All posts by Ed Tittel

Full-time freelance writer, researcher and occasional expert witness, I specialize in Windows operating systems, information security, markup languages, and Web development tools and environments. I blog for numerous Websites, still write (or revise) the occasional book, and write lots of articles, white papers, tech briefs, and so forth.

Windows 8.*, Windows OS Musings

New Tablet/Notebook Storage A-Comin’

November 12, 2014 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

Now that I’m the proud owner of a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 (SP3), I’ve taken the plunge to buy into the largest microSDXC component currently available. These days, that’s a whopping 128 GB, which is an amazing amount of storage to cram into a device that’s about the same size as my pinky nail. I plunked down about $120 at Newegg for a SanDisk Ultra model that’s rated as a UHS-1/Class 10 device, which is supposed to make it the fastest device of its type around. Given that the device I’m currently using in the SP3 is rated the same — it’s “only” 64 GB in size, however, from the same maker — I’m not expecting blazing fast performance by any stretch of the imagination. This CrystalDiskMark output tells why, in its own inimitable way:

These speeds are on par with a 5,400 RPM conventional hard disk. Sigh.

But I can use the extra 64 GB of space, primarily because I’m using File History and my Outlook files weigh in at around 11 GB all by themselves nowadays. My total file history space is running at about 13 GB at the moment, per snapshot. You don’t need much history at that rate to suck up 100 GB (or more) in a hurry. I’ve set the file history space cap at 20% of the drive’s space (the most File History will allow), which means I can go two versions back, at most.

I’ve also purchased a couple of 128 GB conventional sized SDXC cards from PNY as well (for $70 a pop, somewhat cheaper than the $120 that the micro format costs right now, owing to “newness and scarcity”). These will replace the 32 GB SDXC cards in my Lenovo X220 and T520 laptops, likewise to extend storage there as well. The performance results for that media will probably be even slower than that for the SanDisk media on display in the preceding screenshot, but that’s life in the storage game right now. A USB3 flash drive is undoubtedly faster, but they still don’t have the 64 GB (or bigger sizes) in the teeny-tiny “Atom-style” format familiar to those using Bluetooth or minimalist 802.11n (or older networking technologies) in their notebooks nowadays. When they become available, and I can leave them plugged in all the time, that’ll probably be my next flash storage purchase for these hard-working portable PCs.

[New material added 11/12/2014 late afternoon]

The mail lady dropped off the new 128 GB microSDXC late this morning, and I had a chance to run some more benchmarks on the Surface later today. Here are some resulting screenshots, which I follow with some commentary:

The Surface SSD on the left; 128 GB microSDXC on the right

The results show that the 128 GB SDXC device is a tad faster than its 64GB counterpart, and that both are significantly slower than the built-in Samsung MZMTE256 SSD. I’ll report on the full-size SDXC devices when they show up in the next few days as well.

[New material added 11/12/2015, one year after this post went up]

Out of curiosity I decided to check on prices for 256 GB micro SDXC cards, one year after the first instances made their appearance, and one year after this post went live. I’m pleased to report that most 128GB devices of this kind now go for under $50, and you can find 256 GB [putative, it’s actually more like 240GB of actual storage inside Windows] devices for upwards of $65 to around $100 for all but the fastest such cards. Good news all around on the price front, then, especially those seeking to extend the capabilities of tablets with limited built-in storage (which I define as 64 GB or less, as is typical for most low-cost devices).

Hardware Reviews, Letters from the Ed, Recent Activity

A Tale of Tablet Storage: USB 3 vs micro-SDXC

June 6, 2014 Ed Tittel 5 Comments

One thing I’ve noticed lately when it comes to breathless hype about Windows tablet storage is the fairly blithe assumption that by adding a micro-SDXC memory card, problems can be staved off or avoided. With a 64 GB (fairly affordable at around $35 to 60, depending on speed) or 128 GB (not yet affordable, with only one SanDisk model at around $120 currently available) card one can indeed extend the storage available to most Windows tablets (including the recently-announced Surface Pro 3 from Microsoft, plus countless others). But there’s something else about this form of storage that savvy buyers will wish to ponder as well, as illustrated in this side-by-side set of screen caps from the CrystalDiskMark disk speed analysis tool

USB 3 on the left, microSD card on the right: which would you prefer?

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to observe that speeds from the Mushkin 32 GB USB 3 Atom flash drive on the left vastly outstrip those from the SanDisk Ultra 64 micro-SDXC USH-1 card on the right, even though the SDXC card is rated at about as fast as such cards get, while the Mushkin Atom is by no means near the top of USB 3.0 UFD speed ratings. Methinks the interface for the card reader plays a significant role here on the Fujitsu Q704 tablet where I ran the test, and on other tablets as well.

There are two interesting take-aways from these speed measurements — namely

1. If you are going to use a micro-SDXC card to extend storage on a tablet, you’d better not expect it to run anywhere near as fast as the built-in SSD does, nor even as fast as plugging in an external USB 3 UFD. This also suggests that spending extra $$$ on faster SDXC cards may not be worth the added expense (though I’d want to test slower models to see how much slower they wind up going to be doubly-darn sure about that).

But then again, the SSD is oodles faster than either USB or micro-SD.

2. If you have to choose between a bigger UFD (size-wise that is, as anything over 32 GB requires a bigger “stick” in which to store the necessary memory chips) and a micro-SDXC card, the UFD clearly comes out ahead on performance, while the micro-SDXC card comes out ahead in compactness and lack of added external protrusions to carry and keep track of. Only you can decide which of those trade-offs is most worth making in your particular circumstances.

As for me, I’m opting for performance and capacity by using fast UFDs like the Mushkin Ventura Pro or the ADATA S102. Sure, they stick out from the side of the tablet, but they rock the speed and provide plenty of capacity. Then again, something like the newly-minted Corsair Flash Voyager GTX (just announced this week at Computex in Taipei) which includes an SSD-level flash controller and high-speed flash circuitry, might be just the ticket (for other options in this class of expensive peripherals check out Les Tokar’s USB 3.0 Archives at The SSD Review).

Hardware Reviews, Letters from the Ed, Recent Activity, Win7View

What I Don’t Like About the Fujitsu Stylistic Q704 Tablet Convertible

March 31, 2014 Ed Tittel 37 Comments

OK, it’s been a couple of months since my brand-new Fujitsu Q704 tablet with oodles of add-ons and appurtenances showed up at my door. I’m learning to live with the $165 monthly payment that my “let’s experiment with a business lease” ends up costing me. But I’m not as enamored of the machine as I’d hoped to be, and it hasn’t yet graduated to the status of “production traveling machine.” In fact, I’ve been using my older Lenovo i7 X220 Tablet and T420 notebooks more or less interchangeably on the road for the last two years, and am still happy to work with them.

As this image from the Fujitsu site shows, the Q704 is available with a battery-powered keyboard dock (center) and a plain dock with video and three USB 3.0 ports.

But now that I’ve been working with and using the Q704 unit for a while, here are my gripes:

1. The battery-powered keyboard dock is heavy, and turns the unit into a 4.75 lb notebook (it’s not even really an ultrabook, at that weight). Battery life is under 8 hours, too. By contrast my older Dell XPS-12 weighs 3.375 lbs, and gets 5 hours from a single battery.
2. When detaching the tablet from the keyboard dock, I’ve learned that it’s best to shut down. Mode switching from tablet to notebook by docking the unit, and from notebook to tablet by undocking same, is not as easy or trouble-free as I would like it to be.
3. As you might expect, an i7 (even a Haswell U4600) gets pretty warm, if not hot, when busy in the tablet, which can make it a little uncomfortable to hold in the hand or on the lap.
4. The touchpad on the keyboard dock, while sizable, is nowhere as nice to use as the one on the XPS-12, and the bottom buttons only click when pushed toward the center of the touchpad, not on the outside edges (as my fingers seem to want to do, to avoid pushing the right button when seeking the left, and vice-versa). For the kind of money Fujitsu charges for its gear, I’d expect them to use absolute top-of-the-line components, including the touchpad.
5. Given the presence of a U4600, the performance is less than you’d expect, and lower than even some higher-end i5 machines. See the Geekbench results at Tablet PC Review for more details. Read the whole thread to get the overall “nerd-view” of the Q704: it’s not pretty. Apparently, waterproofing perforce means less efficient ventilation and lower performance because of thermal inefficiencies. Sigh.

All in all, I’m hopeful that a combination of BIOS fixes and “best use practices” will help me extract a more acceptable experience from my Q704. Should be interesting to see how it all turns out.

Letters from the Ed, Recent Activity, Software Reviews, Tips, Tricks and Tweaks, Windows OS Musings

Machine Crash Prompts Lots of Learning, Especially for Intel Rapid Start

March 7, 2014 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

OK, so I’m on the phone last Friday, and I’ve just installed Service Pack 1 for MS Office 2013. After the obligatory post-install reboot, I discover the system won’t boot because it can’t find a boot drive. A long bout of troubleshooting ensues, after which I reluctantly conclude my motherboard’s gone south. My immediate efforts concentrate on moving over to my back-up desktop system, and I put an order into Newegg for a new Z87 motherboard, with a i7 4770K processor.

By the time I got my standby system promoted to production status, and prepared my T520 notebook for backup status (which means it’s got all the apps I use installed, and is ready to play host to my Outlook PSTs and all my usual data files and stuff), the parts arrived from Newegg. Wednesday, I started putting pieces together, and managed to get all the way through the build process for my first shot at a new backup system. But that’s where my first lesson of this adventure came into play: I struggled mightily to get the Corsair CWCH cooler to mate properly with the MSI Z87-G45 mobo I’d selected (good price, with mSATA drive slot), but ended up having to switch for the stock Intel cooler because I had to keep fiddling with the CPU to get it to work.

Turns out my #10 Torx screwdriver came in really handy, because torqueing down the front screw to clamp down more tightly onto the processor was the only way to get things working. This necessitated three tries before I was able to boot into the BIOS. Getting the Corsair cooler in place ONCE was more than enough for me, so I’m using the stock cooler now, watching temps, and plan to drop in a Zalman CNPS95 (had good luck with these before in various earlier builds) if the stock cooler doesn’t cut it. At present, CPU temps mostly fall in the range from 40-50 degrees Celsius (about 10 degrees hotter than on the i7 930 CPU I just replaced, but I think that’s normal when scaling down from 45 to 22 nm technology). The Antec 902 case in which the build is housed is well ventilated, with four 120 mm fans, plus a 200mm venting warm air out the top.

My next big challenge came from a Windows licensing snafu. MS didn’t inform me until one day after the initial install that my key was a duplicate (why couldn’t they check that at initial validation, I wonder?). I wasn’t able to get tech support to issue me a new key (even though I’ve got an MSDN subscription and two unused Windows 8.1 keys, the activation utility would accept neither one of them). After trying every trick I know of, I elected to re-install, as much because I wanted to switch to RAID drivers and try out the Intel Rapid Start Technology, as because I got tired of trying to fix the licensing snafu I’d caught myself in.

The GUI doesn’t show much, but it takes several contortions to get it working.

That’s where my next big learning adventure began. I quickly learned that I needed an SSD “hibernation partition” in which to shadow memory contents to make Rapid Start work, and I chewed through several sets of instructions before I figured out how to make it work on my MSI-based system:

0. I number this step zero because it occurs when Windows isn’t running (yet): you must get into your system BIOS to enable Intel Rapid Start Technology (and set the hibernation value to “Immediate” if present) before you can get the Rapid Start installer to work properly. You’ll have to catch and set this at an opportune reboot before attempting to install the software.

1. I set up the Intel mSATA 80GB SSD (nominal size; 76.29 GB actual) with a 42 GB partition, to leave 34 GB for the hibernation partition that Rapid Start uses to snapshot or copy memory contents. I used Disk Manager to set up a 42 GB GPT partition, leaving 34 GB unformatted for the series of diskpart commands I figured out I would need. Any SSD will do for the snapshot, and you should leave slightly more space in the hibernation partition than you have memory installed on your PC (mine has 32 GB; hence, a 34 GB partition). Interestingly, while the hibernation partition is visible in Disk Management, it is invisible to Windows Explorer (aka “File Explorer” or explorer.exe in Windows 8.*).

2. Next, I fired up diskpart following the instructions in the Intel Rapid Start Technology Guide for UEFI Mode, with special emphasis on the section entitled “Create a Primary Store Partition on a non-OS drive SSD.”

3. I skipped the convert gpt step, because the format I created in diskmgmt.msc was already GPT-formatted (in Step 12). I followed the create partition step as shown, using 34816 as the size of the hibernation partition in megabytes (34 GB * 1024 (megabytes per gigabyte) = 34816).

4. I jumped over into Intel Rapid Storage Technology, clicked the Performance tab, and made sure the acceleration features were enabled (this turns out to be an essential step in the process, though not very well documented).

5. I cut-and-pasted the exact value for the set id command from the documentation, namely “D3BFE2DE-3DAF-11DF-BA40-E3A556D89593” as shown in the Intel User Guide, then exited diskpart as directed.

6. Before you can get the Intel Rapid Start installer to work, you need to reboot the PC. After that, provided your chipset (Intel 8-series chipsets or better, with spotty 7-series coverage) and setup are copascetic, the program should install nicely and do its thing. One more observation: I had to reboot my machine two more times after installing Rapid Start to start observing the effects that the software promises — that is, a more rapid start. Apparently, it takes two reboots before the hibernation file gets set up and starts working properly, so be patient, please!

My PC now boots to the login prompt in under 10 seconds, which is at least 10 seconds faster than it used to boot before installing the Rapid Start stuff. Is it worth it? The real answer is that it depends on how often you reboot your PC. I mess around with mine all the time, so I think it’s worth giving up 34 GB of SSD space for this purpose. If you don’t reboot often, or you don’t have the SSD space to spare, you may not feel the same way.

But now, at least, I’ve figured out how to install and use Rapid Start on a home-brew PC, and I’ve got a RAID-based disk setup going for this UEFI Windows 8.1 install. The machine currently clocks at 8.1 in the WinAero version of WEI (Windows Experience Index, with the Intel 530 SSD the slowest link in the collection of subsystems measured) so I can’t be too unhappy with the results. By a slim margin (8.10 to 8.05 for my other desktop’s SSD), it’s now the fastest system I’ve got.

Letters from the Ed, Recent Activity

Business Lease for PC Equipment Bundles Interesting Charges

Gallery February 19, 2014 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

More or less on a whim, I decided to try out the business lease option when purchasing a recent desktop/portable system through the Fujitsu online store last month. From this disclosure, you may guess that the remarks that follow pertain to my recently-acquired Fujitsu Stylistic Q704 Tablet PC, for whose purchase I cut my deal with a company named the Marlin Business Bank, a firm that apparently specializes in such deals. Today, I just got my first invoice in the 24-month installment plan that will pay off the machine, and for one extra dollar, make it all mine. I also set up my online account, and made an electronic payment from my checking account to the leaseholder, Marlin.

Is it too cynical of me too find something “fishy” about the institution’s name?

Surprise, Surprise: Hidden Charges Surface
When I purchased the unit, I was told that my monthly payments would be something on the order of $135 a month to pay off the PC. Imagine my surprise, when I discovered the following items in that first invoice:

a $95 “documentation fee”
a charge for $27.06 that appeared in the late payment charges column of my invoice, but which was explained to me on a phone call to Marlin based on the very reasonable question of “How can I be late when this is my very first payment, and it’s not due until early March?” as an “added charge” for which no pre-printed column was available on their invoice form. The very nice phone support person was never able to adequately explain exactly what that charge was for, but made it very clear that it must be paid! I decided to let that slide this month, but if it’s a recurring item, I will most assuredly raise a ruckus about this. I won’t know until next month’s invoice appears in my mailbox.
a monthly, recurring charge for insurance of $18.02 (which translates into $216.24 per year) on a total purchase of around $2,800 represents approximately 7.72 percent of that price to protect Marlin’s investment in my office equipment. I already pay $440 a year for up to $40,000 of computing gear on my homeowner’s policy and resent being forced to pay about half that amount for less than 10% of the same coverage (twice).

It’s Just Like Momma Warned Me: “Things Aren’t Always What They Seem”
I can’t say I’m devastated to now understand fully that what I thought would involve about $135 a month looks like it will be more like $150-something. When financing anything, it’s always the little things that sneak in after the deal is done that bump up the monthly charges. But dang! You’d think that credit disclosure laws would force such companies to spell out explicitly and directly what the monthly charges will be, and also to list out all the one-time charges as well. The bottom line is that what I thought would cost me $3K instead of $2.8K is going to be more like $3.5K (or more) by the time the lease is paid off.

Fortunately, I learned that the lease carries no pre-payment penalties, so I can get out of the monthly “extras” (but not the interest over the life of the lease) by paying it off early. I’m going to check the state of our various accounts and then discuss this with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who I’m sure will agree with me that paying this note off early is our best way out of a sticky situation. Live and learn, my friends — and please, check those lease terms carefully, and ask in advance about one-time and add-on charges!

EdFiles, Hardware Reviews, Recent Activity, Windows OS Musings

Interesting USB Access Issue on Fujitsu Q704 Worked Around

February 10, 2014 Ed Tittel 2 Comments

I’m still breaking in — or rather, getting to know in depth — my latest Windows 8.1 tablet. Somewhat annoyingly, the Fujitsu Q704 stops “seeing” a USB flash drive (UFD for short) plugged into the keyboard dock once the machine has been idle for half an hour or longer. Continue reading Interesting USB Access Issue on Fujitsu Q704 Worked Around →

EdFiles, Hardware Reviews, Recent Activity, Windows OS Musings

Interesting Adventures with New Fujitsu Q704 Tablet/Convertible

January 29, 2014 Ed Tittel 68 Comments

Having secured permission from the Chancellor of the Exchequer (aka, “The Boss” — namely, my wife Dina) I recently purchased a new Fujitsu Windows tablet convertible, model Stylistic Q704 Hybrid Tablet PC with the keyboard dock/extra battery option. The price came in at over $2K, which is kinda painful for a 12.5″ tablet, but when the Boss said I could go for it, go for it I did. Now I’m learning to live with it. Here’s a snazzy publicity still:

Continue reading Interesting Adventures with New Fujitsu Q704 Tablet/Convertible →

Letters from the Ed, Tips, Tricks and Tweaks, Windows OS Musings

Customization and Control: Does the OS Really Matter Anymore?

December 31, 2013 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

I’ve got 4 laptops, 1 all-in-one, and three desktop computers on the roster at home, and another couple of laptops, a mini-ITX desktop, and a Chromebook on my “school loan” program right now. At this point, all but one of those machines — the Chromebook — is running Windows 8.1. I have added either Classic Shell or Start8 to all of the Windows machines, to make using and working from the desktop easier and faster, but otherwise I haven’t really mucked with the OS itself all that much. Many of those machines boast a “perfect score” in DriverAgent (no drivers out of date, that is) with the “worst score” on any machine showing three drivers outdated (two of which are bogus in each case, the other sufficiently mysterious and apocryphal to resist my occasional efforts at update/repair).

Windows 8.1 shows a plain Windows 8 logo in the system info widget from control panel.

In short, everything is humming along nicely and all but one of the machines is rock-solid stable with a perfect 10 score in the Windows Reliability Monitor (and even the odd PC out — my production desktop, ironically enough — is sufficiently stable in day-to-day working practice that I don’t worry about losing work or productivity on that machine). All of this adds up to an interesting observation or realization on my part — namely, that the OS running on those machines doesn’t really matter all that much any more. By hook or by crook, I’m able to keep things working, and I’m not being stymied or feeling overly frustrated about maintaining my computers, and keeping them working properly over time.

Windows 7 was (and remains) great, but Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 have also done right by me, too. Does this mean I’ve been lucky? Perhaps so, as I read about and hear from others who’ve run into snags with Windows 8, or the 8.1 update/upgrade, or who are struggling with hardware and driver issues. But I’m also inclined to observe that both hardware and software seem exceptionally stable and troublefree of late, and to have experienced fewer Windows headaches in the past four years or so, starting with the release of Windows 7 in October 2009. I’m not even terribly inclined to knock on wood so as not to tempt fate overmuch with my words, though that thought immediately crossed my mind as soon as I wrote them!

Here’s hoping that 2014 will continue humming along, as 2013 did for me, to my great surprise and delight. May your experiences be the same, too, if not better than that!

EdFiles, Letters from the Ed, Recent Activity

Grrrrrr: I HATE Tagalong Software

November 22, 2013 Ed Tittel 3 Comments

In the past two weeks, I’ve set up half a dozen PCs, mostly in the wake of clean installing or upgrading them to Windows 8.1. Along the way, I’ve encountered numerous software elements that seek to get users to install additional software programs so they can get access to sometimes essential plug-ins, programs, and other stuff.

To be more specific, I’ve encountered the Ask toobar and search replacement items along with adding Java to those machines, as well as the AVG toolbar and search tab insertion into most Web browsers (which means Chrome, IE, and Firefox on my production PC, and also includes Safari and Opera on other machines as well) for Adobe Flash player (here’s a whole list of vendors who include the AVG Toolbar as part of their product installs).

Booting the Secure Search tab in Chrome proved to be quite an effort.

I got stuck in a particularly nasty uninstall problem with AVG Secure Search and Chrome, in fact. I used Revo Uninstaller to get rid of the installed elements, and then had to go into the Web browsers to root AVG Secure Search out of their defaults and settings, one at a time. My issue with Chrome persisted until I realized that the “On Startup” item in Settings provides the ability to add multiple tabs when the program starts up. That was where the remaining invocation of AVG Secure Search remained untouched and unstopped, until I figured out I had to manually delete that entry from that part of the browser configuration.

I understand that companies often partner up when offering free and popular or widely-used software to the public, and permit third parties with money to spend on purchasing installs who feel like they have something to gain by paying to come along for that ride. But what I don’t understand is why some of those third parties feel like they have to resist user attempts to avoid such maneuvers, sometimes to the point of making such installs feel more like drive-by malware than like legitimate commercial software.

I have long regarded AVG as among the best of the free malware protection makers, and their consistently high ratings from Virus Bulletin, PC Magazine, and so forth indicate that their malware suite is decent software. I am dismayed that they would use their knowledge of how software hides from users against the very users they so ardently seek to protect.

I feel the same way about any tagalong items that don’t clearly advertise their presence and provide clear, obvious, and usable opt-out mechanisms so users don’t end up installing software on their machines that they don’t really want. I don’t exactly love the idea of having to watch installers closely at all times on vigilant lookout for opt-out messages when they appear, either, but it definitely beats having to take the extra software as a consequence of the software you want, and then having to uninstall and clean up after the unwanted stuff manually after the initial install is ended.

Sigh.

EdFiles, Letters from the Ed, Windows OS Musings

Interesting Outlook 2013 and iCloud Adventures Happily Concluded

November 8, 2013 Ed Tittel 7 Comments

On October 22, I posted a blog here entitled “Interesting Adventures with iCloud and Outlook 2013” wherein I recounted some difficulties with making those two software components play nice with each other in the immediate aftermath of my upgrade from Windows 8.0 to 8.1 on my production machine. Having now waiting a little over two weeks for more collective wisdom to coalesce online, I’ve found my way to a solution of those difficulties.

Continue reading Interesting Outlook 2013 and iCloud Adventures Happily Concluded →

Author, Editor, Expert Witness