HP Mini 5101

My laptop was on repairs for a while so I decided to join two needs. First one was me having a laptop and second one was me having something for wife as Christmas present. This laptop is result of those needs. :)

HP mini 5101 has an Intel Atom Processor N280 (1.66 GHz) and up to 2 GB of RAM. While this may not sound so powerful, it works nicely with Windows 7. Standard 2.5" 160 GB hard drive is something that offers good performance and space for a nice price. All things considered, I am not sure that SSD drive would behave that much better on this machine.

Until I saw this notebook, I never imagined 10" screen as being that small. If you open Visual Studio 2010, there is huge amount of scrolling needed. Resolution is 1024x600 and that ensures that not even all dialogs are visible. There is option of HD screen (1366x768) but I am not sure that it would improve things much. It would just force me to use higher DPI setting which brings same problem back. Fortunately there is support for external monitor and that is life saver.

Case is definitely bright point. It is light but it looks like something that can handle man’s hand. What reminds you that this may not be toy for stronger gender is finish that just attracts fingerprints. However, in gentle hands that clean it once a while, it looks good.

Keyboard is one of those Chiclet-style (every key for it self) and it spans almost from edge to edge. I still prefer standard HP notebook keyboard but I cannot say that I considered it too much of punishment to use this one. Only weak points are plastic connections of keyboard to notebook body. That plastic just breaks too easy.

I can say that programming on that machine was quite good experience once you connect external monitor. Without external monitor, there is just not enough screen real-estate to do anything but basic browsing.

Since I got my laptop back, only thing that I miss from HP mini is it’s weight (1.2 kg). However, once you arrive on your destination, there is that point when you actually need to use your computer. And comfort of full laptop is not something that HP mini can challenge.

[2010-04-06: I upgraded memory from default 1 GB to 2 GB. This did not improve Windows Experience Index but it did wonders to working experience. For those interested full scores are 2.3 (processor), 4.5 (memory), 2.0 (graphics), 3.0 (gaming graphics) and 5.9 (hard drive).]

Leaving Ferrari

It is not a secret that I like Michael Schumacher. When it was announced that he will be substitute for Felipe Massa, I was happy as little child. As you all know, that didn’t happen.

Although I still followed Formula 1 and I still was Ferrari fan, something didn’t feel right. First there came Kimi Raikkonen. Guy was quick but I just couldn’t imagine him in Ferrari clothes. Next idiotic move was signing Fernando Alonso. Getting this guy in red suit was just too much for me. Only thing that tentatively connected me to Ferrari was Felipe.

My plan was just to repeat year 2009, be a Ferrari-Massa fan and hope that next year they will find driver worthy enough to drive in red car.

However, it seems that I will be Mercedes fan instead. They successfully (according to Bild) completed negotiations and Michael Schumacher will drive once again.

He doesn’t need any money (and he will not get much anyhow) and nobody expects him to actually win championship. It will just be joy ride mixed with wish to prove himself again. I other words - pure joy to watch.

Thank you Santa for this present.

Help Me

Good

After all those years of having help content in proprietary form, there is some change on sight. If you go into C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Help3\content\Microsoft\store directory there you will find files with extension .mshc. There is no program registered for handling it but you can open it with WinRAR (or any other smarter archiver – it is actually a zip file). Snoop inside a little and you will notice that these are actually XHTML and image files. For some reason, while text has html extension, pictures have no extension whatsoever (those I saw were in PNG format).

You might wonder why I consider this to be such a big change. For one, formatting content to be in same form as Microsoft’s own documentation just got much easier. I am sure that at least some developers of components for .NET Framework will integrate their help into Visual Studio 2008. Having help for all your components in same format with cross-references between such independent component and .NET Framework itself cannot be bad.

I still remember old days when MSDN Library was highly useful even without Internet connection. Last few years formed such a huge gap between what was in local version of MSDN and what was in Internet version of it. I hope that if formats that are used on their Internet site are used also internally, there would be more frequent updates and gap would not be that big.

Bad

Help viewer is now same application you use for browsing Internet. It can be Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome or whatever your preferred browser is these days. Bad thing is that every browser has own issues with XHTML (less) and CSS (more) code used for display.

Internet Explorer does not align menu correctly on 120 dpi systems and that results in all code being below menu - not something that looks or works nicely (lot of scrolling involved). In other browsers, menu and content alignment is correct but there are issues with not quite getting window width settings just right.

Also there is no setting to limit browsing to only some subset of data – e.g. C# and .NET Framework 2.0. This way it is just too often that you can find a function you need only to see that it is not supported with framework that you need. With Visual Studio 2008 we got framework targeting. Maybe with Visual Studio 2010 we can get same support in help.

I cannot help but to count on .NET community to come up with much better help system than one in Visual Studio 2010. Just small application with local search and browser windows (with tab support!) will do. :)

Ugly

Startup time is awful. It is faster to load your favorite browser, go to online MSDN and find what you need there. And you can do it faster than local help can load first window. Maybe because Visual Studio 2010 is so fast that slowness of help system annoys me so. I cannot but to wonder what efforts were involved to make it that slow.

Conclusion

Maybe it will be a little unfair from my side (since Visual Studio 2010 is only beta) but if this is how help will look like, we may as well be without one. Only situation when it is semi-useful is when there is no Internet connection available.

Summae 1.00

New freeware is ready to go.

It is small utility that attaches it-self to context menu of all files. In that way, calculating sum is always near. Do not worry, that option can be turned off. In such case you can use standard user interface to add files and calculate their sums. In case that you need command-line, again, it is there. Supported algorithms include CRC-16, CRC-32, MD-5, RIPEMD-160, SHA-1, SHA-256, SHA-384 and SHA-512.

Summae.exe is main program that is used to select files and configure settings. SummaeExecutor.exe has command-line interface. Sum.exe is command-line interface. It may come in handy in cases where scripting support is needed.

For readers of this blog, I added download of zipped files also. If you prefer to try software without installation, this is way to go.

Download

• Installation
• Zipped files

Windows 7 and Intel Graphics 4

My laptop was on repairs for a while. Since it came back, I decided to update Windows with newest bits. One of installations Windows Update offered was also new driver for graphic adapter. Nothing fancy - just standard Intel Series 4 Graphics chipset.

Few days ago I, as I changed screen brightness, screen went black. And not pure black. I could see image but very dimly. I saw it before. It looked as background light is gone. I already saw myself packing laptop back for second round of repairs.

I shut it down (with good old Alt+F4 repeated multiple times). When I started it once again everything seemed to be alright. I was puzzled and when it happened again after some time. Since broken back-light doesn’t fix itself too often, I decided to search my system for cause of error.

It ends up that whenever I bring screen brightness to lowest setting (either by key combination or selecting it on slider) it turns off backlight completely. And there is no obvious way to turn it back on. No matter how much you increase brightness after that nothing brings light back.

Well, almost nothing. In Windows 7 you can use Win+P key combination to call upon window that gives you choice of display you wish to use. It was enough to change display to “Duplicate” in order to restore brightness. Since that left screen in resolution that was not optimal one, another call to Win+P window and selecting “Computer only” was needed to restore everything where it was.

Since I often change screen brightness, this is my workaround to avoid reboot each time I go one notch too far. I tried to restore driver to older version but, for some reason, I cannot get driver rollback to work. Updating to latest Intel drivers didn’t help much (Microsoft delivered 8.15.10.1872, Intel had 8.15.10.1986) since same “feature” is present there.

I am not sure how wide-spread this error is since I could not find anything about it on Internet (or I didn’t search good enough). However, I do know that my particular combination of HP 6030b and Intel Graphics 4 Series is affected. Lately, with this laptop, I feel that driver gods are not on my side.

P.S. No, screen is not broken, I tried older Windows 7 installation (VHD boot) and problem cannot be reproduced there. Only installations (both VHD and normal boot) where I use Windows Update regularly are affected.