- Imote2 .Builder Kit makes creating wireless sensor networks a snap
- BUGbase: A Small Change in Plans
- Toys for Techies: BUG
- Defects Our Specialty
- Beowulf Pre-viz used NVidia boards
- Mandriva Flash 2008 First Look
- Analysis: Why I'll Miss CompUSA
- FiOS Outage
- VIA Eden ULV 500 MHz: x86 compatible, 1 watt
- Burgled
April 25, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Imote2 .Builder Kit makes creating wireless sensor networks a snap
I spent several hours today exploring the Crossbow Imote2 .Builder Kit, a "complete development environment for high performance wireless sensor networking (WSN) applications leveraging the Microsoft .NET Framework," as the company describes it.
(I'd never say "leveraging" and "Microsoft" in the same sentence myself if I could avoid it, because of Microsoft's rather checkered legal history of "leveraging" its near-monopoly -- but oops, I did it again. Back to Crossbow.)
The Imote2 .Builder Kit sells for $990 in the U.S. in small quantities. It includes three Imote2 processor boards, two Imote2 sensor boards, two battery boards, batteries, a USB cable, and software on CD-ROM. Obviously, individual boards are cheaper, especially in quantity.
Why so many boards? The processor boards also have radios, and can talk to each other using the 802.15.4 protocol. The Imote2 has an XScale CPU @ [13–416] MHz and a DSP, 256kB SRAM, 32 MB of SDRAM and 32 MB of FLASH, and baker's dozen of I/O ports of various stripes in addition to the radio and antenna. It has two pairs of connectors for sensor boards, a set for a "basic sensor board" on one side and an "advanced sensor board" on the other side. The flash image includes the .NET Micro Framework.
The sensor boards that come with the kit are of the basic variety, but I guess that refers to the connector they use: they actually have a 3d Accelerometer, an advanced temp/humidity sensor, a light sensor and 4 channel A/D.
The Imote2 software is an add-on to Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 (yes, 2005, not 2008) and .NET Micro Framework 2.0 (yes, 2.0, not 2.5). A 90-day trial version of Visual Studio 2005 Professional is provided with the kit.
I found the programming model for the Imote2 easy to understand, as I was already fluent in C# and familiar with Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Micro Framework. I think I could build wireless sensor network applications with this kit very quickly: in days to weeks, depending on the complexity of the application.
The processors seem plenty fast. Debugging is trivially easy. The only trouble I had with the kit was a minor but annoying deployment issue: sometimes a board would stop taking downloads, and code deployment from Visual Studio would fail. I was always able to recover from this by stopping all the software on the PC that talked to the board, disconnecting the board from the USB bus, reconnecting and resetting the board, and restarting the software.
According to the company, this is most likely a problem with the Microsoft USBSPOT driver. Once I had a board programmed, it would be fine.
The picture at the top of this article is the hardware configuration for the most advanced demo in the kit, a star network in which two battery-powered CPU/sensor stacks transmit accelerometer data, one CPU board receives the signals and sends them over the USB cable, and the PC plots the live output, as shown at left.
Overall, this is a very impressive kit. There's more information at the Crossbow site.
Posted by Martin Heller on April 25, 2008 12:10 PM
January 19, 2008 | Comments: (0)
BUGbase: A Small Change in Plans
The BUG system, which I discussed last Tuesday, will go on sale Monday at the BUG Labs store. It won't be exactly what was previously announced, however.
In an email, a company spokesman explained the change of plans:
This (the picture at the top left) is the BUGbase "Hiro P" model. It's what the first batch of BUGbase units will look like, and is much like the BUGbase we've been promoting, only with a minor aesthetic change to the front panel and no onboard 802.11 wi-fi.
Why no wi-fi? The issue extends from developing a set of open source wi-fi drivers, and we had to make a decision on our first production run - either ship early with no wi-fi, or delay the ship date until the driver issue was resolved.
However, to compensate the Hiro P customers, we will be offering them a BUGwifi module *at cost*, and we will also be giving them a *free* BUGvonhippel module. Additionally, we will be extending the early adopter program to the new batch of wireless-enabled BUGbases.
More about this can be read in the announcement we just issued on BUGblogger: http://www.bugblogger.com/2008/01/what-about-wifi.html
The wi-fi driver issue sounds similar to the one I encountered when I reviewed the Mandriva Flash 2008 in December. To get wi-fi working on that system, I had to download a small firmware file directly from Broadcom.
Posted by Martin Heller on January 19, 2008 08:11 AM
January 15, 2008 | Comments: (0)
From http://www.buglabs.net/products:
BUG is a collection of easy-to-use electronic modules that snap together to build any gadget you can imagine. Each BUGmodule represents a specific gadget function (ex: a camera, a keyboard, a video output, etc). You decide which functions to include and BUG takes care of the rest letting you try out different combinations quickly and easily. With BUG and the integrated programming environment/web community (BUGnet), anyone can build, program and share innovative devices and applications. We don't define the final products - you do.
The BUGbase (an ARM CPU and lots of interfaces) and four BUGmodules (GPS; Digital Camera/Videocam; Touch-sensitive, Color LCD Screen; and Accelerometer, Motion Sensor) will be available later this quarter. Four more BUGmodules are promised for Q2, but as one of them is a teleporter I would take that with grain of salt.
The software is Open Source and has a Java-based SDK:
BUG is built entirely with open source software. BMI, the BUG Module Interface, attaches devices to the BUG. Device-based services and applications are dynamically available based on which modules are connected to the BUG. Higher up the stack is Java, which hosts a service-oriented component runtime called OSGi. Java and OSGi make creating new BUG applications simple and intuitive, as BUG applications are essentially one or more bundles. In addition, each BUGmodule launches an OSGi bundle which in turn creates services for other components to consume. BUG applications are created using the BUG SDK (internally named Dragonfly), and are shared with other developers and users through BUGnet, our online community.
When I contacted BUG Labs about review units, they pointed me at "Dragonfly, the Eclipse-based BUG SDK, which includes a virtual BUG emulator."
The "getting started" guide is at http://bugcommunity.com/wiki.
Posted by Martin Heller on January 15, 2008 06:34 AM
December 27, 2007 | Comments: (0)
My parents had an auto parts store in Philadelphia for something like 40 years. Their motto was "Defects Our Specialty."
Funny, right? Actually, it was a good slogan, since there was a high incidence of defective replacement auto parts, and my Dad in particular knew how to get the warehouses and manufacturers to honor their warranties and exchange the defective parts.
Fast forward to 2007. My 14-year-old daughter (#3) has been hinting, whining, and nagging about wanting a digital camera for years, almost as persistently as she has been hinting, whining, and nagging about wanting a cell phone. When the Kodak EasyShare model at left went on sale at Quill for $89 just before Thanksgiving, I ordered one, and a 2 GB SD card to go with it.
It never occurred to me that the camera might be defective, in this day and age. I left it sealed in its box, smuggled it into the house when my daughter was at school, and got my wife to wrap and hide it.
We open presents on Christmas Eve, in the German tradition. (My wife is German-born, and Catholic.) When daughter #3 opened her camera, she was visibly excited, and went tearing around taking pictures.
Unfortunately, the pictures all came out dark and red. Not once did we see the flash go off, even when the camera was set to flash always.
Quill generally accepts returns within 90 days, so I went to Quill.com and requested a return and exchange for the same item because of the defect. On Boxing Day, I got the following email:
Thank you for writing Quill.com.
We apologize, since the camera mentioned in your email is over our 30 day return policy, we are unable to authorize your return.
The fine print on the back of the packing slip confirmed that Quill's return policy for electronics is 30 days. I gave daughter #3 the number for Kodak service, and she entered the nightmare world of voice response menus, Muzak on hold, and technicians with thick Bangalore accents. With the help of her older sisters, she eventually got a return authorization from Kodak, although she would have to pay shipping both ways, which would come out to about a third of the cost of the camera.
I was not happy. I fired off a return email to Quill:
It's not very friendly of Quill to enforce the 30-day return rule for a gift bought in a pre-Thanksgiving sale, kept sealed, and opened on Christmas.
Later that evening, I got another reply:
Martin, I have issued a pickup request with UPS for your defective camera as this item was purchased on November 19th which is only a few days over our 30 day return policy....
Customer Service lives. I'm not quite sure about Quality Control, however.
Posted by Martin Heller on December 27, 2007 08:13 AM
December 19, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Beowulf Pre-viz used NVidia boards
I mentioned last month that I was interested in (and somewhat skeptical of) the Vicon motion capture technology behind the new movie of Beowulf. In fact, I haven't seen Beowulf yet myself: my wife and I decided that my twelve-year-old son wasn't ready to see it, and I haven't yet had the opportunity to go see it in adult company, given the concert for which I was preparing. I'll have to check and see whether Beowulf will still be playing in IMAX 3D this weekend.
I've recently heard from NVidia that Sony Pictures Imageworks used NVidia's professional Quadro boards to boost the creative pipeline for Beowulf. I can remember hearing a similar story from Silicon Graphics about 10 years ago: at the time, they had lowered the cost of a graphical workstation for CGI from hundreds of thousands of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars.
That number is down by another order of magnitude, to thousands of dollars. The NVidia Quadro boards that Sony used for pre-visualization, which is the step where you figure out the composition of each scene before you do the final rendering, sell for a mere $599 and up.
What's next? Kids, be the first one on your block to create your own photo-realistic animation! (Just kidding: it's hard work.)
I also asked about the software that Sony used. "The final images were rendered with RenderMan. Shot lighting and compositing was done with Imageworks proprietary software called Katana for lighting and Bonsai for Compositing. Animation working renders were done with RenderMan and Maya, and layout images were done in MotionBuilder in real time and Maya pending the purpose."
Posted by Martin Heller on December 19, 2007 01:21 PM
December 16, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Mandriva Flash 2008 First Look
A bootable 4 GB Flash Drive containing a portable version of Mandriva Linux 2008 is now available from Mandriva for 79 EUR ($89) and from Amazon for $94. The general idea is that you can take this little memory stick with you and be able to run Linux from it, do Internet and Office tasks with Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice, and save your files to the free space on the drive. The Mandriva system can access Windows volumes, and the free space on the flash drive can be read from Windows.
I tried this device out on the two computers I have at home, a fairly new Compaq Presario V6000 laptop, and a 5-year-old Compaq Evo desktop. After some configuration issues, it worked fairly well on the new laptop. It was unusable on the old desktop, which barely met the minimum hardware requirements, although it's possible that with some tweaking it might be made to work better.
The first hurdle to using Mandriva Flash on any machine is getting the computer to boot from the flash drive. On my laptop, pressing Esc at boot time let me change the boot order for the current boot process. On the Evo desktop, changing the boot order didn't work, but the Mandriva Flash software was able to write a boot menu onto the hard drive.
The next hurdle on the laptop was getting the Broadcom wireless network adapter turned on. It took quite a bit of digging, but I eventually found the magic formula on the Mandriva Wiki: I had to download a small firmware file to the flash drive from Windows, reboot, and then reconfigure the network driver in Linux.
Both the Metisse and Compiz Fusion 3D desktops worked well on the laptop, but were disabled on the old desktop. I'm not sure why people really want 3D desktops, however: it's just eye-candy.
I found Perl, Ruby, Python and Java on the drive, along with Vi, but no gcc, gdb, or emacs. It currently has no way to run Windows software. As configured, it's a reasonable portable desktop system for casual Linux users, which might be more convenient than carrying around a Linux Live CD and a separate flash drive.
Posted by Martin Heller on December 16, 2007 08:14 PM
December 12, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Analysis: Why I'll Miss CompUSA
CompUSA will be closing its doors after the holiday season. Ephraim thinks that this is a sign of the times. Many commentators have described the chain's evolving financial troubles, and its often inscrutable management moves. For example, when they laid off their senior sales staff as a cost-cutting measure, more than one commentator pointed out how bone-headed it was to give up their differentiation from the big-box stores.
I'll actually miss my local CompUSA. They usually had a better selection of equipment that I wanted to try than my local Best Buy or Circuit City, or my local mom-and-pop computer shops, although clearly not as good a selection as I could find online. They often had decent deals, although recently my local Staples could often match them. And they sometimes offered knowledgeable sales and service, which is more than I can say for my local Best Buy, although my local mom-and-pop computer shops have been much more consistent about knowing what they're doing.
One of the items I bought at CompUSA more than anywhere else was laptops. It's not easy to buy a laptop online, because the feel of the unit matters so much. You can't really tell from an advertisement whether the screen of a laptop is going to be readable, or whether the keyboard will feel right under your fingers, or whether the laptop will make your shoulder hurt when you carry it around.
Sic transit gloria mundi. Maybe my local store will continue under new ownership...
Posted by Martin Heller on December 12, 2007 06:52 AM
November 23, 2007 | Comments: (0)
You may have noticed that I didn't write about the history of Thanksgiving yesterday. I meant to; I just couldn't.
About 5 PM Wednesday as I was frantically trying to finish up a few things at work, my son called from home that he'd gotten a "network cable is unplugged" message while browsing the Internet from the shared Windows XP Home computer in our second-floor hallway. That computer is connected to an ActionTec router by a Cat5 Ethernet cable; the router gets its connectivity from Verizon FiOS and also serves as a Wireless Access Point for all the laptops in the house.
Of course, being 12, he had already tried to "reconnect the cables." He didn't know what cables were involved, so he did random things to the power supplies and power strips. He also wanted me to fix the problem over the phone. Right.
When I got home, I took one look at the router lights and decided that the router had probably fried. I wasn't 100% sure, so I went through the drill: I unplugged the router, cleaned up the way the plugs went into the power strip so that the ActionTec power supply plug couldn't move the strip's power switch to the off position, swept up the dust bunnies, unplugged and reconnected all the Cat5 cables, reconnected the power, and reset the router.
None of that helped, so I called FiOS support after dinner. I got a voice-response system that couldn't really accept much of the information I had, but it eventually got to the point of trying to ping the router and seeing no response. At that point, it put the ticket into a service queue for a live person to deal with.
I got a call from Verizon service as I was sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday evening with my extended family. I decided to take the call despite the inconvenient time. The service agent walked me through several of the things I had already tried, and decided to drop-ship me a new router. I then returned to the dinner table.
A few hours later, as we were working on pie, the agent called back: his system wouldn't accept the drop-ship order. I went back upstairs, and tried bypassing the router under his direction; the computer saw a connection, but couldn't acquire a valid IP address. A laptop exhibited the same behavior. He mused about the possibility of a bad network port at their end and/or bad network cards in my computers in addition to a bad router, and decided to schedule a service visit; the earliest slot he had open was Saturday morning.
This morning, Verizon called and said that they had a free tech: would we be home all day? We arranged it so that somebody would be; the tech arrived a bit after 11. It didn't take him long to swap out the router for a new one, and declare the old one "completely fried." "It happens a lot," he said. All was well once I edited the new router's wireless access settings to use WPA and my normal SSID and pass phrase.
I asked the tech why I couldn't get an IP address when bypassing the old router the day before. "I dunno," he said. "It works now."
Posted by Martin Heller on November 23, 2007 11:44 AM
October 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)
VIA Eden ULV 500 MHz: x86 compatible, 1 watt
I had a long talk on the phone last week with Johnny Wang, a Product Marketing Manager at VIA Technologies. (Yes, this was yet another delayed meeting that I was originally supposed to take at ESC.) The subject was mainly why VIA's line of low-power x86-architecture CPUs are interesting for embedded applications.
According to Wang, while RISC processors have owned the low-power embedded systems market for quite a while, VIA has developed x86-compatible processors that are competitive. We're talking about devices like set-top boxes, small kiosks, and thin clients; going beyond embedded systems, these are also good for silent desktops.
VIA has developed x86-compatible processors and chip sets and small form factor boards that have very low power consumption (e.g. 1 W peak TDP and 100mW idle for the 500 MHz Eden ULV). There are RISC processors with lower power consumption, but when you build them into systems and factor in the north bridge, south bridge, and memory, the Eden processor can be the basis of a lower-power device than you can build with today's RISC processors. VIA has combined the north and south bridge onto one chip; the Eden ULV line supports 1.8V DDR2 RAM, where most RISC processors need higher power DDR RAM.
From a software developer's point of view, there's a lot of benefit to developing for an x86-compatible processor, since you don't have to stretch much to find compilers and tools, and emulation basically becomes a non-issue. From a thermal packaging point of view, if you have a system that dissipates less than a few watts of heat, then you can get away with passive cooling and not worry about fans, which also gives you a quieter system. And of course from a "green" point of view it always makes sense to keep the power consumption and heat dissipation down.
There's more information at http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/processors/eden_ulv/.
Posted by Martin Heller on October 26, 2007 02:51 PM
September 30, 2007 | Comments: (0)
My second daughter's off-campus apartment in Rochester was burgled during the day last week, at a time when she and her roommates were all at school. The burglar or burglars broke a window and stole their laptops and other visible electronics. Their animals weren't harmed.
Of course, my daughter hadn't gotten around to getting renter's insurance: she was too busy at school. I have a call in to my own insurance agent, to see if my homeowner's insurance will cover some of the loss. I don't have much hope: even if they do cover it, they'll probably depreciate the value of what was stolen from my daughter to something below the claim deductible.
Meanwhile, my daughter had papers and presentations due, and needed another laptop pronto. I picked one possibility out of a CompUSA sale flyer for her, a Compaq Presario, but it wasn't exactly what she wanted, so once she and her roommates got things under control at the apartment she went shopping for a laptop, as she really couldn't wait for shipment.
The laptops on offer at Circuit City and Best Buy didn't impress her; she wound up at a CompUSA near campus. She eventually decided on a Toshiba Satellite U205-S5058, an ultra-portable full-featured notebook that comes with Windows Vista Business installed. At my insistence, she also bought a security cable that fits into the lock slot on her new notebook. There's no sense putting a new horse in the barn after the old one bolts unless you're going to start closing the barn doors.
I haven't asked what her backup situation was when the laptop was stolen, because I don't want to make things worse. I've been nagging her for years to make regular backups; she may well have decided I was right last year when her old laptop started to have intermittent problems booting. In any case, what's gone is most likely gone.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
Posted by Martin Heller on September 30, 2007 10:58 AM
September 10, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Stupid Verizon Cellphone Tricks
Ed Foster mentions a number of frustrating problems with Verizon Wireless (VZW) in his August 20th blog entry. I have to agree with Ed and his readers about the clumsiness of and lack of coordination between VZW's sales and support organizations, but I have a cure for one small complaint.
As I mentioned July 5th (No iSoup for You), I gave up on getting an iPhone after it was announced for a variety of reasons, and upgraded my VZW phone to an LG-VX8300. This isn't the most attractive phone in the world, but it does what I want and works where I am.
I bought a USB cable and ear buds for the phone from VZW, and I bought a 2 GB microSD card for the phone from an Internet site that had them on sale for $21. The USB cable lets you connect the phone to your computer, but only gives you access to the music directory for purposes of downloading music to the phone from Windows Media Player or VCAST Music Manager.
You don't, however, need to spend 25 cents a picture to transfer your photographs, no matter what VZW tech support says. It's just that the USB cable is no help.
If you want access to the picture, video, and sound directories, the solution is simple. Power down your phone and remove the microSD card. Put the microSD card into its SD adapter sleeve, and put that into your computer. Then, assuming that you use Windows and want your pictures, either use the photo manager or Windows Explorer to copy or move your photos from the memory card onto your PC. You can also move video, music, and sounds around, but be prepared for issues if you try to copy DRM-protected music to your phone via the memory card.
Posted by Martin Heller on September 10, 2007 02:33 PM
August 30, 2007 | Comments: (0)
It says here that AMD has released the the SSE5 specification. These instructions will appear in future x86 processors based on AMD's 64-bit Bulldozer core.
Here's the AMD overview:
With the introduction of SSE5, many new 128-bit instructions have been added to the existing instruction set detailed in the AMD64 Architecture Programmer's Manuals. Included are 46 base instructions that expand to 170 total instructions, enabling improved performance and reduced loads.
New instructions include:
Fused multiply accumulate (FMACxx) instructions
Integer multiply accumulate (IMAC, IMADC) instructions
Permutation and conditional move instructions
Vector compare and test instructions
Precision control, rounding, and conversion instructions
Download the full document to learn about new three-operand instructions, a new 128-bit media instruction format, and more.
Please send feedback to: SSE5.feedback@amd.com.
What's unusual about this instruction set is that AMD has published it on their own. More often, AMD says "Me, too" to new Intel instruction sets.
The question is whether you should care about this as a software developer. If you maintain operating systems, drivers, libraries, or compilers that support AMD64 processors, you really should care about this, and start thinking about how you'll integrate this instruction set into your products. If you develop applications in a high-level language, you probably will never want to bother to learn this instruction set.
On the other hand, there's an opportunity here for people who write specific kinds of image- and sound-processing applications to speed up their code. Is is time for more people to get their hands dirty with assembly language?
Does your application use SIMD effectively? Would it be faster and better if it did? Would it help the computers that run it do more, stay cooler, and use less energy if it did?
By the way, the SSE4 specification from Intel is here. SSE4 will be available in future processors based on the Penryn and Nehalem cores, and SSE4.1 will be available on future processors based Nehalem cores.
Posted by Martin Heller on August 30, 2007 08:24 AM
June 28, 2007 | Comments: (0)
.NET Micro Framework: Tahoe Development Kit
Last week I told you about a conversation I had with Colin Miller, the manager of the Microsoft SPOT group, about the .NET Micro Framework. Since then, I have installed the .NET Micro Framework SDK, along with the EmbeddedFusion Tahoe Development Kit. That goes along with an EmbeddedFusion Tahoe board that Microsoft's PR firm sent me; they also sent an accelerometer daughter board, a "ball in maze" sample application, and a lab manual for the sample. The accelerometer and sample application are not part of the standard Tahoe kit.
The Tahoe board uses a Meridian CPU module, which combines a 32-bit Freescale i.MXS (ARM920T core) processor running at 100 MHz, RAM, FLASH, an LCD display, some buttons, and the Microsoft .NET Micro Framework. As you can see from the illustrations, the LCD display and the buttons are on top of the board, and the Meridian CPU module is on the bottom. The Meridian CPU supports many low power peripheral devices via the serial, i2 C, and SPI interfaces. It isn't obvious from the illustration, but for development the Tahoe board draws power from a miniUSB connection at the top left.
Compared to the 8-bit, 12 MHz, Intel 8051-based embedded controllers that I grew up on, the 32-bit, 100 MHz ARM 9 is a speed demon. By the time you factor in the overhead of the interpreted .NET Micro Framework runtime, however, the performance doesn't feel all that spectacular. Maybe I've been spoiled by 3,200 MHz desktop CPUs with multiple cores.
Anyway, I'm finding playing with the .NET Micro Framework SDK and the Tahoe SDK luxurious fun, in my geeky, retro way. I remember writing assembly code to flip I/O bits on wire-wrapped breadboards for embedded controllers 20-odd years ago, and here I am writing C# code to flip I/O bits on a packaged printed circuit breadboard. The more things change...
Posted by Martin Heller on June 28, 2007 02:33 PM
June 11, 2007 | Comments: (0)
You may recall that I wrote about Sun's Project Blackbox as "crackpot technology." Today I received a follow-up email from Mark Richardson at Sun:
Martin,
I thought you might find this YouTube video interesting:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HNGM-rje7UFor the past few weeks, Sun and the University of San Diego (UCSD) have been conducting earthquake testing of Project Blackbox. The tests have been done on UCSD’s Seismic Response Modification Device, better known as the "shake table."
The testing is part of Sun’s quality assurance, an important step before Project Blackbox becomes generally available later this year. Since Project Blackbox is a modular datacenter its important that it be able to withstand movement.
The link above shows Project Blackbox surviving a Northridge-equivalent earthquake with only minor damage. The Northridge quake occurred on at 4:30 a.m. on January 17, 1994. It was a 6.7 magnitude. The test was the culmination of weeks of more subtle shock testing. With the SRMD we've observed Project Blackbox as it is subjected to less severe, but more normal shock such as might be incurred during transport from Sun's assembly facility to a customer's site. Things such as crane lifts, truck, rail, ship, or air transport. Observing Project Blackbox in those situations, and being able to adapt the testing in real-time, has allowed Sun to collect a tremendous amount of data that will help us
to refine the product and make it even better.
Posted by Martin Heller on June 11, 2007 01:00 PM
April 11, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Shopping for a Laptop: Best Buy 0, CompUSA 1
I took my oldest daughter shopping for a new laptop last Thursday, as her old Compaq laptop is on its last legs. She's a married graduate student who often commutes to school and work on the T (Boston's subway system), so she wanted something that would be light and fit into her satchel. She uses her computers for email, Web browsing, and storing her music library, as well as to write papers, prepare presentations, design Web surveys, and to analyze big data sets with SPSS. Clearly, she needed plenty of RAM and disk space. She doesn't care much about using her laptop for gaming or entertainment: my son-in-law has the games installed on his laptop, and they have a DVD player and a TiVo box connected to their TV. She had a budget of $1,000.
We decided to start at Best Buy, since they've been advertising heavily in the local papers. I picked out half a dozen interesting models for her, after eliminating the junky units that could barely run Windows Vista Home Basic and the units that were out of her price range, and she narrowed them down to two or three candidates. I felt that she should test the models out herself before she bought one, but the laptops were all locked down and running demo software, so we went looking for sales help.
The sales help at Best Buy couldn't be bothered to talk to us, so after a while we walked out. CompUSA was just across the parking lot, so we went there, even though there has recently been speculation in the press that they're having trouble competing with the big box stores.
We found a much larger selection of laptops at CompUSA than we'd seen at Best Buy. We also found plenty of sales help in the computer department, who waited until we were ready to talk to them, and then helped us without pushing too hard.
There was also a Sony salesman in the store, who explained the Vaio product line and showed us how Sony laptops are better constructed than HP, Toshiba, and Acer laptops. He was fairly convincing. However, the model he recommended to my daughter not only was out of her price range, it wasn't yet in stock at that CompUSA store, and she wanted to go home with a new laptop rather than order one and wait. I was amused that he broke the first rule of technology sales: "Never sell tomorrow's product."
My daughter wasn't interested in looking at a Mac, even after I explained about Boot Camp and Parallels. She wasn't especially impressed with the Acer or Toshiba laptops, and started leaning towards HP when I explained that HP and Compaq had merged.
Ultimately, she went home with a 5.4 pound laptop made by HP that has a reasonably high-end AMD dual-core mobile processor, 2 GB of RAM, 160 GB of disk space, and a 14.1" 1280x800 screen, running Windows Vista Business. She also picked up a 4 GB thumb drive, which I'm hoping will be fast enough to use for ReadyBoost; if not, she and her husband will still be able to use it to carry big files back and forth to work. After rebates, she pretty much hit her budget. I'm pretty sure it'll meet her needs for at least the next three years.
I really hope that CompUSA can stay afloat. I do a lot of my computer buying online or at small local white-box shops, but for someone like my daughter CompUSA offers just about the right selection and a palatable sales experience.
Posted by Martin Heller on April 11, 2007 06:00 AM
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