Adventures in home working

Out of the box I had a few issues with my Thinkpad X60T running Vista:

1. After a morning working by the beach the wireless network was often disabled when I plugged in at home,  I needed to do a “Diagnose and repair” to re-enable it
2. After a not so useful windows update I found that my display was often switched off when I resumed from sleep,  I had to cycle through sleep again to get it back
3. Active rotate has never worked reliably and now doesn’t work at all

The first two of these are now solved - or at least I have a workaround

1. For wireless, go into the advanced power settings and configure it so that the wireless adapter isn’t powered down.  What seems to have been happening is that if available battery power dipped below some value the wireless adapter was disabled.  Now if I want to save power I use the mechanical switch to disable wireless, but I hardly ever need to
2. For blank screen, I found out that provided I suspend BEFORE I close the lid, when I resume the screen is always on.  Slightly annoying but much better than before.
3. Fix to get Active Rotate working reliably anyone??

I’m always loosing my Blackberry, but fortunately I always manage to find it, normally by ringing it up.  But I always worry that I will leave it on silent or it will be too far away to find by ear.  Anyway there’s a solution it’s called berry locator, check it out: http://www.mobireport.com/apps/bl/ 

definitely seems to be worth $4.95.  You can download the trial here

http://mobireport.com/bl/demo.jad

I tried it and it works great.

While I was at my in-laws this weekend I didn’t have broadband so I installed OnSpeed to improve performance of my GPRS connection.  I have been pretty impressed, here are the main advantages:

1. For me OnSpeed seems to compress data by an average of 3-4 times, of course OnSpeed claims more!
2. This means on my capped Orange GPRS/3G data connection I can now stay online all the time that I am out of the house and browse quite a bit and not really worry about hitting my cap
3. It also means that browsing is significantly faster
4. It seems to have a much better estimate of GPRS data usage than my 3G Watcher program
5. It’s transparent in use

What’s the catch:

1. It costs £24.99/year which I think is a good deal when you consider how much GPRS per MB data costs are
2. Images are compressed, the quality is slightly reduced, but its not been an issue for me so far
3. You can block adverts if you want more compression, which I personally think is a good thing, although the Maxthon ad blocker is better
4. It seems to slow browsing down slightly when I’m on my fast ADSL connection,  you can disable it, but its not significant enough for me to bother disabling it