggage along that I really don’t like. Specifically, the restore drive must be equal to, or greater than the size of the source backup drive. In other words, if I am backing up a 320GB drive, I cannot restore to a 200GB drive. Big bummer.
I am also considering building a WinPE 2.1 solution to imagex a capture, and use the captured .WIM to apply it to a different hard drive. This would probably be the lowest cost alternative of the bunch if it works. Then of course there’s DPM. Checking to see if Home Server will do what I want.
Anyone doing something similar today? Have a backup/recover solution you like for cheap? I’m looking for something that works on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 for less than $100 if possible. Let me know.
The only reason I’m even going down this path is to use Hyper-V and Windows Server 2008 on a full time basis.
Today I trekked down to the Microsoft Developers Conference (MDC) being held in the Dallas Westin Galleria. For this particular event I decided to bring along some Lenovo ThinkPad W700 bling. I wanted to see if a 17” laptop running the latest and greatest operating systems on the planet would attract some attention. If you want bears, use honey. If you want fish, use good bait. What do you use for developers? Don’t answer that. :?)
The Honey Pot
I decided a flashy desktop might catch the eye of a passer by. It worked well enough. I probably should have opted for an ice chest full of “refreshments” or some of the tactics you see at a lot of the conferences in Las Vegas. But I decided to keep it totally conservative and within professional guidelines. Here’s the desktop.
If you click the pic above you can see the full 1920x1200 screen capture. It isn’t apparent from this picture, but the Lenovo ThinkPad W700 screen is super bright and really handles booth duty like this very well. The 17” screen is just large enough to make things interesting. That was really the main intention for taking the machine to the show. I wanted to know how many developers are using 17” laptops as their dev platform. As it turns out, most of the people I talked to are using desktops and multimon.
Physical versus Virtual
The other scenario I wanted to depict is the ability to code in a virtualized setting. Virtualization of the various layers we all use is improving at break neck speed. In the picture above you can see Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta all tricked out running Aero Glass. In fact, since it’s R2, you also see the new superbar everyone is talking about with Windows 7. In the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) session you see an instance of Windows 7 Ultimate x64. You’ll also notice because I have full desktop composition turned on in the RDP session, I get the entire Aero experience.
Most of the time I had the Windows 7 RDP windows full screen so you could not actually tell, unless you looked really close, that the session was a virtual machine being executed by Hyper-V. That’s really the whole point. How many of you are building virtualization environments for your developers where the environment, application or website, and the dev tools are sandboxed on the data center across the wire inside a VM?
Options Options
You can’t really tell in the Windows 7 virtual machine above, but Visual Studio 2008 Professional is installed. It’s obvious on the R2 host because I dropped the icon on the desktop and taskbar. But these days you have the ability to architect applications in new ways with presentation, data, application and operating system virtualization. This also invites strange and new ways to virtualize the dev, test, model office and production systems you have.
I didn’t install the full compliment of Microsoft Virtualization offerings. I didn’t really need to. I just needed some eye candy to lure some developers over and show off Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta and Windows 7. Mission accomplished. I also wanted to know how many of them were using some form of virtualization in day-to-day duties. Nearly everyone.
We had a fun time this morning talking with the people that came to the event. It looked like they were well taken care of, well fed, and lots of good information on Azure and the other developer focused sessions. One thing is for sure, the line between developer and IT Pro is blurred, especially when it comes to Partners or Small and Medium sized businesses. The good news is that I’m doing some planning to bring more IT Pro focused content to events like this and give you more variety. Stay tuned for that.
As you can see from my blog and all of the other blogs on the technet.com and msdn.com areas, comments now require using the captcha codes. This is of course to fight off the spam bots and other nefarious creatures of the web.
So what do you think? Will this have any effect on you? Still planning to comment? Is it just one more nuisance you don’t need? The upside is that we are still allowing anon comments. I moderate comments because bot or not, I still need to make sure someone isn’t posting porn links, using outrageous profanity, etc. So I’m curious if the catcha stuff will deter you from commenting. I worry the answer is yes. I am hopeful the answer is no. Thoughts?