Over the last few years, “slim” has been “in.” Laptops, following in the steps of products like the Macbook Air, have tried to become as light and thin as possible. Netbooks, those $300 little jobbies everyone seems to want to own, are also driving this trend. One of the ways it is being accomplished is by removing components some people find indispensable, and others just don’t use: the CD/DVD drive, or “optical” unit. You can trim a lot of weight, and thickness, from a laptop just by removing those components.

PCs have had optical drives of some type installed since the last floppies went out of vogue. In the late 1990s. Manufacturers ramped up to optical storage since software vendors were shipping whole product sets on CD, and later on DVD, as “all on one disK” distributions. No more stacks of 50 Microsoft Office floppies…just one CD. Later it became “just one DVD” as software outpaced 600MB CD capacity, but the component sizes were the same and compatible with one another. Now, however, these are vanishing from cases and leaving us with few easy options when we want to watch a DVD or (heaven help me) install software from CD.

One of the biggest lessons from the craze for “netbooks” — inexpensive little laptops designed mainly for browsing the Web — is “that people were so excited about the small, easy-to-carry size that they didn’t miss having a CD or DVD drive. USB is an obvious choice. With a single port, the user can connect a single CD or DVD drive to their laptop at will, thus re-establishing the balance between input & output device.”

But let’s say you’re seriously into watching DVDs or listening to CDs. The obvious solution is that you should keep your existing unit. Folks like you “might want to think twice if you’re hooked on transferring CDs into MP3s — or if you spend a lot of time watching DVDs on airplanes and don’t want to squint at your iPod.” I’ll admit guilt to the latter, having watched whole movies on flights from Boston to London. But I carry my laptop for both business and writing, and am used to having it strapped across my back on a regular basis.

Maybe on future models the paradigm will involve a big memory stick sized to fit a whole movie. That would be the death knell for the laptop-based optical drive. And it’ll happen, too.

Since digital photography has almost totally taken over the market, many people are probably wondering what to do with the thousands of “analog” negatives and slides they accumulated during the pre-digital age. I know I have boxes of the things, since I worked as a “semi-pro” photographer for several years. Many haven’t been examined in years, but I’d like to put some of them online. The prints are missing, so I can’t scan them. What to do?

Happily, there’s a relatively inexpensive solution. Nikon, Plustek, and other companies make “negative and slide scanners” that turn those old bits of film into shiny new JPEG or other files in relatively short order. If you’re scanning negatives, software can translate them into “positive” images just as if you’d made a print under an enlarger.

Prices for these units vary widely, based on resolution and capacity. An 1800 dpi unit from Pacific Image weighs in at $120 from BH Photo Video, while a 4000 dpi Nikon Coolscan multi-format unit (that can handle 35mm, medium format, and probably 110 and 120 sizes as well) will set you back a cool $2000. There are also automated units that will process whole strips of negatives in one go, which eliminates the need to sit around scanning individual images.

Many units also include software that will help iron out analog-era problems like scratched film or exposure issues. Back in the day, we took care of problems like these in the darkroom using fun tricks like “dodging and burning” or even hand-retouching of negatives. Now, software does it all.

Remember, though: you’re moving physical media to online storage, so you need to guard those scanned copies by making backups and maintaining them. If you’re out of luck if you throw out all those negatives and also lose the image files due to a disk crash or other catastrophe.

My plan is to scan in everything I think is useful, and maintain those negatives in protected storage along with a copy of the files. I can always re-scan really important ones if the technology improves over time or (as I hope) analog photography makes a comeback. In the meantime, I’ll be able to inflict old vacation photos and some of my student art projects on an even wider audience than ever before.

So what are you waiting for?

I recall a time, some years back, when I had to attend a week-long conference in a city not known for its night life. To prepare for this experience, I wandered into a software store and picked out a game that looked interesting. I figured I’d haul my department’s sole laptop (remember those days?) along and do some serious gaming.

Then I found out the laptop’s video card wasn’t even SVGA. The game wouldn’t even install.

Happily, those days are gone. Today’s laptops come with pretty significant graphics capability and are often decent gaming machines. But I have to admit I was surprised to see that Sager has come out with a “gaming laptop” that’s specifically built with components to make games run well.

Now, there are already gaming “laptops” on the market. Alienware, Gateway, and a few other companies sell them. But generally they weigh in at 9lbs or so, which (in my opinion) is just way too heavy to lug around. 17″ screens are nice, but so is not having a sore back or shoulder. The Sager, by comparison, is only 7.1lbs. That’s no worse than my Lenovo T61p.

The nice thing is that the Sager has a very good graphics card — critical to decent game performance. Apparently it’s “one of the first systems to run the Nvidia GeForce 260M GTX graphics card, which performs as well as the GeForce 9800M series cards found in the P7808u, the GT627-218US, and the G71G-Q1. And it loads 1GB of video memory.” Plus, you can customize the configuration to get more system memory, bigger disks, and other options. And its list price is only around $1500, so it’s not insanely overpriced like other game-specific systems.

Many users don’t seem to understand that performance isn’t always about the fastest CPU or disk. As I’ve said on many occasions, a solid amount of RAM and a good graphics card can sometimes do more to boost performance than the fastest CPU. I still run an old (2004 or so) 2.8GHZ P4 chip with 2GB of system memory.

Recently I installed the latest “Company of Heroes” edition, which tests the system to check its potential performance during gameplay. It got a “good” rating all around, and plays well even in graphics-intensive areas. My Geforce 7600 GS (with 512MB of memory and a fast chipset) probably had a lot to do with that. A lesser graphics card with a “newer” CPU probably would not have performed as well.

If you’re after a gaming laptop that doesn’t cost a bundle or weigh a ton, the Sager may be your best choice.

A relatively new type of attack has been in the news lately, and it’s particularly bad because it’s subtle and, until recently, undetectable by most users. The attack is known as Clickjacking, and it involves legitimate web pages that have been hacked to include hidden links leading to various forms of malware. A user clicks on the injected code, which might be hidden using an invisible image or other technique, and bad things happen. Clickjacking can be used to do anything from installing malware on your machine to turning on your webcam’s microphone.

Happily there’s a solution, at least for Firefox users. Download the latest release of NoScript, a handy little plugin, and you’ll be protected from all known forms of Clickjacking. What NoScript does is to monitor the code that’s on the page you’re viewing. If it notices any suspicious scripts that might try to execute from untrusted websites, it disables them and notifies you of its actions (similar to plugins like AdBlock Plus).

As an added bonus, NoScript then shows you the offending content and gives you the option of effectively quarantining it forever or allowing it to execute. It also can make the hidden content opaque, so it’s visible on the page. This is a very powerful little tool, and hopefully all Firefox users will update immediately (that’s a hint) to the latest release.

What if you’re not using Firefox? Visit this article and you’ll be provided with all the currently available information about securing IE, Chrome, and Safari. Sadly it seems there’s no way at present to protect any of these browsers completely, but you can at least limit the potential damage by enabling various browser options.

Apparently other applications, like Flash, are also vulnerable to this type of attack. According to a recent PCWorld article other companies are working on patches to close these vulnerabilities.

Hidden content like this isn’t new, and sometimes it can be legitimate. You don’t want to globally disable all scripts on all sites. I couldn’t write this blog if I did that, since WordPress uses scripts. What you’re after is the ability to disable hidden content that references untrusted sites. NoScript’s ClearClick capability does that. It’s another tool in the arsenal, and definitely worth installing.

I’ve tried a number of photo printers over the last ten or so years. About six months ago I traded in my old (and not very trustworthy) Epson S630 in favor of an Epson PictureMate PM240, which is a dedicated, photo-only device. I figured it’d be a good idea to separate photo duties from normal 8.5×11″ output. Surely a dedicated device would produce better results.

I was right. The PictureMate’s output is crisp, clean, and more like a lab-generated photo than any other printer I’d tried. Photos are generally dry to the touch when they emerge from the printer, and the device’s on-board menu system is easy to navigate.

The problem is that the device is prone to clogged jets. When it arrived, I installed the “starter” cartridge and tried a few tests. They were excellent, so I brought the printer up to my office and parked it for a few days. Then I printed a few additional shots, and ended up with hundreds of horizontal lines across the output. The troubleshooting guide says to run the “clean jets” routine when this happens, so I did. No matter how many times the cleaning cycle was repeated, the problem persisted. And each cleaning attempt consumed more ink & paper. Not good.

Epson was contacted, and sent me a new cartridge and package of paper free of charge. This corrected the problem, so I figured the “starter” cartridge was defective. The lines didn’t reappear when I printed shots from my December holiday, so I thought I was home free.

Last week the problem showed up again. On a hunch, I ran the printer through two dozen cleaning cycles (re-using the same paper multiple times) and watched as the wavy-line test output slowly improved. The process took two hours. Then I called Epson Support and related my tale of woe to a sympathetic rep who only marginally spoke English.

He agreed something was wrong, and FedEx’d a new printer to me last week. I just returned from a business trip to find it waiting, and will run more tests over the next few weeks. Is this simply a matter of a defective printer that doesn’t seal the jets properly, or am I facing a more pervasive design defect? If the replacement has the same problem, I’m going to insist on a refund or credit toward a different device. At $32 per cartridge and 100-pack of paper, it’s not worth the hassle.

When I started in this industry, nearly all work was done using small 9″ to 15″ monochrome screens. Some places still used paper terminals (I can still hear the loud “neeeeehhh” noise these things made). Tubes were expensive, so they stayed small. There was no such thing as a windowing system.

Today I use a 21″ flat screen monitor and could still use more space. Generally I have a word processor, Firefox, Eudora mail, Dreamweaver, and a copy of Eclipse or NetBeans open at any given time. Things get crowded.

Happily, several solutions to this problem are available. Two of the three involve hardware, but at least neither is overly expensive. The first requires the purchase of a larger, preferably wide screen monitor. With the wide 16:9 aspect ratio, you can have multiple windows open without overlapping the output significantly.

I know writers who keep two or more documents open, and who need the ability to toggle between the two without having either obscured. Wide monitors generally allow this to happen without resorting to a screen resolution that would require a magnifying glass.

The second hardware solution requires a second monitor. Windows started supporting dual head configurations, i.e. two monitors active simultaneously that show different output, as of XP (it’s amusing to note that the Macintosh could do this in around 1992!). Add a monitor, change some video settings, and you now have double the screen real estate. You can move open applications from one screen to the other. Of course, users with limited desk space may find this difficult.

The only other option for improving screen real estate is to increase your current monitor’s resolution. If you’re using standard SVGA resolution (1024×768) you can try 1280×1024 or even higher as long as your video card and monitor support it. The problem with this option is that eyestrain can result, especially over longer periods. If you need space, try the cheapest option first. If that doesn’t work, a trip to your local PC hardware dealer may be the only choice.

We’ve talked about requirements for home-based printing of digital photos in the past, but with the holidays fast approaching it seemed like a good time to talk about this in more detail. I also just bought an Epson PictureMate 240 “personal photo lab,” which is turning out to be an interesting little machine.

First, I’ll state that I agree with famed hacker chef Alton Brown’s dislike of “unitasker” devices, or those that perform only one specific job. I have PCs that boot multiple operating systems, my main printer is an HP OfficeJet that handles printing, faxing, scanning, and even includes a multiple input memory card reader. My kitchen (yes, I’m also a cook) contains no George Foreman grill or chicken-on-a-spit roasters.
This said, I think I like the idea of a dedicated photo printer.

I first started printing photos about ten years ago, when I bought a small Xerox inkjet that handled both plain paper and glossy photo stock. It died after a few years and I’ve since gone through several more multitasking printers, finally ending up with the HP mentioned above. Allegedly it’ll print photos, but I’ve never managed to get decent output on it no matter what settings I try.

The PictureMate, at $99 (online price), seemed like an interesting toy and I decided to buy one a few weeks ago. It’s a tiny unit that accepts only 4×6″ photo paper - the user is warned never to insert plain stock or it’ll destroy the heads - and uses a single cartridge that holds both black & colored ink. It’s self contained and includes its own card reader as well as a tiny preview screen: you insert a memory stick or card, the printer reads it and shows thumbnail copies of photos on the tiny screen. You then select one or more images and hit “print.” Initial tests seemed very promising, with vibrant colors and dry to the touch prints right out of the feeder. The device can also be connected to a PC via a standard USB port; it then acts as a standard printer with its own set of special properties. As a bonus, when connected to a PC the device’s card reader slots are available via the OS (they appear, like other memory-card devices, as standard removable disks).

So far only one problem has appeared - the device started emitting prints with horizontal black lines across them, and no amount of cleaning or head realignment would resolve the problem. A short phone discussion with Epson produced a promise for a new print cartridge, which corrected the situation immediately.

Epson sells packs that include a single replacement cartridge and 100 sheets of pre-cut 4×6″ glossy or matte finish paper for about $32. That means prints cost about $.32 each, not including the amortized cost of the printer itself. Some photo labs are more expensive, while others charge less. I certainly won’t use this device to print off hundreds of photos at a time, but it’s very nice to have a photo printer at home for special occasions. It may be an evil unitasker, but it’s a useful one and it eliminates the hassle of emptying my HP’s ink by trying to print photos. Just in time for the holidays, too.

Taking lots of photos is easy and cheap with a digital camera, since there’s no film to develop and you can view the results immediately on most units using the camera’s built-in preview screen. If you don’t like what you see, you can just delete it and (hopefully) shoot again with different settings. When you get home, you can download all your shots to a PC for safekeeping, and can organize them using either folders (my preferred method) or any of several photo-management applications on the market.

In pre-digital days, everyone processed rolls of exposed film and ended up with either negatives and prints or a box of slides. In many cases these would either end up in larger boxes or in a closet somewhere, while more industrious individuals organized theirs into extensive photo albums based on specific trips and events. Sometimes specific prints were selected for enlargement or duplication, but in my experience at least 75% of all photos ended up stashed in boxes never to be seen again.

Today, things are obviously very different. I have about 8 years worth of JPEG images stored on disk; a few of these have been printed out while others are on my family Web site. Many have never been used for anything else, thus proving my assertion that huge numbers of photos are taken and immediately forgotten.

Several options are available if you need to print digital photos. By far one of the easiest involves burning one or more shots to a CD or memory stick, then taking them to your local photo lab for processing. Some stores offer self-service printing kiosks where you can pop in a memory stick or SD card and print away. Numerous Web-based services are also available; if you choose this option you just send JPEG files directly to the lab and the resulting prints are mailed to your home.

If you’re more adventurous, you can buy a photo-capable inkjet or dye sublimation printer and create your own prints. In general the cost per print is higher if you do it yourself, but it can be a lot of fun and you have total control over the process. Several consumer grade units are available from Canon, HP, Kodak, and other vendors and cost anywhere from $50 to $200 depending on features and quality. Look for high resolution (greater than 300dpi) and devices that advertise reasonably waterproof output. Vegetable based inkjet output is often extremely sensitive to water, and will bleed almost immediately.

In my experience, you’ll pay $.30 or more per print for a 4×6″ photo. If you experience printer errors or media problems, the cost can go up considerably since you’ll end up throwing away the defective prints. The same was true in the old days of darkroom development in chemical baths, so nothing much has changed here. Back then, prints were scrapped due to incorrect exposure times or developer problems. For most people, commercial printing services are far less frustrating and cost effective than printing photos at home but there’s a lot to be said for having the ability to cook off prints whenever you want. Just don’t expect to save money in the process.

While it’s long been possible to watch TV on your PC monitor, and it’s certain many people do so on a regular basis (hopefully not while trying to work!), the PC has not yet morphed into the all-encompassing entertainment system/network portal/communications device that some have hoped for. Mind you, I have friends who have ripped every CD they own, along with DVD movies and in some cases even vinyl media into digital format, which they store on large disk arrays so it’s instantly accessible from anywhere on their in-home network. But two real problems remain. First, I’ve not yet seen an audio card that can drive a 50″ TV and I’m in love with my 16:9 Sony unit. Second, no one has an HDTV-compatible video card yet.

Or so I thought, until I saw an article that discussed one reporter’s attempt to have a new PC-based HDTV/digital video system installed on a machine with Windows Vista MCE (Media Center Edition). Interestingly, companies are still working on the idea of fully enabling the Media Center concept even though Cable companies have taken the lead in this market and will probably maintain it. Aside from the problem of screen size, a standard DVR (Digital Video Recorder) is currently much more stable and easier to use than MCE. It also doesn’t suffer from the ongoing issue of crashes, driver incompatibility, stuttering video, and general complexity that’s endemic with the current crop of PC-as-Home Theatre hardware. As the article states, “If MCE was out during the late 90s, it wouldn’t have been a problem, but when MCE 2005 made its debut with no more than OTA HDTV support, it was clear that MCE had lost its potential.” While Vista is said to be secure enough to give media providers a warm feeling about allowing people to purchase and store HD movies on it, MCE itself is simply behind the curve in terms of consumer-grade Home Theatre hardware.

The other problem, as discussed in the article, is that the installation of the specialized hardware required to receive digital HD cable signals on the PC was horrendous and took several days. At the end, the Time Warner Cable technician apparently asked what the system could do. When told, “his reaction asked the question ‘why on earth would you go through this when you can just rent an HD-DVR from us for $9 a month?”

The general concept of PC as Home Theatre is still tantalizing and should be explored. Presumably, other companies are working on hardware and driver combinations that might enable display of large-screen video without sacrificing the PC’s other capabilities, but again the problem involves all that other stuff that people invariably want to install on their machines. Sure, you can set up a machine that does nothing but act as a video center and runs only the OS and media software, but what’s the point? It’s no longer a PC, but a dedicated Home Theatre system. For the money, I’ll go buy or rent a DVR and a nice LCD monitor.

We’ve discussed the overall performance impact of memory and CPU changes, but that’s not the whole story. PCs and Macs include multiple subsystems, all of which play a role in the overall performance of the system. In some cases, again depending on workload and application usage characteristics, you could buy the hottest CPU available and gigabytes of RAM without seeing a noticeable performance improvement.

The next subsystem involves graphics, which includes the video card and monitor. In ancient times (i.e. “at least a decade ago” in technological terms) the CPU handled most graphics processing, while the video card more or less just passed signals to the monitor. Falling memory prices and ever increasing demands for better video performance have pushed a great deal of graphics management duties to the video card itself, however. Today’s video cards include a dedicated, graphics-optimized processor as well as anywhere from 128 to 512MB of RAM; this frees the main CPU to handle other processing duties, and produces the frequently incredible graphics capabilities of today’s PCs. The capabilities of this card and any attached monitor is often more critical than the main CPU for graphics intensive applications like games, animation, and photo editing.

Recently I bought a fairly high end game, and was disappointed by the graphics performance until I realized my video card had only 128MB on board and an older processor. $75 later I had a card with twice the memory and a much faster processor. The game’s performance improved markedly, with both a higher frame rate and better overall detail. This upgrade also improved my Second Life virtual world experience, allowing higher levels of graphics detail without sacrificing frame rate. Would such an improvement affect Word, Mozilla, IE, or other business applications? Unlikely, because they’re not graphics intensive applications and don’t push the capabilities of that subsystem.

Similarly, networking performance is basically unrelated to any of the other subsystems we’ve discussed. A faster CPU and more memory won’t help your music or Web download speeds, especially if you’re stuck with a 56k modem. In this case you’ll need either a DSL or Cable connection as well as an Ethernet card (unless your machine has such a port built in, as is the case with many newer systems). Remember that these connections are often “asymmetric” in nature, with higher download speeds and slower upload performance. You’ll see vendors offering 3Mbps (Megabit per second) services, but usually this is only when downloading. Closer inspection often discloses an upload speed of maybe 25% of the advertised download rate; if you see a connection advertised as “768k/128k” it means a download speed of 768k and upload of 128k.

A high speed connection significantly increases overall networking performance, but remember that it’s also dependent on many other factors, like whether you’re sharing your line with other users and the load at the other end of the wire. High “hit rates” from other users or a slow connection at the Web site you’re visiting may mean long wait times, just as with an old modem. Many factors are involved, and networked connections involve factors outside your control.

In my next post I’ll discuss the disk subsystem, which is the last major component in PC performance. Stay tuned.