Don Khuth Chronicles

I’ve got my hands on another laptop to play around with. This time it’s a Tablet PC manufactured by Dell called the Latitude XT2. It’s a visually appealing laptop and fairly light to handle. Lately, I’ve been handling laptops that are quite heavy so the XT2 didn’t feel like anything.

The system that I’m testing is configured as follows:

12.1″ Premium WXGA LED Display
2GB DDR3 SDRAM
Intel Core2 Duo U9400 1.4GHz
Intel Integrated Graphics Media Accelerator
80GB Hard Drive 5400RPM
Dell Wireless 1397

Out of the box, the system came bundled with Windows Vista. I’m not sure why it didn’t come with Windows 7 installed but I assume that it was assembled before the release date of the operating system but for some reason they didn’t ship it out to us until last week. Unfortunately, nobody likes Windows Vista so it had to go.

My company uses Windows XP but we’re pilot testing Windows 7 so it’ll be a while before we start to use Windows 7 as the main operating system. That means that I’ll have to configure this laptop to use Windows XP before we can roll it out to the users. We ordered eight laptops so it’s not so bad. The plan is to configure one of them properly and then image it and throw the image onto the other machines. I have one tablet at work for that and the rest I get to play with.

I brought one of them home and installed Windows 7 Professional on it. Much like the other installs, Windows 7 found most of the hardware. The only thing that it didn’t manage to find was the fingerprint reader and some other hardware that I can’t remember. I had to download the drivers for those and manually install them.

So here’s the laptop. It’s pretty slick looking with the brush metal texture. It’s about 8.5″ wide, 11.5″ long and 1″ thick and weighs 3.62lbs. I have a Dell D400 laptop but the XT2 is a bit smaller and lighter than the D400. It has somewhat of a nicer feel to it too. And when you touch it, there aren’t any finger marks left all over the place like the other laptops that I’ve used, at least none that I can see at the moment.

The screen is nice and bright. There’s an ambient light sensor at the bottom of the display but I hardly use it because it’s a bit of a headache sometimes with all that dimming and brightening. The best resolution that I can get is 1280×800 which isn’t too bad. Running along the bottom are the power, the CTRL (CTRL-ALT-DEL), orientation button, ambient light senor and the biometric fingerprint reader.

Switching from laptop mode to tablet mode requires you to rotate the screen 180 degrees clockwise. It’s not bi-directional so you can’t turn it 180 degrees counter clockwise, not if you want to break it. Once it’s in tablet mode, Windows remembers that last orientation that you had it in and switches to that orientation. The orientations that you can switch from are landscape, portrait, flipped landscape and flipped portrait. As far as I know the orientation button only switches between three of those modes. I’m not sure why but it doesn’t want to switch to flipped landscape mode automatically. In order to get flipped landscape mode, you have to manually set that in the display settings.

Last but not least is the pen. I haven’t really used the pen much because of the touch open. Also, I found the pen to be a little finicky. Sometimes it thinks that I click on something when in reality I haven’t even touched the street. I think the proximately detector is slight off. Plus, there’s not too many uses for the pen because you can easily use your finger. But the thing that it can be used for is to wake up the computer from standby mode. You simply put the laptop to sleep and when you’re ready to use it again, you can either type a few keys or eject the pen from its hiding spot.

Switch between pen mode and touch mode was seamless. The multi-touch screen comes with software by N-Trig that allows you to switch between the two modes. It also adds some gesture features as well like pinching to zoom in and out, flicking to navigate and some handy two finger combination to do stuff.
I testing the dual mode in Windows XP and it’s very buggy. I couldn’t get it to work properly. When I switched between pen and touch mode, it was very slow. Going from touch to pen mode was easy but for some reason the touch doesn’t always register correctly. But the two modes in Windows 7 seems to be flawless and works without any issues.

All in all, this is a pretty impressive machine given that you have a good operating system to handle everything. Switching between all of the display modes was quick and easy. Once you rotate the screen, the screen blinks quickly and the new orientation takes over. The laptop is light weight and great for mobility. The fingerprint reader handles logging in without any issues. The display is night and bright. The keyboard is just the right size. Over all, I like this laptop very much. It’s probably one of the best laptops that I’ve used in a while. But on the down side is the $2700 price tag. I’m not sure why it’s so expensive but I’m assuming that it’s because of the tablet feature. The screen isn’t as solid though because when it’s in laptop mode and you go to press the button, the screen shakes a bit. And the one thing that I almost missed were a couple of buttons that are hidden underneath the display. They’re not visible until you switch to tablet mode. They’re used to scroll and navigate. It’s pretty handy when it’s used.

I have an account with Microsoft Developer’s Network through Mohawk College so I was able to get a license key for Windows 7. The official release date for Windows 7 was October 22, 2009 but I had a copy a few weeks early. Even though I’ve had access to Windows 7 all this time, I only installed it at the beginning of this week. So far, the test drive is pretty good.

The first thing most people will notice when their system boots up is that there’s no more progress bar. Windows XP and Vista has a progress bar that shows you that it’s loading. In Windows 7, they’ve changed it to the Windows logo and they made it pulsate. From an I.T. perspective, that’s much better because then people won’t know how long it actually takes to boot up. On the system that I tested Windows 7 on, it took anywhere from twenty to thirty seconds to load.

So here’s the machine that I’m working with. It’s an old Sun Microsystems machine with two single AMD Opteron processors clocking in at 2.6GHz each, 6GB of RAM, nVidia Quadro FX1100 128MB, two SCSI hard drive, one drive holds 70GB and the second holds 140GB. I got the system from work since they were going to toss it and it was still in working condition. All it cost me was the gas to get it home. It’s a fairly heavy machine because of the case. I think it’s made from steel or something.

I think the only thing wrong with this machine is the video card. Every now and then I would run into some issues where the display would be all messed up or things would be all yellow. I have the proper drivers installed so I think there’s something faulty about the hardware itself. It if wasn’t for that, I would have a higher Windows Experience Rating.

As you can see, you’ve got your standard Windows desktop with the taskbar, gadgets and icons. Like Vista, the Start menu placeholder is the orb that glows when you hover over it. The taskbar has been made a bit larger and the way things are organized is a bit better. The system bar is less cluttered this time. The gadgets are not restricted to just the right hand side of the display. You can move them around anywhere you want. The icons are a lot larger too. It’s almost as if you’ve set your resolution to 800×600.

The Start menu looks a lot nicer and is now even more useful than before. I found that the search actually responded fairly quickly no matter what you’re searching for. I think before, it would only search for software and system related stuff. Now, it pretty much searches the whole hard drive for anything.

Some software that is listed on the Start menu has the option of opening a sub menu. For example, for Paint, it would give you access to recently saved files but for Messenger, it allows you to change your status, check your email or even view your profile.

As I mentioned before, the taskbar has been given some organizational changes which helps makes it less cluttered. Any similar software that is running is grouped together and when you hover over it, you get a little preview of each individual window. This is very helpful when you have multiple Word documents opened and you want to see what in each of them without having to switch to them. When you hover over the preview, that window will be show and everything else will be transparent.

The icons on the taskbar as some interactivity to it as well. When you cover over an icon, there’s a little animation that takes place. There’s a little glow to each icon and they’re all difference. The colour of the glow depends on the colour that was used to create the icon. For example, the Firefox icon will have a red-orange-yellow glow to it while the Messenger icon will have a blue-white glow. It’s a nice little touch, I say.

They’ve also changed up the way you switch between windows as well. This is the feature that’s available in Vista where you hit the Windows key and Tab rather than Alt-Tab. This feature gives you a little preview of each window. It’s a nice feature but it doesn’t do much for me. I just like playing with it but the novelty fades after time.

In Windows XP, you would have to click on the “Show Desktop” shortcut to quickly minimize every window that was opened. In Windows 7, that shortcut has been replaced with a tab at the end of the taskbar. When you hover over that, everything turns to glass which in turn allows you to see what’s on your desktop. As soon as you move your mouse away from it, everything goes back to normal.

Overall, Windows 7 is a big change in the right direction for Microsoft. It’s not a resource hog like Vista and it’s a lot faster as well. Where Vista fail, Windows 7 has succeeded. If you’re lucky enough to be eligible for the free upgrade to Windows 7, I recommend that you upgrade. I don’t know the retail price of Windows 7 but it’s probably worth it to buy.

I’m currently typing this blog from a software that came with Windows Vista. It’s looks pretty handy since everything is available offline and the major parts that I need are available to me. There’s a good chance that I’ll be using this software instead of WordPress. I’ll still be using WordPress as the platform but I’ll be using Windows Live Writer to write my blog.

The cool thing about Windows Live Writer is that I no longer need to preview my post anymore because I’m basically typing this post in the blog itself so I see exactly what it’ll look like when I publish it. When you start up the software, it asks for your credentials and then downloads and bunch of stuff, the style sheet being one of them. For this site, it even posted a temporary post and then deleted it so it has done a nice job at integrating with the online platform.

A nice little feature is the plug-ins which you can download and add extra features to the software. For example, there’s a Polaroid Picture plug-in that turns your picture into a Polaroid. You can make minor adjusts to the picture like adding a caption and tilting the image ever so slightly. I find this a nice little feature because it saves me from having to resize the image in Photoshop.

There’s a bunch of other plug-ins available as well, about six pages worth as of now. The default things that you can do ranges from adding a hyperlink, images, tables, maps, tags or even videos. All of this stuff is available in WordPress but since the latest update to WordPress 2.7, I found it to be a little slow. Sometimes, it’s gotten so slow that every time I press a key, it would take about a second before it shows up.

Although it has some nice plug-ins, I’m not sure how compatible those plug-ins will be with WordPress. I’m hoping that it’ll do everything offline so that when this post gets publish, there won’t be a lot to do online. The Polaroid plug-in is simple enough since it’s just an image but from what I can see, I don’t think there’ll be a problem.

Last month, Royal Bank ran a promotion for a free Asus Eee PC (pronounced “E”) if any customers who upgrade to their Signature No Limit banking package. I was updated to that package automatically because the package that I was using before was no longer available. The difference between my current package and the qualifying package was a $3 charge. I saw that as a good reason to upgrade to get a small little laptop.

I called them up to ask if I was eligible for the promotion. The CSR said that I was and all that I had to do was pay for the addition monthly charges. After I signed on, he told me that I’d have to wait a few days and someone will call me to tell me what to do next. That didn’t sound too promising because whenever you have to rely on someone else, there’s a chance that there will be some delays. In this case, there was a delay and I had to call back to follow up.

I spoke with a lady who looked over my profile and told me that she had to get back to me about the promotion. As far as I know, there was no need to check for anything since the first representative already did all that. The lady called me back a couple of hours later and told me that I wasn’t qualified for the promotion because it was only opened to customers who upgraded from the Day-to-Day banking package. I didn’t fight with her because I was at work and didn’t have time to argue.

A few weeks later, I get a message on my cell phone from RBC saying that they’re still looking into the matter. I’m not sure why they’d still be looking into it if I wasn’t qualified so I just brushed it off and carried on with life.

The following week, I get a letter in the mail telling me that I was qualified for the laptop and all that I had to do was enter in the promotion code on the website and verify my information before they sent out the laptop. I was so excited at it that I called to my parent’s house and asked my little brother to enter the information for me, because I didn’t have internet at the time. He typed in what I told him to type but when he finished, there wasn’t any confirmation or anything. I had to double check to make sure he did it right so I waited until I found a stable wireless signal and re-entered my information. At the end of it, it confirmed my information and said that the laptop will be here within six to eight weeks. Since it has been confirmed, I was willing to be patient and wait.

I can’t believe that after making a few phone calls, it turns out that I am qualified to get a free Asus EEE PC from Royal Bank. The first person I spoke with said that I would be eligible if I upgraded but when I called back, they had to do an investigated to see if I was qualified. The person who called me back said that I didn’t qualify which made me a little disappointed.

Now that I have the laptop in my hands, I plan on doing a little review on it. Initially, I was supposed to get the 2gb version but when I opened the box, I noticed that it was the 8gb version so I lucked out. I have an upcoming “debate” with a colleague of Jenn regarding Mac and PC and I can probably test out the webcam on this little thing and at the same time use it to debate the guy about it. So we’ll see how that turns out. Asus Eee 701SD review, coming up!

The guys and I in the I.T. department don’t always get appreciated for the work that we done. Without us, things around here wouldn’t be this smooth but then again, without the user, we wouldn’t have a job. Every now and then it’s nice to get some positive feedback from the users to let us know that we’re doing a good job. I’ve received a few from some of my coworkers but then of them went as far as emailing my manager.

We have a procedure around here that says a user has to contact the Help Desk for any I.T. related issues. From what the users have told me, the Help Desk might as well be called the Helpless Desk. Our users are very frustrated with some of the Tech Support guys in Orlando and it seems like they do not like the quality of job that those guys are doing.

When a user calls in to open a call ticket, they expect it to be remedied in a timely manner. Usually, Tech Support are Level 1 support so if they take more than fifteen minutes to work on an issue, they should pass it on to the Level 2 support which are the Desk side Technicians, ergo me. People don’t want to be on the phone for hours on end when it would take a Technician a matter of minutes to solve the issue. But lately, that’s the case because it seems like no one wants to call the Help Desk anymore.

One of the engineers called in to the Help Desk because he was having problems with his Outlook email client. He would get an error message and it would keep appearing every so often. The Tech Support on the phone connected to this computer and looked around. He checked the Sent Items folder to see if there’s anything there. My coworker remained the Tech Support guy that “sent items” means that the emails have been sent and recommended that he check out the “outbox” folder. The Tech Support assured him that it in the sent items somewhere. So after looking around for a few minutes, he told my coworker that he’ll have to call the exchange guys because the file that my coworker was sending had a large attachment and it’s probably stuck in the exchange queue.

The ticket was later passed on to someone on the Exchange team and that guy deletes the email and closed the ticket. My coworker on the other hand was still having the same issue so he’s confused as to why the ticket was closed when the issue was still there. He calls back to the Help Desk and asks for a Manager so he can escalate this issue. The manager doesn’t know what to do so he tells my coworker to wait a bit while they try to solve the issue. This ticket was opened last Friday.

My coworker was getting frustrated and couldn’t send out any emails so he gives me a call and asks me to take a look. For an issue that like that has take days to resolve, the ticket should have been forwarded to Desk side Support. I head over to my coworkers cubicle and fixed the problem in a matter of seconds. He was amazed that I came through for him and really appreciated the fact that he can now get back to work. The problem was that his email had an attachment where the files were thirty megabytes in size so he was correctly to tell the Tech Support about the outbox folder. I told my coworker that the recommend attachment size is ten megabytes because that’s an average size limit. He has Gmail and said something about Gmail letting him send files over twenty megabytes but I told him that we’re not Gmail. Our exchange server might not allow for something of that size so to be on the safe size, he should break up the file size to something smaller.

After seeing that I was able to fix his problem in a matter of seconds, he was very happy. He later went on a rant about the Help Desk being incompetent and that they should be fired for not knowing what they’re doing. Part of me agrees with him because sometimes those guys don’t know what they’re doing. It’s no wonder why their turnover rate is so high over there. They need to start hiring people who are trained or at least provide some sort of training so they can assist the users better. The faster they solve the problem, the quicker the user can get back to work.

My coworker sent out an email (since he’s about to now) to my manager letting him know that I did a good job. “Over the course of the last 10 months, Don Khuth helped me many-many times with the IT-related questions. Don performed it much better (quicker, politely, with feedback and follow-up) than the 5656 team which wasted a lot of my time. If the IT department has a Recognition program similar to the one we have in engineering, I would most willingly nominate Don for the Golden Award for his quick, competent and patient help.” My coworker’s kind words are much appreciated. After a stressful week, it’s nice to know that what you do at work means something to someone.

It only took me four working days but I’ve finally managed to retrieve the data from an encrypted drive. I was so stressed out from this ordeal that I couldn’t sleep at night. The impact of the whole thing didn’t set it right away but once I realized that the data on the hard drive is being used for a $25 million project, I start to feel bad. For a while, my guilty conscience got the best of me. I didn’t know when it was going to end.

This morning, I start to pack the hard drive and get it ready to be shipped out to a data recovery company. We’ve been sending hard drives to them for a while and they were pretty successful. Even with that track record, it wasn’t known for sure if they would be able to get the data out of an encrypted drive. If they did, there would be a pretty hefty price tag for their work. For a $25 million project, it’ll be worth it.

Before shipping out the drive, we had one last thing to try. I’ve managed to decrypt the drive last night but the information on the drive was unreadable. Windows wasn’t able to mount the drive and wanted to format it. I couldn’t mount the drive with Ubuntu because it couldn’t find the NTFS signature and I couldn’t mount a RAW drive. The hard drive didn’t have any physical defects to it so it’s working fine. The only problem was that none of the data on it could be read easily. I assumed that once the drive has been encrypted, Windows would load back up and everything would be fine. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case here. After the decryption, the operating system wouldn’t load. After that point, things started to look a bit gloomy.

What I tried to do was get the Master Boot Record (MBR) repaired using an MBR from another machine. Theoretically speaking, if you move the MBR from another machine that has been encrypted in the same manner and overwrite the bad MBR, the hard drive should be working again. I was expecting that once I’ve booted up, I’ll be presented with a login screen and I can log in and access the files. So I used Linux to do a sector by sector copy of the MBR. First I tried the first 512 bytes and then I took a bigger chunk. I did the same to the corrupted MBR and then I overwrote it with the good version. At the time, all I was hoping to do was to get a login prompt so I can get into the hard drive and copy the important data. Unfortunately, the kernel from one system didn’t match the kernel from the other system and things came to a halt so back to the drawing board. Even though I used the same configuration and password for both machine, something was slightly different.

The slightly different kernel was a good thing though. When I booted up with the emergency, it detected some inconsistently and attempted to repair the kernel. That was a good thing because if the kernel is working, I can back that up and use it to decrypt the drive. Once I’ve decrypted the drive, it’s just a matter of getting the operating system to load so I can back up the drive. Unfortunately, something happened during the encryption process and messed up the boot sector where Windows reside and this caused another error. So with no OS, I assumed that I could connect the hard drive as a secondary and boot up using my computer. Once I’ve loaded the OS, Windows could connect to the drive and open up the files. This didn’t work because Windows couldn’t detect a file system on the drive and it wanted to format it before doing any further. That’s not exactly what I had in mind.

Nothing appears to be working the way that I thought it would work. I didn’t have many options left. I was surprise that I had options at all. I am not familiar with the software so I don’t know exactly what goes on in the background. I emailed my counterparts in Orlando and they have still yet to reply. I got a response from one guy but he told me to email some other guy. I don’t know why he didn’t just forward that guy the email to give him a heads up.

I didn’t have much choice but to send this drive out to a data recovery company in hopes that they will be able to do something. I packed up the drive and left it on my coworker’s desk so he can send it to the company. But before we sent it off, I came up with one last idea. I wanted to see if the encryption software could somehow repair the corrupted kernel. Once it has repaired, I can reboot the machine and use an emergency disk to log in a backup that repaired kernel. After the backup, I would reimage the machine and repair the kernel with the backup kernel. Now that the kernel has been repaired using a good backup kernel, I could attempt to decrypt it and get some data.

At first, I came to the same conclusion has my previous attempts but I did one thing different. I gave the hard drive to my coworker and asked him to use software to scan the drive for recognized files. As soon he started the scan, the software was able to find a few files. After a few minutes, more and more files were being recognized. Once the scan was completed, we were able to retrieve the user’s whole profile and recovered three gigabytes worth of information. I took everything that was found and stuck it on the server for the user to access. I hope that everything was recovered successfully. He should be happy with the data that we managed to get back. We don’t have to worry about sending it out and it saved $1500 in fees.

What I’ve learned from all of this is the importance of backing up. I’ve encrypted so many laptops before and they were all successful but that doesn’t mean that something can’t go wrong. If something can go wrong, it will. Murphy’s Law comes through every time. It has changed the way I do things around here and I back up just about everything before I do anything with the hard drive. If it was the user’s fault, I wouldn’t feel so bad but when part of the fault is on yourself, I’m sure you’ll have trouble sleeping at night too. I’m just glass that I was able to retrieve everything and that my hard work didn’t go in vain.

I spent a good ten hours or so at work trying to recover some information that was stored on a coworker’s machine. But so far, every idea that I had has been a failure. I got an idea, I tried out that idea, I waited and then I was let down. I don’t know if there’s a way around it because if there was, the encryption software wouldn’t be worth buying but I’m trying to do what I can.

For the last month or so, it has been my objective to encrypt all of the laptops there were on site. The encryption process is pretty straight forward. I just install the administration software and then the encryption software and the rest is done automatically. So far, I had a perfect track record and everyone’s laptop has been encrypted.

A few days ago, I encrypted a laptop and the user brought it back down to me saying that they couldn’t log into their machine. He said that he had changed the initial password to something but it wasn’t taking the password that he was typing in. The more he types in the wrong password, the longer the system makes him wait. In the user’s manual, there’s a way to reset the timer by inserting a CD and then entering the Admin password and then canceling out of that screen. When the laptop reboots, the login screen will be shown again.

For some reason, the login screen didn’t show up. Instead, we’re presented with a black screen that says something about a failed integrity check. I’ve never seen this screen before so I had no idea what to do. What’s worse is that, if we can’t get pass this screen, everything on the hard drive is potentially lost. That’s not good news when the person is responsible for a $25 million dollar project.

I feel responsible for this mishap because I was the one that encrypted his hard drive. Before doing so, I didn’t backup any of his files. I’ve encrypted three hundred or so laptop and nothing like this has happened so I assume that everything would go well. There’s always that odd one that will do something totally different from the other.

I’m not expert in data recovery but I’ve got a few theoretical ideas that work… in theory. For situations like this, you need to think outside the box and try to figure things out in a creative way. At the moment, I don’t have many options left but so far when it seems like I’m out of options, another idea pops into my head. All I can do is give it a try and hope for the best. I’ve got one last thing to try tomorrow so I’ll have to cross my finger and hope that some of the data can be retrieved. I’d prefer to be able to decrypt the drive fully and get all of the data but when you’re fight a losing battle, it’s better to win a little than nothing at all.