Archive for September, 2008
Recently our organization purchased for a senior management one of the latest and priciest notebook in town, a Lenovo X300 ThinkPad priced at about USD 2,900 (July 2008).
The notebook at that time was not available in stock on many outlets since we called numerous notebook shops to enquire about its availability. In the end, we contacted Lenovo directly and was forwarded to a distributor who told us that we had to wait for at least 2 weeks in order to get hold of the notebook. Since the decision was already made to purchase this unit, we ordered the notebook and it did indeed reached us in 2 weeks time.
The initial comments we’ve got from people who looked and felt at it for the first time:
- It doesn’t look good.
- Wow, it’s damn light.
- The notebook bag seems heavier that the notebook itself.
- It doesn’t really looks like it’s worth about USD 2,900. Oh well.. maybe it’s whats inside that matters most.
- Wow, this notebook is worth more than my 7 year old car!
Once the notebook arrived, I never thought I needed to do anything to it and just passed the notebook the the senior management staff.
A few weeks later, I was requested by the senior management staff to assist in transfering Microsoft Outlook emails and data from the old notebook to the new X300 ThinkPad with Windows Vista Business installed. During this time, I had to activate the wireless connection on the X300 in order to connect to the Internet. Upon successfully setting up the wireless connection, I managed to connect to the Internet for a few minutes before the whole machine just freezed. Moving the mouse didn’t work. Pressing Ctrl + Alt+ Del didn’t work as well. In the end, it just hang and freezed and all I could do was hard reboot by holding on to the Power On button for a long time. Continue Reading »
My Lenovo X300 ThinkPad Notebook experience
CIO involvement with SOA is a bit of a chicken/egg quandary. Are SOA implementations failing because CIOs don’t get involved? Or are CIOs smart not to get involved with a failing trend? It’s tricky to tell who failed first.
To be perfectly honest, if I were a CIO and I’d drug my feet on SOA, I’d be pretty darned pleased with myself this week - particularly after reading “Are You Being Played in the SOA Game Plan?”
PCWorld.com ran the piece on Monday, and it’s a great headline. But I read it with reservations, because I know there’s nothing more thrilling for a journalist than to reveal that someone’s getting played. If journalists are biased - and, really, everyone has several biases - then this is the big one for reporters. They live for exposing people, places and things.
During my tech journalism tenure, I’ve learned that most technology trends do, indeed, follow that infamous Gartner hype cycle - and ultimately, they emerge from it somewhat successful. So, I’ve grown just as suspicious of the “Wow, it’s a rip-off” articles as I have the “Wow, it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread” headlines. Continue Reading »
Shift in SOA Marketing Could Mean Cost Savings For You
As a manager of a team, do you sometimes wonder if your staffs or subordinates are actually working on the right tasks, or are even working at all?
Some may be just surfing the web for irrelevant materials while some may be wasting time chatting with friends via instant messengers.
Did you know that on average, an employee loses about 81 minutes of productivity to web based distractions such as engaging in social networking site and chatting online on a daily basis.
If your organization is suffering from unproductive and distracted employees, there are two options.
Option 1: Pull out the Internet plug
OR
Option 2: Implement a workplace activity management and monitoring software Continue Reading »
Workplace activity management and monitoring software
After nearly a month of research, I finally found a solution to a colleage’s IT problem as discussed in this post - How to backup outlook and run it from a USB
With this solution, yes, you can run outlook directly from your external drive. Firstly let me define what external drives could be:
- External hard disk
- Ipod
- USB drive
- Basically any device which allows you to store digital content
The possible applications that you can run on the external drive:
- Games
- Microsoft Outlook
- Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint)
- Adobe Apps (Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat)
- You favorite browser with all setttings saved including your favourite bookmarks
- Basically any applications which you can installed on your machine can be installed in the external drive.
With this solution, the following scenarios are possible:
- Your Ipod can act as a PC as well. Just install all your applications in it and plug it on any machine for the applications to work.
- Do a software demo without showing it from your laptop. Just install the software in the external drive, plug it into the client’s machine and present from there.
- Backup files together with the application required the run the files. During urgent times, having access to the file itself is useless without the application to run it. With this solution you can be assured of accessing not just the file, but the information contained in it as well.
So to cut the long story… what is the solution? Continue Reading »
How to run any applications on an external drive
