Billion 7800 / 7800N Router

I don't really do hardware reviews, but I wanted to say something nice about Billion's new ADSL router. My network is a little complex, I have a /27 routed subnet, I tunnel IPv6 over IPv4 and I have lots of firewall rules. I don't have NAT, and I need stageful packet inspection. Also, my phone line ls quite long.

Consumer routers tend to be cheap miserable little things. Vigor are pretty good, but don't have a Broadcom chipsets and therefore achieve poor speeds on long lines. Cisco are expensive and complex (but nice kit). I've tried OpenWRT in a clever setup with two routers, but although I'm demanding I don't want to make my router my hobby!

My 7800 is on an Andrews and Arnold BE line. It was quick and easy to setup and immediately achieved twice the speed of my old Speedtouch. My IPv6 tunnel runs just fine and the iptables based firewall does exactly what I need.

You can access the 7800 via telnet and do clever Linux things, but you don't really need to. The web interface is very comprehensive and snappy to use and it works well on Safari and Firefox.

I've never been so pleased with a router at this price point.

My ISP, Andrews and Arnold are worth a mention. They don"t block anything, they don't do packet filtering and they give me 32 IP addresses. They also let me do things like tweak the target SNR margin on the DSLAM via a web control panel.

iPad Update

I've had an iPad for a couple of weeks now and it's been interesting. It's a bit early to say how it's going to evolve. It's become the "thing I carry around all day". I love being in a meeting with it (once we're past the "ooh, an iPad" bit) because I can have all the papers in it (and other relevant documents) and have shed the whole business of printing and filing documents - I'm almost entirely paperless now. When I'm on the hoof, it's much better than a smartphone for email, which means I get to reply to lots of these in odd moments. I'm very attached to Evernote and this is great on the iPad. Right now, I have a laptop, smartphone and iPad.

This is overkill, but I'm allowing myself the luxury of figuring out what's best for what and how the iPad fits into the ecosystem. With time, I can see many busy people moving to a desktop/iPad/dumbphone setup.

Not everyone is going to go for this, but I find I can read books on it. In cold financial terms, it pays for itself in around two years if I don't print papers for meetings.

My team have another reason to have a few of these around - lots of our students are going to have them and while I'm not going to instigate a big project to make everything work in iPad, we're including it in the list of platforms we check new and updated things on.

...and oh, yes - I love it!

Out with the M2400, in with the MacBook Pro

Well, I finally gave up with the M2400. The hardware was pretty much OK, but I made the fatal mistake of borrowing a MacBook for a week (and then two weeks and then a bit longer until I finally had to give it back).

I now have a Unibody Macbook Pro 15". It sleeps, it wakes up. Mac applications are beautiful and work together beautifully. I'm stuck with running Vista in VMware Fusion for this and that for our corporate applications, but don't think I'll every go back.

Oh yes, and I also have an iPhone 3GS, which connects to the MacBook in cunning ways.

Three Months with the Precision M2400 (E-Series)

Well it still works, sort of. As long as you don't get any ambitious ideas about getting it to sleep (the easy) bit and then wake up (the hard bit.) I've been watching this one carefully and about once a week I open the lid to be greeted by a black screen. Nothing brings it back except a power cycle. One of these was in a meeting when I was depending on this thing to deliver a presentation. Dell have clearly been trying to fix this - the BIOS has been through ELEVEN versions and the video drivers have been updated.

It generally wakes up during the night to do backups and various other Vista things. It mostly goes back to sleep again, but not always.

Docking and undocking is mostly works, but sometimes it takes minutes to sort itself out after being docked and every now and then it moans that the docking station power adapter is the wrong sort. Sometime it "goes weird" (Vista technical term) and needs a reboot after a dock or undock.

The wireless connects like lightning but every now and then hangs so that you have to turn it off and off again using the switch. It then remains unreliable until a reboot (oh, so many reboots.)

Having said that, when it's up and running (which is most of the time) it's powerful and well built. The trouble is, it has Vista on it!

To be fair, I don't think these problems are specific to the new Dell E-Series, it's just that Vista can't handle all this sleeping and waking stuff and finds docking all rather stressful.

I rather envy my wife's MacBook. Open the lid and it wakes - instantly and every time. Close the lid and it sleeps - always. Updates come rarely and always work (and it's all nicely automated - no emails telling you to download things.) The MacBook never "goes funny", needing a reboot and it's not traumatised by having things plugged into it!

Dell Precision M2400: First Thoughts

After a wait of about three weeks my new Dell Precision M2400 finally appeared. With the bag, dock and other bits there was a total of five boxes. The slice battery didn't turn up, I guess it will appear later. Dell boxes are all unbleached card and there is an absolute minimum of paper (good.)

The great thing about the Dell order process is that you can configure the system exactly the way you want and track the whole order and delivery process very easily online.

Physical Design and Component Quality

Let me start by saying that I'm impressed with the machine and very glad to exchange it for my old Latitude D820. It's powerful, light and secure - and it's looks good without attracting attention. The wave effect on the lid is eye catching, but doesn't look out of place.

The machine feels very solid. The screen doesn't bend and you can grab the open machine by one corner and wave it about without anything bad happenning.

Component quality is excellent. The hard drive is a super fast Seagate Momentus 7200.3 and the 1440x900 LED backlit screen is incredibly bright and clear - the best laptop screen I've ever used. The trackpad works very well and the keyboard feels good. The Intel wireless connects incredibly quickly.

My only other grouch in this area is the optical drive. It's quiet and fast, but seems to spin the whole time there's a disk in it and it's too easy to open by just brushing the side of the chassis.

There seems to be a fan running much of the time, but it's pretty quiet and given the speed of the CPU and the graphics, I guess that can be forgiven.

I ordered the keyboard backlight. As I often worked in a fairly dark lounge this is great. It comes on when triggered by an ambient light sensor and this works well.

One nice thing I've never seen before: Most laptops have several little panels you open with a tiny screwdrive to replace various bits. This new Precision has one big panel that comes off with one screw and gives you access to all the gubbins - excellent.

TPM / Embassy Security Center / Fingerprint Reader

Embassy seems to have improved a little (I completely removed the whole thing on my D820 after about a week.) Finger enrollment worked well, and using the reader for pre-boot authentication worked very smoothly. However my idea that this would provide a very quick and secure way of logging in and unlocking the screen proved optimistic. "Secure Windows Login" spends many extra seconds doing mysterious things and pretty often would not accept a finger, making it necessary to type in the password. The "Private Information Manager" is both buggy and clunky.

Reinstalling Vista

Once the machine was up and running I set about installing my usual range of tools (GroupWise, Firefox, Thunderbird, iTunes and Dropbox). I like GroupWise, but the installer is rubbish. On this occasion I installed while Windows Updates were quietly installing in the background - I should have known better. This resulted in the GroupWise install failing part way through (and Windows Update failing.) Windows Update sorted itself out just fine, but the general consensus on the web seemed to be that you recover from a failed GroupWise install by reinstalling Vista from scratch. After trying various less drastic approaches this is exactly what I did.

The plus side was that Dell provide a "real" Vista install disk along with a driver disk. No key is needed and the install is fast. This leaves you with a mostly working machine and the full driver package is very, very easy to download from the Dell website. Unlike many consumer machines, Dell do not load piles of unwanted software on to Precisions and Latitudes.

Conclusion

With the new Latitude E6400 / Precision M2400 Dell have a machine that will be very attractive for businesses and individual users. There's nothing in the HP or Lenovo range that I'd swap mine for.