One of the coolest things about my new job seems to be the number of toys that have gone rushing over my desk in the last few weeks.

Most folks assume that they just get “given” to us, and for some devices (such as the TyTN II and the Mirage) they are – but only for a very short time then they have to go back to the Mobile Demo team or their real owners because my excuse to play with them is over.

Most however have been paid for out of my very own pocket. Not expensed and not donated. I really must do something about that.

So… what is in the picture this month?

At the top is my UMPC. It’s a Samsung Q1U and I like it very much. It’s recently had some surgery to give it more RAM and it’s now very much more usable. I’m not a fan of the split keyboard though and to be a really useful machine it needs a better battery and a faster CPU (and a faster hard drive!)

Below that is the telephony suspects. My Shadow, then a BlackJack II, the TyTN II we used for the Silverlight demo at Advance08 and finally the Samsung Mirage (SGH-i780).

Because all of these phones apart from the Shadow have GPS I bought myself a tiny (keyring sized) Freedom GPS 200 bluetooth device (it’s going to have to share with the Q1U though!).

Last but not least is the answer to the keyboard woes of the Q1U. A Freedom Universal folding bluetooth keyboard. This device claims compatibility with both Windows/Vista devices and smartphones. Well, I had no problem what-so-ever pairing it with the Q1U and so I’m really happy with that.

The bad news is that at this point in time I am totally unable to get it working with any of the phones in the list above. First of all the driver install from the PC doesn’t work in Vista (you have to manually copy the files across and install it), the over-the-air installer doesn’t recognize any of the devices and for good measure even when I get the driver installed it wants to generate a unique unlock code for each device before it’ll let me pair… the website fell over when I tried to go it for the first device, and as you can see… I get through devices at a fair rate so locking me to one isn’t going to make me a fan.

I’ve logged a couple of support requests… when they get back to me I’ll have another look at the keyboard and report back.

Oh, and the neat little bag with “Windows Mobile” written on it… invaluable for lugging around chargers, USB cables, spare batteries, microSD cards and USB adapters and whatever else!

A while ago I got myself a Samsung Q1U Ultra-Mobile PC (UMPC) which I’ve really enjoyed using for RSS reading, basic browsing, and as a glorified remote control for my SlimServer. I’ve been lucky enough to be using the Origami Experience v2 which you can read about here which really rocks (though I must get it set up for speech so I can yell “next” at it when I’m on the elliptical!)

One problem though is that the UMPC devices are, by their very nature, a little underpowered. With an 800Mhz Intel A110 processor and only 1GB of RAM trying to do a lot of things was a bit painful.

Luckily Hugo Ortega (who I’d been lucky enough to get some advice from before buying my Q1U) had posted some very clear instructions on doubling the RAM in the Q1U to 2GB.

With a couple of hours free on Sunday I headed down to Frys and grabbed a Crucial 2GB 667Mhz 200 pin SoDIMM (less than $50 from Amazon or your local electronics store). As it turned out it took longer to get to Frys and back than it did to actually complete the installation!

The machine certainly feels a lot quicker and more stable. The HDD is spending less time thrashing which in turn I hope will help battery life. The addition of a 2GB Readyboost SD card will also help keep things smooth and fun.

The lesson I’ve learnt from this … along with last weeks flattening of my day-to-day Vaio to install a slipstreamed SP1 build and get rid of all the cruft … RAM *really* matters to Vista. Even on a low power processor it can be the difference between usable and painful for anything other than really simple tasks.

Every 6 to 12 months I like to flatten my computers and build them up from scratch. Clean start with the operating system, applications I actually use and a chance to get rid of the trialware and redundant drivers for hardware that’s been consigned to the bin.

It’s also a really good time to take some backups!

I’ve been noticing though that my day to day laptop (which I don’t want to reformat for a couple of months) has been getting a bit slow, so I wondered what I could do to fix things up.

I’ve recently updated to Vista SP1 on all my applicable machines and noticed one significant usability factor on a couple of very similar machines we have at home. The one with 2 hard disks is much more responsive than the single disk machine. I’ve got the OS, apps and data on one drive and the pagefile on the second drive (it was fairly small) – note this are physical drives, not partitions.

That got me thinking if there was anything I could do on the laptop to speed things up.

First thing I did was get rid of old files by using the Disk Cleanup Wizard which got rid of some cruft.

Now I’ve always assumed that Vista has been doing a pretty good job of keeping my drive de-fragmented but I installed a trial of DiskKeeper and was surprised to find that it reported almost 20% fragmentation.

So I ran the defragment a couple of times and that certainly helped.

In order to get the number down significantly though I did have to make sure all my applications were closed – so no files were locked open. That made me wonder about the contents of (for instance) my Outlook OST (Exchange Offline Store) and PST (Personal files) – sure enough, right clicking on them allowed me to compact those – after emptying my deletes items folders.

My next experiment was based on the fact that my processor isn’t often stressed out, but the disk light is usually on. So I decided to compress the drive (on the grounds that reducing the physical I/O at the expense of some CPU cycles might be a good thing)

Net result…. compressed disk, clean up wizard done, compact application data files and running de-fragmentation utilities… gives you not only a bit of a spring clean but a more responsive machine.

Take some backups and give it a try. You might be surprised. Of course it’s better to get a second drive and balance the physical bottlenecks but for laptop and small form factor machines there’s still a fair bit you can do to tweak.

If you're like me you think it's great UAC protects you but you hate it's (less frequent with Vista SP1) prompts?

Well the good news is that you can set it to not prompt if you're an administrator.

Microsoft’s recommendation is that User Account Control (UAC) remains enabled. There are several options within Vista that allow you to “tune” UAC to the level you're comfortable with.

There's a fairly detailed explanation on TechNet that you can read for background but the quick steps are...

• Start the Local Security Policy Editor
• Navigate to Local Policies | Security Options
• Edit "User Account Control: Behavior of the elevation prompt for administrators in Admin Approval Mode"

You have three options - in ascending order of protection and descending order of nagging:

• No prompt - The elevation occurs automatically and silently (UAC is still enabled).
• Prompt for consent (default) – An operation that requires a full administrator access token will prompt the administrator in Admin Approval Mode to select either Continue or Cancel
• Prompt for credentials – An operation that requires a full administrator access token will prompt an administrator in Admin Approval Mode to enter an administrator user name and password.

Before you change the settings read the warnings and information about each of the choices.... Vista is getting a good reputation as being the most secure version of Windows ever and a lot of that is down to the behavior of UAC so don't increase your risks without knowing what you're doing

I've noticed that when I restart Vista I sometimes get a dialogue "The data file .... was not closed properly." when I fired up Outlook again.

It was driving me slowly mad (or actually driving me to use those extra 2 minutes to grab one more coffee!) but... I've found a solution... and it's really simple.

All you have to do is make sure Outlook has an open window - ie it's not minimized - when you hit shutdown or restart.

It appears that if Outlook isn't an active window then Vista is a little aggressive in shutting down and if Outlook doesn't respond quick enough then it just gets closed.

Now obviously this doesn't solve the problem of a crash, power cut or other hard stop, but when you're in control it's easy enough to work around.

I'm going to hunt to see if I can find a way to make Vista a little less understanding about Outlooks obsessive need to tidy up ;)

It's official... Vista SP1 is now available in the wild, and trust me - you'd be mad not to!

I've been using Vista SP1 through various earlier incarnations and I've noticed improvements in performance and stability in each incremental build.

I'm running it already on both my day-to-day Vaio laptop and my UMPC. Tonight I'll kick off an update on my daughters desktop machine.

Now the waiting starts for SP2 (and Windows 7)! But for those who never install v1 of anything.... it's time to give Vista a try

For the last few weeks I've had the occasional warning from my DIY Windows Home Server that one of the drive wasn't 100% stable. It would work fine then... just stop. SMART said it was fine when I'd restart but...

Then on Sunday it died and wouldn't restart, so a quick trip to Frys for a new drive, whip off the case, stick in the new drive (replacing the cables as well just to be sure).

Powered it all up. Let it balance storage and... good as new, no files lost (though it did have to delete some backups as there wasn't enough space on the single drive to store everything) but way better than a crash and burn.

Now I might get an extra PCI SATA card and add a couple more drives...

Windows Zero Configuration is a real boon to the world of WiFi connectivity. I let WinXP and Vista take care of connecting to the right router and managing all that "stuff" for me and I've never given it a thought.

However, I've started using a different VoIP solution at home and for various reasons it's not plugged into a wired machine but living off a WiFi connected box (if I can work out the audio driver issues on the server it's going back to there, but I might end up having to wire the machine it's on at the moment)

So... what's the problem?

It was a tricky one to find... Every minute or so on a call I'd get a moment of total silence. I couldn't hear anyone, and no-one could hear me. Weird huh? That's what I thought.

So I started investigating. Lots of diligent diagnostics and pleas to the internet search gods and eventually I got a pointer in the right direction.... every 60 seconds Windows ZeroConf checks the health of the connection... sadly that has an impact on the communications to the router:

Reply from 192.168.10.1: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.10.1: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.10.1: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.10.1: bytes=32 time=944ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.10.1: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.10.1: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.10.1: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=64

So what's the answer?

Well... in WinXP you need to kill the ZeroConf service (hit "Start", then "run" and type "Services.msc" and hit enter. Search for "Windows Zero Configuration...." and hit the "stop service" button) - or if you have a driver/management program for your WiFi card use that instead.

In Vista it's a little tricker

• Open a command prompt using run as administrator.
• Make sure the WLAN service must be running first. If it isn't type net start wlansvc.
• Type in netsh wlan set autoconfig enabled=no interface="name of your wireless network here" (with the quotes)
• If you need to see the name of your wireless network first, type in netsh wlan show settings

or (and if you have a group policy set that won't let you run that command) you can try this WLANOptimizer utility.

However there is a downside of turning off ZeroConf.... in my case when the machine that's running as the VoIP host loses the WiFi connection for any reason you have to restart the service, let it reestablish the connection and then shut it down again!

Hopefully, as this impacts both VoIP users and gamers (who need good ping times) we'll see a hotfix for Vista or someone will write a cool utility that softphones can trigger when in a call to stop ZeroConf doing it's check (perhaps extend the refresh interval to an hour from start of call or only if the connection drops or some other rule)

Oh, the VoIP solution I'm using is MagicJack. It's early days yet, but the quality blows Skype out of the water. If you're thinking about getting one check out the unofficial forum for some really good advice.

A couple of months ago I finally took the plunge and got a new toy - a Samsung Q1 Ultra UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC) running Windows Vista.

I'd been looking for a better solution for a lightweight device that was easy to take on the road with me but that would do a better job of email than my phone, and could also connect to the corporate network and allow me to demonstrate Silverlight apps and other things that I often need to do when I'm out of the office.

As a bonus I wanted something that I could use to read ebooks and catch up on RSS feeds as well as email, but I didn't want to have to carry a whole slew of devices.

The tipping point that got me to go and get one wasn't a huge frustration with the current tools I had available but rather a sneak preview of the next generation of the Origami Experience that was announced yesterday at CES.

While the original was pretty good the integrated RSS reader in the new version was enough to push me over the edge. The added bonus of the Picture Password app helped clinch the deal as I'm not convinced fingerprints are the way to go and hated the thought of entering my password on the Q1U's dinky little keyboard.

While I love the Q1U I think it's a second generation device of a platform that's going to need to get to third or maybe fourth to be really fantastic.

The complaints aren't big things, it's mostly down to horsepower and stamina.

My machine is configured with Vista and, as everyone knows, it does take more resources to run smoothly. The fairly low spec CPU does an okay job of basic apps but in conjunction with only 1GB of RAM and a 4800rpm HDD it's quite easy to get it thrashing. I'm wondering if I dare brave opening the case up and trying to fit extra RAM and/or upgrade to a SSD... maybe one day!

Even with the underpowered processor the battery life isn't stellar. I suspect a lot of that might be (ironically) down to the disk thrashing that goes on but I'm starting to think I need a bigger battery.

My other gripe is the keyboard. Although it seems like a great idea the keys are actually harder to use than on my Wizard - I'd much prefer a slide-out keyboard or similar (in fact I think I'll end up getting a fold-up bluetooth keyboard... which will drain the battery as well!).

That does lead me on the the hidden peril of UMPCs.... on their own they are small and lightweight, but throw the power brick, and a spare keyboard and maybe a mouse and a USB hub and whatever else into the bag as well and it does take up a fair about of packing room!

That said, the Origami Experience is pretty fantastic and inking in Vista opens up a whole new dimension in ways to get things done.

Hopefully with the interest that Nokia, Intel and Cononical (Moblin project), and even apparently Apple are showing in this space we're going to see rapid steps to the next generation of devices.

For now if you're thinking about a UMPC I recommend checking out sites like jkOnTheRun, UberTablet or UMPC Buzz as well as the Origami Project site.

In an interesting twist on the commonly held view that OSX is much more secure ZDNet has actually done some testing and dispelled a lot of the rumors and replaced them with some cold hard facts.

X Extremely critical
H Highly critical
M Moderately critical
L Less critical

I guess it goes to show that a lot of the superiority OSX was able to claim in the past came from it's very low marketshare making it a less popular target for exploits, but as that share and awareness has grown it's become a juicier target. Like Flash (which has also been exposed recently as a cause for concern) I hope Apple step up to the plate and make a difference early in 2008.

It's interesting to see how the testing also confirms that Microsoft have done a good job in improving the security of Vista over WinXP - hopefully Service Pack 1 will continue this trend in the right direction.

It's the sort of article that ThinkSecret would have had as front-page news... if Apple had not litigated them to the wall.