Ok So my other tool of the trade that I use is my desktop that was built in early 2008. It took me a few months to get all the parts together because I was waiting for a special new CPU to come out before I built my new rig. IT was well worth the wait because the cpu on this desktop is a great brain to run this power. Let me tell you about it...
The Desktop is run by a 3.0 GHZ 8400 Intel Core 2 Duo CPU. It was one of the fastest Core 2 Duos put out before they came out with the Icores I waited for 2 weeks to get it because it was on back order. Meanwhile all the other parts were on my desk and waiting to be assembled. That included an MSI P7N Dimond Motherboard, 6GB of DDR2 Ram from
Crucial. I found a Mirrored Case with a door from CaseMate. This case is BIG but amazing. It has 2 filters in the front to capture all the dust. IT has about 7 fans but runs very quiet. It has great cooling and enough room to run cable organization through the back so the cables are tucked away from the motherboard to keep tangles down and airflow clear.
The video is run by an Nvdia 8800 GTS PCI E card.
I am running a Western Digital Black 1TB Drive for speed and space. I also have a desktop external Western Digital Drive as a backup that is 1TB as well.
This machine is running Windows 7 Home Premium and has a 23 inch Samsung Display for a beautiful picture. I love Samsung monitors they last forever and have the brightest picture.
The machine was amazingly fast when I first built it and would boot up in about 30 seconds. Now 4 years later and after many software installs and uninstalls, the machine has slowed down a bit. It boots up in a minute and a half but then seems to run quick when doing other things. I am in the middle of backing up data and moving data for my wife over to a new laptop. Once I get her stuff over I will see if I should wipe it or just clean it up a bit. I have gone through so far and removed a lot of software that I dont use anymore. It seems to have helped but I think it could be better. I wonder if that is going to change with Windows 8. I have windows 8 on a laptop and I wonder how it will be in 3 months, 6 months a year later.
I do enjoy this desktop but I sometimes wonder if I would be able to get all my work done with a laptop and eliminate this all together.
Monday, December 31, 2012
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Fifty Shades of Geek
I started a new page on Facebook and I want to try to keep it up to date and get some feedback and posts from other users. I came up with the name after my wife started getting Facebook posts from a page called 50 shades of Sexy. It came to me to do the geek at the end and I thought I could make a page that people who love technology could come and post things and rant about technology and poke fun at some of the stupidity of tech pundits who clearly miss the boat at times!
So if your on Facebook and you've gone through your timeline and your bored but don't want to leave Facebook, stop by and give my page a view. Leave a comment tell me what you think, suggest topics for me to write about. Ill keep the posts shorter of course, if there is something longer that needs more discussion I will link over to my blog here.
So if your on Facebook and you've gone through your timeline and your bored but don't want to leave Facebook, stop by and give my page a view. Leave a comment tell me what you think, suggest topics for me to write about. Ill keep the posts shorter of course, if there is something longer that needs more discussion I will link over to my blog here.
HTC DNA Phone
I recently saw the ad from Verizon showing the new droid phone that was being released soon, the HTC DNA. Well it was only 2 weeks after that, with much soul searching I decided to retire my trusty Iphone 4 and upgrade to a new droid. I had my heart set on the Samsung Galaxy 3 but then when I saw the DNA I started doing research on it. After much research I decided that the DNA would be my next phone. I wanted to go and test it though before I bought it and make sure it was not too big. It is a huge 5 inch phone with a massive screen and a beautiful picture. All of the reviews said do not worry about the size, it is still small for being such a large phone. So after I got a chance to stop to a store and play with the phone and try it out, I was sold on it.
My wife came home from work and we went right to the Verizon phone to order us up some new phones. She got her Samsung galaxy 3 in white and I got my shiny new Droid DNA phone. Her phone is a nice phone too. I love how it feels so thin and lightweight but does not feel like it was made cheaply. Samsung displays are some of the best around when looking at a computer all day, and the display on her phone was no different. I will review that phone more in depth when I can get a day with it and pry it out of her fingers!
The DNA phone came in some neat packaging that was dark and black and really cool looking. I got Verizon to transfer all my contacts from my iPhone, which I should not have done as the backup of contacts was not updated like what i had on my iphone. Triplicate entries galore! The phone came and had about a half charge on the battery. Which was a good indication of things to come. I got the phone at 4 o'clock and used it heavily right up till I went to bed at 10 pm. And just as I was laying in bed it was telling me that it was time to charge.
My first experience of the pure speed this phone had was at a supermarket. I had 3 bars and it was on the 4g network and it dawned on me that I needed to get an app for my work. I wanted to hear a good dance DJ on sound cloud as well. So I went into Google play and chose sound cloud from the list of apps. The app to download was 14MB in size. I was curious how log it would take with only half of the network signal available to me. I hit download and it only took 10 seconds for the app to download and be ready for me to work with! That was impressive to me as I came from an I phone 4 with 3g speeds. When I got home, I could not really test the 4g more as we live in an area that has poor coverage and sometimes its a miracle to get 3g coverage. So I connected it to Wi Fi and downloaded all my needed apps.
All the apps I tested ran smoothly with no issues. The only one that gives me an issue so far is Facebook. When you go to share a picture that is in your timeline, it will come up and you can put a wording to the post, but when you hit publish post. It says finished then says loading and never moves from there until you force quit the app and start it again. Your post does show up but you won't know that until you exit out and come back in. This issue came up on my phone, my wife's phone and her co worker's phone. All are droid phones and all are different models and one is on a different network. Needless to say, I reported that bug to Facebook and I hope they will get a fix out for it. It is not a big deal to me as I have plenty of other ways to use Facebook should the need arise.
My phone will last all day and a charger is not needed unless I am doing some intense activity with the phone like streaming music all day or running the display for a very long time. The biggest draw in the phones battery life is that big beautiful screen. For my work around a 2nd charger will be ordered and I will keep my car charger handy for long trips.
A lot of the reviews I have studied have talked about the phones inability to add storage space and that it only has 16gb of space available to the user. If your coming from the basic iPhone like i was this is not an issue. I can get at least 200 songs on the phone plus my apps and still have a little room left over to store some other things if needed. And with today's cloud storage offerings, you should have space somewhere to put your data so you can shuffle it around to the phone if needed. Would a 32GB version be better? Sure, and I am positive that the engineers are already working that up right now. But for me 16GB is fine. I don't really want to store a lot of music on this phone anyway. I want to have more of a balance and get some reading material on there and try all the different apps that I did not have available to me with the iPhone world. I mean c'mon, with that huge screen, who wouldn't want to curl up with that phone and read some classic novels, or catch up on the latest issue of Maximum PC?
The phone is of course very deeply entrenched into the Google arena. If you have a g mail account and have looked through Google's pages, you know you have email storage and some other apps open to you. I got a g mail account almost 4 years ago and at that same time started using their Chrome browser. It has been a great choice for me as I can store all of my bookmarks on Chrome and they all follow me wherever I go and on which ever device I fire up. It is so nice to not have to download a separate app to play you tube videos! And while Im on the go, there is a blogger app to run on the phone should I be crazy enough to want to thumb type that much for a quick blog post!
The swype input method is cool and I am getting better with it everyday. I try to use that more so I get better at it and it is easier to do at times then pecking with the old trusty thumbs!
This phone was a wonderful choice and is right now the fastest droid out there. I would say its the biggest but Samsung has the Note II which is 6.5 inches and as a hybrid tablet phone (Phablet)? Thone? It is bigger than this phone. I am giving this phone a recommendation of buy and would not be afraid to tell my family to get the phone. I will post more updates as I use the phone more and update if facebook gets their app working again.
My wife came home from work and we went right to the Verizon phone to order us up some new phones. She got her Samsung galaxy 3 in white and I got my shiny new Droid DNA phone. Her phone is a nice phone too. I love how it feels so thin and lightweight but does not feel like it was made cheaply. Samsung displays are some of the best around when looking at a computer all day, and the display on her phone was no different. I will review that phone more in depth when I can get a day with it and pry it out of her fingers!
The DNA phone came in some neat packaging that was dark and black and really cool looking. I got Verizon to transfer all my contacts from my iPhone, which I should not have done as the backup of contacts was not updated like what i had on my iphone. Triplicate entries galore! The phone came and had about a half charge on the battery. Which was a good indication of things to come. I got the phone at 4 o'clock and used it heavily right up till I went to bed at 10 pm. And just as I was laying in bed it was telling me that it was time to charge.
My first experience of the pure speed this phone had was at a supermarket. I had 3 bars and it was on the 4g network and it dawned on me that I needed to get an app for my work. I wanted to hear a good dance DJ on sound cloud as well. So I went into Google play and chose sound cloud from the list of apps. The app to download was 14MB in size. I was curious how log it would take with only half of the network signal available to me. I hit download and it only took 10 seconds for the app to download and be ready for me to work with! That was impressive to me as I came from an I phone 4 with 3g speeds. When I got home, I could not really test the 4g more as we live in an area that has poor coverage and sometimes its a miracle to get 3g coverage. So I connected it to Wi Fi and downloaded all my needed apps.
All the apps I tested ran smoothly with no issues. The only one that gives me an issue so far is Facebook. When you go to share a picture that is in your timeline, it will come up and you can put a wording to the post, but when you hit publish post. It says finished then says loading and never moves from there until you force quit the app and start it again. Your post does show up but you won't know that until you exit out and come back in. This issue came up on my phone, my wife's phone and her co worker's phone. All are droid phones and all are different models and one is on a different network. Needless to say, I reported that bug to Facebook and I hope they will get a fix out for it. It is not a big deal to me as I have plenty of other ways to use Facebook should the need arise.
My phone will last all day and a charger is not needed unless I am doing some intense activity with the phone like streaming music all day or running the display for a very long time. The biggest draw in the phones battery life is that big beautiful screen. For my work around a 2nd charger will be ordered and I will keep my car charger handy for long trips.
A lot of the reviews I have studied have talked about the phones inability to add storage space and that it only has 16gb of space available to the user. If your coming from the basic iPhone like i was this is not an issue. I can get at least 200 songs on the phone plus my apps and still have a little room left over to store some other things if needed. And with today's cloud storage offerings, you should have space somewhere to put your data so you can shuffle it around to the phone if needed. Would a 32GB version be better? Sure, and I am positive that the engineers are already working that up right now. But for me 16GB is fine. I don't really want to store a lot of music on this phone anyway. I want to have more of a balance and get some reading material on there and try all the different apps that I did not have available to me with the iPhone world. I mean c'mon, with that huge screen, who wouldn't want to curl up with that phone and read some classic novels, or catch up on the latest issue of Maximum PC?
The phone is of course very deeply entrenched into the Google arena. If you have a g mail account and have looked through Google's pages, you know you have email storage and some other apps open to you. I got a g mail account almost 4 years ago and at that same time started using their Chrome browser. It has been a great choice for me as I can store all of my bookmarks on Chrome and they all follow me wherever I go and on which ever device I fire up. It is so nice to not have to download a separate app to play you tube videos! And while Im on the go, there is a blogger app to run on the phone should I be crazy enough to want to thumb type that much for a quick blog post!
The swype input method is cool and I am getting better with it everyday. I try to use that more so I get better at it and it is easier to do at times then pecking with the old trusty thumbs!
This phone was a wonderful choice and is right now the fastest droid out there. I would say its the biggest but Samsung has the Note II which is 6.5 inches and as a hybrid tablet phone (Phablet)? Thone? It is bigger than this phone. I am giving this phone a recommendation of buy and would not be afraid to tell my family to get the phone. I will post more updates as I use the phone more and update if facebook gets their app working again.
Monday, July 23, 2012
A technicians Point of View about Mac to Pc
7/23/12
When you are a technician, you see a lot of different situations and scenarios and you see things differently when it comes to computers. One question I get asked a lot is, which is better, mac or pc? Now that is a question that has been argued through history and has been studied by many experts and there are very different opinions. I will give you my opinion coming from a technician’s point of view.
My work during the day is strictly on windows clients. All my clients work on Windows and the only apple product that is sometimes brought up is an iPhone that needs exchange email setup or someone needs help getting to the webmail on an iPad. As far as a mac computer being used for everyday work they are not really used. And I tell my clients that before they go and buy a mac, I tell them the pros and cons of the mac as it relates to doing the everyday work that my clients do in our company.
Now I have some friends that I do support for and I help keep them running and occasionally they will bring me their emergencies that come up. The one that I just went through was a friend who had a pc laptop and it crashed. I came in got some files to move off it to a backup drive, but could not get the outlook files. It was determined that the hard drive had failed and a new machine was in order. This was a good choice as it was a laptop and about 4 years old and it was heavily used. My friend decided they wanted to get a mac laptop. They thought that being they used an iPad and an iPhone that a mac would be great and it would make life easy to have data and documents move between all three with ease. We both were about to find out that would not be the case. And from a techs point of view, what I started to go through setting this mac up and migrating data over, a common user could never go through it and get it working. They would either pull their hair out, curse mac out and go to their local Apple store and beat up some poor apple worker out of frustration, or they would call in an expert and pay a lot of money to get things done.
So my friend gets a top of the line mac book pro, not the retina display one, as they needed it right then and the newest ones were not shipping for a week or more. I come over to help set it up. Get it connected to wireless no issues, install Microsoft office 2011 and get activated, no sweat. This will be a breeze…. I get them connected to their email accounts, they have 2 one is a personal the other is for their company. Sweet, emails are flowing in and out of the outlook! Things are looking like I’ll be out early and sipping a beer by the pool! Now we come to something that should be very simple to do but the mac version of office has the option hidden. My user wanted to set up so when they start typing an email it is set to use a font and set at a size they prefer. On the windows world, this is very easy a few clicks and it is done. On the mac side I had to go into these different options, and when I saw how it was done by referring to the help file, I thought to myself, “Did I miss something? Is this really need to be this complicated?” I get that done though and it all looks good, I had to get some files restored from a backup drive that could only be read by a windows pc so I took that with me and we setup to have me come back with the files and get them restored and archived back into outlook.
About 2 weeks go by and my friend calls and says they are having some issues. I figured, no big deal, there are always some growing pains when converting from pc to mac and vice versa, it takes me a second to remember how to switch gears if I have to walk someone through something on a different platform. So we go though some issues, some are basic questions, like where is this, how do I do this, what is that? Nothing major. Then I was told that the computer is hesitating when they are working in outlook, so I remotely connect to take a look and I see it happening, it is getting stuck when trying to write and email and just pausing, you type a whole sentence and nothing happens and then it catches up and types it while you’re looking at the screen in disbelief that you just saw that! So I went through the normal steps I take to fix this, check for updates, make sure nothing unneeded is running in the background, restart the computer and try it again. Nothing works. So my friend calls apple and gets a run around, then they call Microsoft and get a run around. So then after a call to their local apple store and talking to a nice tech who is willing to listen, they were told to try to reinstall the office suite. Really??? Well ok, it should not be hard let’s make a backup of the outlook files and do that. So I went in and ran export and let it back up the email files to the doc’s folder for safe keeping. Then I find the Microsoft document on how to reinstall office. Can I reinstall just a part of the software like windows? NO! You have to reinstall the whole thing! Ok fine! I print out the sheet so I can follow along as I am doing this remotely and it will be easier than trying to juggle 2 windows around. The document I printed, is 6 sheets long! I start reading it to prepare. Step one, force quit all apps. Step 2 delete the application folder from the hard drive, step 3 go into library folder and delete the plist files for office…. Wait what? I know what I am looking at and what I have to do to make this uninstall, but for a common user, there is no Way they will want to even attempt this! And it got worse. Every step got more complex just to remove this program! Then one of the steps, told you how to go and save your files that are stored in the Microsoft folder in the documents folder, and how it should be moved to the desktop so the emails and settings for outlook are not disturbed. So I go through this entire document follow the steps to the letter. We restart, and now need to reinstall office. Put cd in follow the prompts, activate, all done, ready to go! Open word, looks great, even kept the settings for the font size, COOL! Go to open outlook, sorry this identity cannot be opened in this version of outlook! Ummmm what???? Holy crap, did I miss something? Did I delete something bad? Oh no what now? A simple Google search turned up the answer, simply make sure you run Microsoft updates to get the versions all straight, then when it’s updated the outlook identity will rebuild itself and open. But to an average user... would they know to look at that and find it on Google? Perhaps if they have the knowhow to research problems a try to fix them, but as I thought of my friend who I was doing this for, they would not have been able to do that. They would have been a little freaked out if I was not on the other end of the phone.
I was quite surprised at the amount of steps that we had to go through to get the applications back in working order, and the entire ordeal my friend has gone through getting setup and working on the mac. If I had known that this would have been such a learning curve for my friend or the growing pains they would go through to get used to the mac, I might have pushed harder for them to go to another PC.
And from my point of view as a technician, there seems to be quite a few things that are not as easy to do on the mac that they were on the PC. The next time someone asks me what they should go with, my first question will be “What kind of applications do you run now?”
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
A great comparison about Kindle Fire and Ipad.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/diy-it/how-to-decide-should-you-buy-a-new-ipad-or-a-kindle-fire/484?tag=search-results-rivers;item0
DIY Tech blog by David Gerwitz.
It is always a great read.
This post was really well written and gives a great comparison about the two tablets and gives insite into how to decide which one would fit your needs.
DIY Tech blog by David Gerwitz.
It is always a great read.
This post was really well written and gives a great comparison about the two tablets and gives insite into how to decide which one would fit your needs.
A Google ChromeBook, Is it better than a tablet?
So my work wants us to try using different laptops to see if our road warriors can get work done and still stay connected to the office while out and traveling. My department was given Google Chromebooks to use and see if we can connect to our work while using these newer devices. This is my review of the device after 2 weeks of getting used to it and learning its features.
I am currently writing this post on the Chromebook and so far am please with the device. It is a samsung laptop with a dual core Intel Atom CPU which is good its faster than the first generation of Atom processors and feels much more responsive while I am navigating through web pages. I have to find out how much ram is in the device, but Im going to guess its probably about 2 gb of RAM. The c.book also comes with a nice light 16GB SSD Drive for storage of files and data. There is a usb slot for other devices to be connected such as flash drives and cameras and things of that nature. There is also a monitor connection that uses the included VGA connector to connect to a bigger screen if needed. There is also a headphone jack and mic jack for sound input/output. It even includes an SD slot to load memory cards from Cameras and camcorders.
The screen is 12.1 inches and very bright. I opened up the laptop in bed one night and my sleeping wife grumbled that the light was too bright turn it back off!! So after dimming the brightness, I was busy thanking the Google gods for a nice bright screen that one could see anywhere they needed it! The weight of the device is about a pound and its super thin about 2 inches when closed and one inch when opened. It also includes a built in web cam that can take pictures and be used for different apps like Skype.
The battery life... oh sweet heavenly battery life!! The range of time the device can be used in between charges is 8 to 12 hours!! Are you serious?? Yes I am! I am super excited about this because I am coming from a 6 year old laptop who's best length of battery life was 40 minutes! Just to give you an idea of real world usage, I have used this moderately and have charged it once in the 2 weeks of use-sage. My boss who is a power user has been running his non stop and keeps hammering on it while doing things at the office, he has charged his about 4 times since getting it. I have yet to find out how my other co workers have done in this area. (Work has been super busy!) My boss said he gets closer to the 12 hours of life he was also able to keep his charging overnight the first night. I was thinking in terms of how regular users use these devices, so I plugged it in and only charged for a bit then started useing it when I got home. I have only gotten to about 8 hours of use. I know a regular user will see its getting low and then plug it right in. But I am going to use it till it tells me it cant go any more and keeps shutting off. Then I will recharge it.
One of the nicer things about this over a tablet is since its a laptop it has a built in keyboard and you do not need to reconnect one when you need to do some serious word crunching. The keyboard is a nice fit and would fit a variety of hands including larger hands who are clumbsy on a smaller netbook in the 11 or 10 inch form factor. The Track pad is nice and big and can be seen and felt without much searching. The click button is at the bottom of the track pad and is easy to use and has a nice mechanical feel to it. using right click takes some getting used to as the button does not really differentiate between right and left clicks. Instead you have to click with both fingers in the center of the button and you will get right click options such as menus and spell check options. (Thank god because I am a horrible butcher of the English language! To scroll up and down you simply take 2 fingers and slide them up and down the trackpad... it takes some getting used to if your used to a scroll button or a mouse with a Wheel.
The Google chromebook is not a standard Operating system like what you think of with windows and Mac. It is a cloud based system that integrates tightly with Google and its cloud service. You are recommended to have a Gmail account to work with and when you sign up for one you are then given access to the storage and Google office apps to do Productivity tasks with. Being this is a small lightweight system such as this one boot up time is short about 6 seconds worth! you then sign into your google account and have the ability to do what ever tasks you want. The great thing is you have access to all flash based sites and sites that use java, as Google Chrome is your browser as well. If your used to Chrome on your desktop OS then the browser will be very familar to you and works well syncing your bookmarks and such. I have even been able to log into my work cloud and do remote desktop tasks if needed with the c.book! Being that I started moving my important files into the cloud and trying to think that I would need my data to be protable and accessable from anywhere, getting used to this OS has been a breeze. A regular user might have some issues with this and find it hard to do and annoying. Someone who has all their data locked onto a desktop or laptop may opt to travel with a regular laptop to keep all their data with them and transfer documents into the cloud that way.
The Samsung model comes with built in WiFi and has access to Verizon Wireless data packages. It comes with 100MB of data a month for the first year. I have yet to turn this feature on as you need a credit card right away to sign up and I'm sure they would have no problem banging your card if you go past that first 100MB. I have been told by others that using our work cloud can eat through data almost as fast as streaming a netflix movie on a new 4g equipped Ipad.
Youre wondering, "How do I get apps installed onto my ChromeBook? The system comes with access to the google app store which has a few thousand apps and growing. I downloaded Tweetdeck to see my twitter feed and feel it has a much nicer interface to follow than the standard twitter page. There is also a facebook app as well as a Skype app to communicate with. There is also a built in app called scratch pad that you can put notes on and will send them into the Google cloud under a folder called Scratch pad notes. Youtube is included as the standard video player, but other players can be used to view content if needed. There are many free apps as well as pay apps that I have not even delved into yet. I know I am going to research if there are any good IP PHone apps so I can connect to my work phone and make calls with it.
All in all I feel this is an excellent tablet replacement and can do very well for a traveling user. It does not have touch interface so if you really like that then a tablet is a better way to go. For my needs, I always need a keyboard so this is a better optoion for me. It all depends on your needs, for example David Gerwitz a blogger on ZDnet.com commented that he was able to use the Kindle Fire tablet to read electric manuals while he was trying to work on a wall switch in his house. He said his Ipad would be to large to do that with and the same would be true with this Chromebook. Its light enough but a Kindle is a 7 inch form factor and would be better suited for what David was trying to do.
I am currently writing this post on the Chromebook and so far am please with the device. It is a samsung laptop with a dual core Intel Atom CPU which is good its faster than the first generation of Atom processors and feels much more responsive while I am navigating through web pages. I have to find out how much ram is in the device, but Im going to guess its probably about 2 gb of RAM. The c.book also comes with a nice light 16GB SSD Drive for storage of files and data. There is a usb slot for other devices to be connected such as flash drives and cameras and things of that nature. There is also a monitor connection that uses the included VGA connector to connect to a bigger screen if needed. There is also a headphone jack and mic jack for sound input/output. It even includes an SD slot to load memory cards from Cameras and camcorders.
The screen is 12.1 inches and very bright. I opened up the laptop in bed one night and my sleeping wife grumbled that the light was too bright turn it back off!! So after dimming the brightness, I was busy thanking the Google gods for a nice bright screen that one could see anywhere they needed it! The weight of the device is about a pound and its super thin about 2 inches when closed and one inch when opened. It also includes a built in web cam that can take pictures and be used for different apps like Skype.
The battery life... oh sweet heavenly battery life!! The range of time the device can be used in between charges is 8 to 12 hours!! Are you serious?? Yes I am! I am super excited about this because I am coming from a 6 year old laptop who's best length of battery life was 40 minutes! Just to give you an idea of real world usage, I have used this moderately and have charged it once in the 2 weeks of use-sage. My boss who is a power user has been running his non stop and keeps hammering on it while doing things at the office, he has charged his about 4 times since getting it. I have yet to find out how my other co workers have done in this area. (Work has been super busy!) My boss said he gets closer to the 12 hours of life he was also able to keep his charging overnight the first night. I was thinking in terms of how regular users use these devices, so I plugged it in and only charged for a bit then started useing it when I got home. I have only gotten to about 8 hours of use. I know a regular user will see its getting low and then plug it right in. But I am going to use it till it tells me it cant go any more and keeps shutting off. Then I will recharge it.
One of the nicer things about this over a tablet is since its a laptop it has a built in keyboard and you do not need to reconnect one when you need to do some serious word crunching. The keyboard is a nice fit and would fit a variety of hands including larger hands who are clumbsy on a smaller netbook in the 11 or 10 inch form factor. The Track pad is nice and big and can be seen and felt without much searching. The click button is at the bottom of the track pad and is easy to use and has a nice mechanical feel to it. using right click takes some getting used to as the button does not really differentiate between right and left clicks. Instead you have to click with both fingers in the center of the button and you will get right click options such as menus and spell check options. (Thank god because I am a horrible butcher of the English language! To scroll up and down you simply take 2 fingers and slide them up and down the trackpad... it takes some getting used to if your used to a scroll button or a mouse with a Wheel.
The Google chromebook is not a standard Operating system like what you think of with windows and Mac. It is a cloud based system that integrates tightly with Google and its cloud service. You are recommended to have a Gmail account to work with and when you sign up for one you are then given access to the storage and Google office apps to do Productivity tasks with. Being this is a small lightweight system such as this one boot up time is short about 6 seconds worth! you then sign into your google account and have the ability to do what ever tasks you want. The great thing is you have access to all flash based sites and sites that use java, as Google Chrome is your browser as well. If your used to Chrome on your desktop OS then the browser will be very familar to you and works well syncing your bookmarks and such. I have even been able to log into my work cloud and do remote desktop tasks if needed with the c.book! Being that I started moving my important files into the cloud and trying to think that I would need my data to be protable and accessable from anywhere, getting used to this OS has been a breeze. A regular user might have some issues with this and find it hard to do and annoying. Someone who has all their data locked onto a desktop or laptop may opt to travel with a regular laptop to keep all their data with them and transfer documents into the cloud that way.
The Samsung model comes with built in WiFi and has access to Verizon Wireless data packages. It comes with 100MB of data a month for the first year. I have yet to turn this feature on as you need a credit card right away to sign up and I'm sure they would have no problem banging your card if you go past that first 100MB. I have been told by others that using our work cloud can eat through data almost as fast as streaming a netflix movie on a new 4g equipped Ipad.
Youre wondering, "How do I get apps installed onto my ChromeBook? The system comes with access to the google app store which has a few thousand apps and growing. I downloaded Tweetdeck to see my twitter feed and feel it has a much nicer interface to follow than the standard twitter page. There is also a facebook app as well as a Skype app to communicate with. There is also a built in app called scratch pad that you can put notes on and will send them into the Google cloud under a folder called Scratch pad notes. Youtube is included as the standard video player, but other players can be used to view content if needed. There are many free apps as well as pay apps that I have not even delved into yet. I know I am going to research if there are any good IP PHone apps so I can connect to my work phone and make calls with it.
All in all I feel this is an excellent tablet replacement and can do very well for a traveling user. It does not have touch interface so if you really like that then a tablet is a better way to go. For my needs, I always need a keyboard so this is a better optoion for me. It all depends on your needs, for example David Gerwitz a blogger on ZDnet.com commented that he was able to use the Kindle Fire tablet to read electric manuals while he was trying to work on a wall switch in his house. He said his Ipad would be to large to do that with and the same would be true with this Chromebook. Its light enough but a Kindle is a 7 inch form factor and would be better suited for what David was trying to do.
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