A passport to data asylum

If anything can go wrong, it will. That is what the age-long Murphy’s law says. And, no matter how durable today’s hard disks are, there is always a time when they will give up and stop spinning.

Unfortunately, in most cases, the hard disk dies a rather quick death, with only a few subtle telltale signs that we usually recognize after the fact. Beside, no matter how powerful our anti-virus software is, there might be a time when the data file update cannot keep up with the creativity of the virus makers. And, with our computers connected to the Internet 24 x 7, the threat is even more real.

By the way, if you receive an email message from someone you know but it contains only an http address, never click on the link. This is the result of the latest malware that checks our address books in webmail services.

What is the worst that can happen when an extremely malicious virus strikes? We will lose important data.

Wouldn’t it be good if you have a backup copy of your important files? You know the answer.

The next question will be how should we back up our files? Shall we upload them to the Clouds? It is an increasingly popular option as our confidence in the Clouds grows.

Some notebook vendors, notably, provide us with a small amount of backup space on their dedicated websites. ASUS, for example, offers Asus Webstorage to the users of its computers.

The same services are offered by Dell, HP, Lenovo and others.The great thing is that, because the backup data can be accessed from anywhere with the right user ID and password, we can use the services to share with other people several large files that we cannot send with email.

Usually the online backup space is very limited, though. We may be able to store only 5 gigabytes of data. What about backing up dozens of gigabytes of data? Yes, you are right. A low cost and simple alternative is to use one or more external hard drives.

Western Digital let me play around with one of its long list of external hard drives. Called My Passport Essential SE, it is reportedly one of the most popular models in the world. Keep in mind that there are similar products from Seagate, Maxtor, LaCie, Toshiba, HP, Samsung and many others on the market.

The size of the unit does remind us of a passport. The casing is made of black and glossy plastic, and it does not really inspire sturdiness.

The name “Essential” may actually be misleading, as the capacity of the 2.5-inch hard drive inside the casing is a truly whopping 1 terabyte. Most other external hard drives still come with 320 or 500 gigabytes capacity. The hard disk spins at 5,400 rotations per minute (RPM).

It has only one very tiny indicator LED that lights up each time you plug the USB cable into our desktop or portable PC. There is only one USB 2.0 port on it. No eSATA or FireWire. And in a year or two we will already be talking about the USB 3.0. The lack of FireWire option may make it difficult to quickly feed video files from our camcorders, too.

At Bhinneka.com, the listed price for the 1 terabyte version is US$ 192. The smaller sister, the 750-gigabyte version, will set you back US$ 142.

Unlike other external hard drives, this device does not have any button to power it up or down, or to start the backup and restore function. The latter functions are controlled with the SmartWare utility, which will automatically be installed on the PC the moment we connect the USB cable. We can also set up an automatic backup, encryption and password.


Most other external hard drives still come with 320 or 500 gigabytes capacity.

Media notebook getting more affordable

There was time not long ago when notebooks with large screens cost US$2,000 and upward. Of course, such hefty prices was peanuts for those officers with bulging bank accounts.

But, fortunately, as always happens to technology, notebooks of this genre have become more and more available, even for people without power like us.

Last week, one of the latest large screened Aspires landed on my desk for review. It was one of Acer’s Ethos series that has a 15.6-inch LED screen. Notably, its bigger brother, the 18-inch Ethos A8943G, won a 2010 Best Choice Award during the recent Computex Taipei. The 15.6-inch version does not carry all the features of the A8943G.

Now, let us see what this Ethos A5943G demo unit offers inside and outside. The wide screen has a 1366 x 768 resolution with HD cinematic view, a DVD multi Double Layer (DL) drive, a 640 gigabyte hard disk drive and 4 gigabyte of DDR3 memory.

To qualify as a desktop replacement (DTR) notebook, Acer has put in an Intel Core i7 740QM that runs at 1.73 gigahertz and has 6 megabytes of internal cache. The graphics is handled by an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5850.

This powerful processor and all the other high performance components are combined to give us a Windows Experience Index of 5.9, the highest I have come across.

Certainly there are more powerful workstation systems out there. However, this notebook is not really targeted as a DTR notebook for engineers. Like the bigger Ethos, it is designed to be a portable entertainment center.

Well, perhaps the attribute “portable” has to be used with a grain of salt here. Although, at 2.8 kilograms, it may not feel as heavy as Toshiba’s Satellite 500M, which we looked at a couple of weeks ago, it is still quite hefty. We need to be careful with our handgrip when taking it out of the computer bag.

Now, here is an exciting new feature that I think other note-book makers should look at. The glossy touch panel can serve as a regular touch pad or a media playback control.

Between the left and the right touch pad buttons there is a round button. Press this button, and several icons on the touch panel will light up. First, we can choose whether we want to play back a movie or play music. And then there are the Play, Rewind, Fast Forward and Mute icons in a row.

When we have Acer Arcade Deluxe running, these icons are quite responsive to our touch. Of course, when the media control panel is active, we cannot use the touch pad to navigate like using a mouse. So, it also works to deactivate the touch pad and prevent the mouse pointer from jumping around as our palm touches the panel.

Connectivity is supported by Wi-Fi with b/g/n standards, Bluetooth, FireWire to connect the notebook to a camcorder and eSATA for external eSATA hard disks.

If you have a Gigabyte Ethernet network at home, you can wire-connect the notebook for even faster access to the Internet. Four USB 2.0 ports are available, although there is no USB 3.0 to speak of.

Now, let us talk about the external design. The overall design of both Ethoses is not much different from my favorite Acer Aspire Timeline. Gone are the ugly rounded corners and thick bezels typical of the previous Acer Aspire series.

The top cover is shining silver. Unfortunately, my experience with the Timeline shows that this kind of finish gets scratched quite quickly.

The keyboard of the new notebooks is also like the Timeline, only the color is silver instead of black. It is also quite comfortable to use — although I still, and will always, love the click-clacking sound of the traditional, not the current versions — of the ThinkPad keyboard.

The screen is not disappointing. Colors are vibrant, as we would expect from an HD LCD. As it is meant to be an entertainment notebook, HDMI is also provided along with the regular VGA out port. Windows 7 Home Premium comes with this notebook.

On the front side there is a fair-sized thumbwheel for volume adjustment. Turn the thumbwheel to the right, and the volume is increased. A percentage indicator will appear on the screen.

Now, what is on my wish list? Unlike the 5:1 configuration of its bigger brother A8943G, my demo unit only has a pair of stereo speakers and a subwoofer.

The sound is not as strong as we would like, and it means that we need to hook it up to a home amplifier if we really want to enjoy a full-featured movie. Yet, when I used the notebook to replay my interviews, sound was clearly reproduced though the two speakers.

We need to make sure the notebook is properly placed relative to our hands, because the front edge of the palmrest is a bit sharp. When I used it on a dining table, there was no problem, though.

What about battery life? Forget it. You are not going to carry this notebook around the whole day and expect to stay away from the wall outlet for as long as you sip your coffee latte at Starbucks.

With such a high-end processor — the grill on the left side emanates hot air to keep it cool — a big screen and plenty of memory, even a fully charged battery will expire in just two hours or so, and that is perfectly acceptable.

The biggest attraction of this notebook is its price. I was told it would cost around US$1,500. Not too bad for a media-centric notebook. If you are looking for a notebook that will help you edit your videos with ease, take a look at the Ethos A5943G.

Portégé R700 and the Libretto W100: Must-sees from Toshiba

Toshiba began making portable computers back in the mid-1980s. Back then, as a student at the University of Hawaii, I saw fellow students from Indonesia buying laptops made by Toshiba. The first laptop from IBM came a little later to the computer store at the student center.

It is funny to think how technology has evolved in the last 25 years. The first Toshiba laptop was quite hefty. Even the term “laptop” did not accurately describe the weight that our laps would have to sustain if we wanted to take notes during a lecture.

Most laptops from the period came with one or two 3.5-inch floppy diskettes drives, which were still an innovation. A hard disk was too expensive for most students. Without a hard disk, my compatriots had to install DOS and word-processing applications — usually WordStar — using floppy disks.

I never used a Toshiba laptop during my student days. I had a desktop IBM PS/2 instead. There was a simple reason for my choice. The monochrome, dual-scan LCD screen used by laptops was too small and fuzzy for my eyes. Compare those features — which were then considered revolutionary — with what we have today and you will be awed.

Less than two weeks ago, the Computer System Division of Toshiba Singapore celebrated the silver anniversary of Toshiba notebooks at an event at Plaza Indonesia in Jakarta. Two products were featured: The Portégé R700 and the Libretto W100.

Every notebook vendor has a thin and light line for extra-mobile computer users. Acer, for example, has its TimeLine series. Lenovo has the ThinkPad X-series. ASUS, Dell, HP and others offer similar models as well. Currently, among the Toshiba lines, the Portégé R700 series laptops are the latest ultra-light models. They are less than 2 centimeters thick and weigh 1.39 kilograms and up, depending on configuration.

Toshiba said that the R700 has up to 8.5 hours of battery life yet is propelled by an Intel Core i processor. The versions offered in Indonesia have Core i3 and Core i5 processors.

These are not the ultra-low voltage (ULV) processors typically used by thin and light notebooks. Toshiba uses the airflow cooling technology that it developed with Intel to make it possible to place a full-voltage processor in a very slim notebook.

Most 13.3-inch screen laptops must sacrifice optical disk drives (ODD). Another amazing feat by Toshiba is that this model, which also has a 13.3 inch screen, comes with a built-in ODD.

The R700 still has no USB 3.0 port, but its docking station does. It still has plenty of ports though, including two USB 2.0, a USB 2.0 and eSATA combo, a VGA-out and HDMI ports and gigabit Ethernet.

The Wi-Fi system already supports the 802.11n standard.

More interesting is the Libretto W100. I still remember the first Libretto, which appeared in 1996. It was a handheld computer with very limited screen real estate.

This time around, Toshiba has gotten rid of the hardware keyboard altogether. In its place, they put a second screen, so it looks like a two-sided slate. Both screens have touch capability and are 7 inches wide. Some people say that the W100 is Toshiba’s answer to Apple’s iPad, although I do not completely agree with them.

This Libretto runs Windows 7. We can use the entire screen to display one application window, or we can open a PowerPoint presentation on the top screen and a Word document on the bottom screen.

To type, we need to call up the virtual keyboard. We can configure the screen keyboard in different ways.

There is also haptic feedback that tells us every time a finger touch is registered.

Toshiba has also thrown in three utilities to make use of the W100 weasier. First, there is the Bulletin Board, which displays important information such as projects, tasks and notes. It replaces the usual Windows Desktop with something that is smarter.

Second, the Windows Explorer function is handled by a utility called ReelTime, which previews documents, photos and videos. The alt-tab key combination, which is extremely useful when we multitask, is now achievable with a custom file browser. Two buttons below the lower screen call up the screen keyboard and the Bulletin Board, respectively.

Unlike the Portégé, the Libretto W100 does not run on Intel Core i processors. The brains are
an Intel Pentium processor with dual-core technology. It has 2GB of ultrafast DDR3 memory. It does
not use a hard disk either. As we would expect, it has a 62GB solid state drive.

Today, Toshiba offers several lines of notebooks. These are the media-centric QOSMIO, the consumer Satellite and Satellite Pro, the enterprise-targeted Tecra, the Portégé and the Libretto. Unfortunately, I have been told that it would be almost impossible for me to get a chance for a hands-on review of the Portégé or Libretto, because they are in a very limited supply.

According to Wong Lih Jiu, general manager of Toshiba’s Computer Systems Division, only one thousand units of the Libretto W100 will be sold in Asia.

A nice marketing tactic, isn’t it? Still, it is worth looking at if you are a hardcore gadget freak.