Limited choice

The laptop lemmings are all going the same way. I am a business traveller, working in an SME. Unfortunately my current notebook is coming to the end of its life. I need a laptop to make presentations, to communicate and carry out my daily work.

I want something not too heavy and quick. When the company buys me a notebook, it will be in the mid-range price bracket. I don't want to take the inevitable Vista performance hit you will get with a mid-range notebook and our IT manager doesn't want the uncertainty of Vista.

This takes out 70 per cent of the choice. I don't want a widescreen display because I will never watch DVD movies on it and it won't go in my briefcase. This leaves less than 5 per cent of the mid-range offerings. At the moment, this makes it easier to decide. Soon my only choice will be to grit my teeth and get a bigger bag.

Mike Jollands

Swivelling monitors

Andrew Kennard (PCW December 2007, Letters) bemoans the fact that most screens are wide, not tall. However, many office workers would probably prefer to work in portrait style.

One of my clients recently phoned to say that she had touched something on the keyboard and was having to look at everything sideways. I discovered that this was not a fault but actually a feature of her new Dell, and that it could either be restored to normal with the supplied software or one could, indeed, turn the screen on its base.

Keith Paterson

Unwanted software

I have had the misfortune to receive new PCs from Hewlett Packard recently.

Don't get me wrong, the build quality is good, and the warranty and support excellent, but they have submitted to a demand from Microsoft that a trial version of Office 2007 is installed on all new PCs.

If a button labelled "Uninstall Office 2007" were prominently displayed on the desktop this would not be so bad, but in truth, getting rid of this unwanted software is a real pain.  Add to this Symantec antivirus software and other so called added value programs, and you find it can take an hour or two to prune the PC back to what you need before starting to configure it for your own requirements.

PC builders should have an option on the order form to allow buyers to request a "Windows only" installation so the PC is as virgin as possible when they receive it.

Microsoft owe me for enough of my life already without imposing yet more time wasting options on brand new PCs.

Colin Ferrington

Weight a minute

One of the important things about a laptop is its weight, so how come some manufacturers seem to get away with either being vague about it or just understating it?

We bought an HP Compaq nc2400 for a client a few months back. According to HP, the nc2400 has a weight 'starting at 1.29kg'.

We weighed it and found it was 1.5 kg, and we couldn't see any way to get the weight down short of
removing fairly important components, such as the battery and hard disk.

Similarly we've just bought a Toshiba Portege R500, which apparently has a weight 'starting at 0.979kg'. It actually weighs 1.1 kg, and again there's nothing we can remove to make it lighter unless we're happy to use it without the battery.

Exactly how are the manufacturers coming up with these very attractive weight figures, and how can we find out what the truth actually is?

Phil Stanton

Vista's foibles

As the motherboard on my old self-built PC was failing at regular intervals decided that it was time was ripe to replace it with a completely new system.

Having eagerly awaited November’s PCW, I immediately ordered a shiny new Mesh that was your Best Buy. When it arrived, all I had to do was switch my old files and programmes across from my old XP machine and reap the benefits of the Vista based system - or so I thought.

OK, so I knew that I would have to learn the new Vista way of doing things. I could live with that; it just takes a little bit longer to get familiar with it. I was also pleased to see it recognise my peripherals immediately, especially my old Epson printer. I was becoming impressed. However, then the shine started to wear off.

I first tried to synchronise the clock with internet time, which didn't work. Next I put the computer into sleep mode. It would reactivate on a touch of the wireless mouse, but then lock up. Only a hard reboot would get me running again. A search on the internet provided no solutions, so my PC now stays on all the time.

Then I decided to play some music on my fancy new 5.1 surround sound system. Great, except that the rear speakers wouldn't function. They work fine in the Control Panel test, but not with any application (e.g. Windows Media Player, iTunes or Real Player). Another search on the internet showed that this seemed to be a common problem with no apparent solution until Microsoft sorts out the drivers.

I am sure I will find other issues as I progress, but while I quite like some of the Vista features, it would have been nice to be forewarned of the key problems. PCW has done some great articles on getting the best out of Vista, but nowhere can I find a list the main bugs that await resolution by Microsoft.

Can you help?

Mike Dunne

Think before deleting

Danny Leonard (PCW December 2007, Letters - "Undelete issues") and others should understand that, by using kit like Nas drives, they are really moving into the world of professional IT.

Those of us who grew up there using mainframes have never been able to undelete files. Once it was gone it was gone. So we learned to be very, very careful before we deleted anything; something I always emphasise when teaching mainframe operating systems to people who have been brought up on PCs.

Perhaps that's why I've never had to retrieve anything from the Recycle Bin.

Roger Tilbury

Check your tariff

I hope your readers are considerably more savvy than me. I take broadband from BT mainly because one I am too lazy to change. Well, I checked what I am paying and found it is £25 per month for 2MB and a cap of 20GB.

When I saw the better deals others (even BT) were offering it made me very annoyed - I can get 8Mbit/sec service, unlimited usage and a whole range of VoIP goodies for the same price.

Please tell your readers to check their contracts every year and like car insurance move it every year. If you just renew you get stung!

David Shaw

Astronomy for free

In response to your introduction to astronomy feature (Reach for the Skies, PCW December 2007), I was surprised to see no mention of the two superb open-source multi-platform planetarium software solutions - Stellarium (www.stellarium.org) and Celestia (www.shatters.net/celestia).

For anyone wanting an introduction to astronomy on their computer, what better than being able to access excellent software for zero financial outlay?

Andy Cocker

Better early than never

I decided to log onto our Microsoft licensing site to check some information only to receive the following, and very timely warning: "Your organization's program membership ends in 732,907 days. Learn how to re-enroll to continue...".

Microsoft should be warmly congratulated for warning me - I only have another 2,007 years to get the application sent off.

Carl Booth

Restrictive DRM

Kelvyn Taylor expressed concern (PCW November 2007, Editorial) about the possibility that music protected by digital rights management (DRM) systems may become unavailable to a legitimate purchaser because of the failure of the supplier or some other similar event.

I share his view that DRM is, as a principle, fine, but that the DRM mechanism used should not be intrusive.

Better still, it should offer advantages to purchasers. To date, just about every attempt at DRM appears to create problems for users at one level or another.

But I wonder whether DRM is a fair focus of his concern. All media has a finite life, usually as a consequence of the carrier media. Nowadays we buy a copy of a tune on a CD, or a film on DVD, but at some point the disc will break down or the equipment to play the disc will fail and replacements will have become obsolete.

But this is nothing new; when I was younger I was puzzled by the older members of the family who were sad that they could no longer play the boxes of 78s that now resided in their lofts. A few years on and I have similar boxes of LPs and 7in vinyl records sitting gathering dust.

Maybe one day in the future we will only be playing high definition DVDs and my current collection of standard DVDs will join the vinyl.

If we buy something on one format, we don’t automatically assume that we can obtain a copy of the same material on a different format. It might be a nice idea to be able to buy a copy of a film that we originally purchased on Laserdisc on DVD, or to replace DVDs with high definition DVDs, at the cost of the media, but sadly the companies that own the rights don’t agree. So if a DRM system renders some media unplayable it seems little different to the situation where a player fails and a replacement is no longer available.

Of course, if a DRM system enabled us to purchase the rights to view or listen to media on whatever device is convenient, or whatever format happens to be available to us at the time, that really would be an advantage.

And I would be at the front of the queue to buy my media, safe in the knowledge that it would be likely to outlast the technology that I am using today.

Gary Beaton