Windows 7 on my ASUS Netbook

PADDe Running Windows 7

Back in October 2008 I purchased an ASUS Eee PC 1000H netbook as my new portable computer.  I dubbed it PADDe, and have been delighted with this little marvel, taking it with me on my Oregon summer vacation and using it around the house and at some of my meetings.  I bought PADDe with a hard drive configured for Windows XP and later upgraded its RAM to its maximum of 2 gigabytes.  I love how light and portable it is and have been satisified with its battery life of over three hours on a charge.

The only drawbacks have been its 1024×600 screen, which I wish were the more standard 1024×768, and its reliance on a touchpad.  The diminished vertical resolution forces me to scroll web pages more than I’d like, and I prefer Pointing Sticks to touchpads.  I often resort to scrolling pages with the arrow keys since that works more reliably for me.

Some months back I bought Presto, a commercial version of the Xandros Linux package, for PADDe.  It provides a Linux boot alternative to Windows XP, allowing me to quickly boot up and access the web.  But I almost never use Presto since it is so simple to have the netbook “Hibernate” in Windows XP rather than shut down.  Hibernation, unlike Stand By mode, doesn’t use any battery power.  And it only takes seconds for the machine to wake up from its deep slumber.

Windows Vista could never run on the little netbook, since it only has a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom CPU (with a “Super” mode that overclocks it to 1.7 GHz).  But I’d read that Windows 7 ran just fine.  So I decided I would use one of the three licenses on my Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade Family Pack to put the latest operating system on PADDe.

See below if you want all of the details of this hours-long effort, but the end result is that PADDe is now happily running Windows 7.  I love this new operating system and am delighted to now have it on both my desktop and my netbook.  Both machines are now in the same “Homegroup”, which is a simplified Windows 7 network.

ASUS Helps Out, to a Point

ASUS very kindly posted some instructions and the needed drivers for upgrading their 1000H netbooks to Windows 7 on its support site.  I painstakingly downloaded each driver (I wish they had just ZIPped them all up into one archive, but no such luck) and printed out the terse instructions.  They just said what to download and gave a brief sequence of driver installations I should trigger with those downloaded files.  But they did not say how you get Windows 7 onto a netbook that lacks a DVD drive.

Microsoft Helps Out, to a Point

I’ve successfully installed Microsoft Office and the Corel WordPerfect Suite onto PADDe by popping their installation DVDs into the drive on my desktop computer and then accessing them on PADDe through the wireless network.  But surely that wouldn’t work for installing an operating system – the network connection would be lost during the install.  But I’m a regular listener of Paul Thurrott and Leo Laporte’s Windows Weekly podcast, so I knew Paul Thurrott already had the answer.  You need to put an image of the Windows 7 installation DVD (called an ISO) on a bootable USB thumbdrive.  Microsoft offers Windows 7 online as an “ISO” download, and for awhile included a little utility for copying that image file onto a bootable USB thumb drive.  But they goofed on their little utility, creating a licensing problem that led them to yank it off their website, at least for now.  Reportedly they will release the source code for the utility to resolve the licensing issues and then I presume they’ll put it back up.  But I didn’t want to wait for that nebulous opportunity.  Thankfully CNET’s good old download.com still had a copy of the utility.

But I lacked an ISO image for the thumbdrive.  I already bought the Family Pack of Windows 7 on DVD, and I certainly didn’t want to buy yet another copy online to get the needed ISO image.  So, per Paul’s instructions, I downloaded the free utility ImgBurn and used it on my desktop computer to make an ISO image of the 32-bit version of the Windows 7 installation DVD.  Then I wiped out one of my eight-gigabyte thumbdrives, using Microsoft’s utility to turn it into a bootable Windows 7 installation device.

Using Two Thumbs

On a second eight-gigabyte thumbdrive, the amazing Verbatim Tuff ‘n’ Tiny drive, I copied all of the drivers I had downloaded from ASUS.  I then stuck both thumbdrives into PADDe while it was running Windows XP and navigated to the \support\migwiz folder on the one with the Windows 7 image.  There I ran Windows Easy Transfer, saving PADDe’s existing files and settings to the other “normal” thumbdrive.  I don’t have very much loaded onto PADDe, so it fit okay, but if that hadn’t worked I could have sent those items over the wireless network to the desktop for storage.  Now it was time for the big plunge – wiping out PADDe’s installation of Windows XP and moving up to 7.

My BIOS Mistake

ASUS said to use the built-in ASUS Update utility to install the latest BIOS on PADDe.  That’s a delicate operation – if you lose power during a BIOS installation you can “brick” your computer so that it won’t boot up, period.  So I yanked out the thumbdrives, made sure PADDe had plenty of battery life, and also plugged him into the AC outlet.  Then I ran the BIOS upgrade utility and thought I upgraded to the latest BIOS.  Later problems would reveal that I had not actually installed the latest version of the BIOS intended for Windows 7 compatibility.  But I didn’t realize that at the time.

Why Won’t You Boot?

After the new BIOS was installed and PADDe was booted back up into Windows XP, I reinserted the Windows 7 image thumbdrive and rebooted.  But PADDe refused to boot off the USB drive – instead only displaying the usual screen to select either Presto or Windows XP.  I uninstalled Presto and tried again.  Nope – now it just booted into XP.  Rebooting again but hitting the F2 key to bring up the BIOS, I realized that a year ago I had disabled the power-on tests and other boot delays to speed things up.  So I set those back to normal and tried again.  It still wouldn’t boot off the thumbdrive.  Another visit to the BIOS revealed that, even though I had it set to boot first off removable media and then try booting off the hard drive, for whatever reason PADDe was reading that USB thumbdrive much like a hard drive.  It showed up over in the hard drive settings as the secondary hard drive.  So I set it to be the primary hard drive, shifting the real hard drive to the secondary position, and tried again.  This time it worked.  PADDe slowly booted up off the thumbdrive and finally the Windows 7 installation was underway.

Generic Windows 7

The installation itself went like a breeze, although it took long enough that I wandered away, coming back to find PADDe was rebooting and restarting the installation process.  I wondered if there had been an error and the installation had aborted or if instead I’d missed instructions to remove the thumbdrive before the computer rebooted.  Gambling that the installation had gone fine and a normal reboot had accidentally retriggered the thumbdrive’s installation sequence, I cancelled the installation, yanked out the thumbdrive, and rebooted.  I was in luck – Windows 7 booted right up and started updating itself.  But while it was clearly running okay, I had none of PADDe’s special netbook features.  There was no option to switch from normal speed to overclocking to powersaving and the like.  The little buttons that adjust the screen settings, switch the power mode, and start applications with one click were not working.  So it was time to start installing the updated drivers I had downloaded from ASUS.

Reboot…reboot…reboot…

I inserted the thumbdrive with the ASUS drivers and went down their list, triggering one driver update after another.  Most of them wanted to reboot the computer after installing.  I decided to be patient and play it safe, rebooting when prompted.  That meant almost a dozen installs and reboots, which got old fast.  One driver didn’t work – the SATA AHCI driver referenced a controller that didn’t show up in PADDe’s Device Manager – but I’ve seen no ill effect.  The Hotkey Service upgrade, however, triggered a recurrent ACPI error box that reappeared whenever I dismissed it.  Hoping a later driver installation might fix this problem, I plowed on down the list.  But the final upgrades for the overclocking and BIOS upgrade utilities also generated errors, saying I did not have the right BIOS installed.

Fixing the Snafus

Scrounging around on the web, I found an upgrade to the ACPI that resolved that annoying error.  But I knew something was still amiss with the BIOS.  The quandary was that I could not load the ASUS Update utility, which is what you normally use to upgrade the BIOS.  Online I found a DOS mode utility for installing the BIOS, but it wouldn’t work under the Windows 7 DOS shell.  Other instructions spoke of making a bootable floppy disc with the BIOS update, the way we used to do things back in the dark ages, but that wasn’t an option – my only floppy disc drive is in the old desktop computer.  Finally I found instructions to download the latest BIOS version onto the computer and then copy the resulting .ROM file onto a USB drive, then rebooting while striking Shift-F2.  That almost worked – PADDe looked for the BIOS upgrade on the USB key, but then complained it couldn’t find ‘1000H.ROM’.  Okay – so it insists you give that name to the .ROM file?  I renamed the downloaded file on the USB key and that finally worked.  The BIOS was now compatible with Windows 7 and I could finally get the ASUS Update utility to install and so forth.

One More Thing…or Several

But even after all that, I still could not program the special buttons on PADDe.  The defaults are okay, except that one just wants to run Skype and I instead use it to start Firefox.  Yet another visit to the support forums yielded a copy of the missing utility and I finally had a fully functional netbook running Windows 7.  To top things off, I ran the Windows Easy Transfer and it downloaded files and settings off the thumbdrive back onto PADDe.  All that was left was to install some missing applications.  I stuck an Office 2007 DVD into my desktop computer and installed that onto PADDe over the wireless network.  Next will come Corel WordPerfect and a few other programs, and I’m all set.

Was It Worth It?

You betcha.  Windows 7 is a whopperload better than reliable old XP, and it was worth the struggle to get it working on my little netbook.  I haven’t noticed any speed issues and look forward to limiting my time on Windows XP to the machines at work.  Knowing how long it takes our district to upgrade our computers, I’ll still be an XP user for years to come, but not at home.

A Vector to Windows 7

My Old Pentium 4

It had been five years since I purchased Duotronic, my seventh primary desktop computer.  It still ran fairly reliably, in part thanks to a couple of disk crashes over the years which forced me to reinstall Windows XP and reset the “Death by Registry” clock.  Windows is notorious for how its registry gradually clogs up over time as one adds and removes programs, eventually making the system sluggish and unreliable.  But even with those refreshes, five years is a long time for any machine to be your primary system.  Old Duotronic was taking a long time to boot up, couldn’t handle large video edits very well, and its operating system was first released almost a decade ago.  So, with the advent of Apple’s OS X Snow Leopard and Microsoft’s Windows 7, I decided it was time to upgrade.

Long-Term Desktop Strategy

I’ve always purchased mid-range and higher DOS/Windows desktop systems that are good performers and can last me about five years.  Replacing my home desktop computer more often than twice per decade is simply too painful to contemplate, what with the gigabytes of files to transfer and the oodles of applications to install.  But, although buying a system that must last many years, I still stay a few notches below the bleeding edge.  The highest-end microprocessors never offer enough extra bang for their many extra bucks.

My old system had a 32-bit Pentium 4 chip with a clock speed of 3.6 GHz, near the 3.8 GHz maximum Intel was able to achieve with that architecture.  Since then, unable to continue to boost clock speed without major heat problems, Intel started producing dual-core and now quad-core chips where you get several processors on a chip coupled to ever-larger on-chip memory caches.  Thus they can outperform the old single-core systems despite their slower clock speeds.

64-bit Multiple-Core Systems

So I knew I’d buy a multiple-core system and I also wanted to shift to a 64-bit architecture.  My first two personal computers were 8-bit machines, then I had a 16-bit machine, and the next four were 32-bit systems.  The more bits, the more data the processor can shovel through per cycle and the more memory it can use.  32-bit systems can’t make use of more than four gigabytes of RAM, and my most recent system already had two gigabytes.  I didn’t want to be limited to only three or four gigabytes in my new one, and now both Apple and Microsoft have operating systems that support 64-bit applications and a 64-bit machine can theoretically access up to 16 exabytes of RAM.  Exabytes? An exabyte is roughly a billion gigabytes. I’ll settle for eight gigabytes of RAM for now, which is 262,144 times as much memory as my first computer!

The Apple Tax

My New Vector Z35

Next I needed to decide between an Apple Macintosh or a Microsoft Windows PC.  Apple’s laptop computers and all-in-one iMacs are highly praised, but one hears far less about their big desktop system, the Mac Pro.  I already have a fun little netbook and an iPhone 3G for my portable computing needs, so I’d be looking at an iMac or a Mac Pro.  I already have a good LCD monitor and wanted more power than the iMac could offer, but a quad-core Mac Pro with the RAM and mirrored hard drives I wanted would cost over $4,000.  Whoa, Nelly!  I paid $3,500 for a PC back in 1993, but I’m not about to pay that kind of price nowadays.  Especially since I’d still need to buy a copy of Windows 7 to put on the Mac Pro for dual-booting and would be purchasing a number of Mac applications to take advantage of OS X.  I suppose a guy who prefers Toyotas to BMWs will also choose Windows PCs over Apple desktops.

I’m No Gamer, But…

With Apple no longer a prospect, I shifted my attention to Dell.  I’ve used many of their systems over the years at work and home, but I wasn’t impressed by their pricing on a higher-end system.  PC World, PCMag.com and CNET all thought highly of Velocity Micro’s Edge Z30 gaming system.  I’m no gamer, but I was impressed by the reviews, even though that gaming system didn’t have the latest microprocessor nor did it offer RAID 1 hard drive mirroring for data redundancy.  A visit to Velocity Micro’s website showed I really needed their Vector Z35 system.  I configured it with a quad-core 2.66 GHz Intel i7-920 microprocessor, 8 GB of RAM, a 512 MB ATI graphics card, two one-terabyte 7200 rpm hard drives in RAID 1 configuration, a 20x DVD burner with LightScribe labeling, and Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit edition.  I’m reusing my 20” Samsung LCD monitor and my Dell surround speakers, so the system cost me $1,580 plus another $150 for Office 2007.  That handily beats Apple’s boutique pricing on the Mac Pro, although I would have liked to try OS X.

Inside my Z35

I like to name my systems after fictional computer scientists and the like.  Vector seemed the obvious choice this time, since it is the maker’s name for this model and Professor Vector was Hermione Granger’s arithmancy professor at Hogwarts.  Vector arrived on Thursday and is one big beast, rivaling my 1993 Forbin system in size if not weight.  And I’ve now traded in Duotronic’s rounded plastic Dell case for a big black metal box with a huge window in the side which lets you peer in at hardware lit up by colorful LEDs.  Even the keyboard is backlit by blue LEDs.  This system is a looker!

Windows 7 Is a Winner

But the best thing by far about my new system is Windows 7.  I’ve used Windows 1.02, 2.03, /286, /386, 3.0, 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, and XP on my past desktop machines, plus Windows 2000 at work.  Notice that I’ve somehow managed to avoid the much-maligned Windows ME and Vista, although the six versions I used before Windows for Workgroups 3.11 were pretty awful, and in those early days I regularly used DOS to avoid “Windoze”.  Windows 7, however, is simply superb.

Vista brought a cool new look to Windows, but the few times I used it on a friend’s systems it seemed quite sluggish, and its User Account Control was maddening with its incessant interruptions.  XP has its own stupidities such as the blithering balloon tips, which pop up and sit there until you close them, and the cancerous Notification Area with its metastasizing icons.  But User Account Control (UAC) was even worse, demanding your attention incessantly.  It reminded me of how the old ZoneAlarm firewall would not leave you alone.  I think UAC was designed by the same folks who created the maddening Clippy “assistant” in Microsoft Office, which did anything but help you keep working.  I’ve now installed a score of applications, and the UAC only briefly interrupted once each time to confirm I really wanted to let the program change the system.  This is a good security measure, what with all of the malware out there trying to infect your system.  Changes I myself initiate within Windows rarely trigger the revised UAC at its default setting.

The Windows 7 Taskbar

The most noticeable change in 7, beyond the improved appearance, is the new taskbar.  The Quick Launch area is replaced by pinning application icons into the taskbar.  By default the icons are big and unlabelled, and each instance of an application stacks under its icon.  This isn’t nearly as annoying as it was in XP, since now you can scroll your mouse over an icon and see pop-up live previews of the application’s windows, jumping to or closing one with a single click.  Windows highlights icons so you can see at a glance which applications are currently running and if they have multiple windows.  I loved the “Show Desktop” icon in XP, but it was missing from too many users’ Quick Launch areas.  Windows 7 has a permanent spot for this feature on the far right end of the taskbar.  It appears that Microsoft adapted the best ideas from Apple’s Dock to truly improve the taskbar’s functionality.

Libraries

Another nice addition is Libraries, where Windows can group all of your documents or pictures or whatever from a variety of directories into one view.  I’m an old-school DOS man, so I like knowing precisely where a file is in the disk structure.  This is still easy to figure out in Windows 7 once you realize “My Documents” has moved from “C:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents” to “C:\Users\username\Documents” and that the Documents Library can see into that directory as well as any other you specify, all in one view.  I expect rookies will sometimes get confused by Libraries, but power users will welcome the functionality.

Windows 7 Gadgets

Another fun and useful addition is Gadgets – little applications that run on your desktop.  I’ve used Yahoo Widgets on my XP system for years, and Vista had similar Gadgets yet by default associated them with an annoying sidebar.  Windows 7 immediately lets you plant a Gadget anywhere you want on the desktop and gets rid of the pesky Dock that plagues Yahoo Widgets.  The calendar and weather gadgets are attractive, and I like the CPU meter even though it is no more useful than the tachometer on my automatic-transmission automobile.

Adobe Crumbles to Windows Live Movie Maker

Microsoft kept Windows 7 light and spry by deliberately omitting some applications that came standard with Vista or even XP.  But you can download the ones you want from the Microsoft Live site.  I’ve been using their handy Windows Live Sync tool to keep files in sync at work and at home, and today I downloaded and used their new Windows Live Movie Maker to create a video, Waters of Autumn, of various creeks and brooks I’ve shot during my day hikes this fall.  I only shoot short clips on my handheld digital camera, but in the past I crashed Duotronic repeatedly trying to create videos from them using Adobe’s Premiere Elements 5.  I have learned to hate Adobe’s software, which is slow, bloated, and buggy.  I still use Acrobat at work and like doing some lighting touchups in Photoshop Elements 4 (I know, they’re up to version 8 these days), but I really wanted to avoid purchasing Premiere Elements 8, especially since PCMag.com reported their beta review copy had bugs, even as they rewarded it their coveted Editor’s Choice.

I had good luck on a recent trip using XP’s Movie Maker on my little netbook, so I thought I would see if the new free Windows Live Movie Maker could serve my needs.  As Waters of Autumn shows, it works just fine, although I had to use my trusty ThumbsPlus to paste in the Creative Commons logo before importing a picture for the end credit slide.  The AutoMovie feature is especially nice for quickly adding transitions and the like.  And it has built-in YouTube export capability and a plug-in will let you quickly export to Facebook as well.  Now they need to add one for Flickr and I’m set.  This little program isn’t nearly as powerful, nor as cumbersome and frustrating, as Premiere Elements.  As the wonderful Jerry Pournelle would say, “Recommended.”

I’m also using the Windows Live Writer to compose this blog post.  It interfaces to WordPress and other blog services, and is a much better editor than the native WordPress one.

A Slow Wizard

The most annoying thing about my upgrade was that it took Microsoft’s File and Settings Transfer Wizard over twelve hours to bring my documents over from Duotronic to Vector via the wired router connection.  But that did bring over more than 400 gigabytes of data with few problems.  Why so much data?  Almost half is a friend’s backups which had overwhelmed the old external drives on hand.  Plus my extensive (and entirely legal, thank you very much) music and audiobook collection takes up another 100 gigabytes, there are over 40 gigabytes of photographs, and so on.

My new camera

I’ve been doing a lot of digital photography on my day hikes this year and I’ve been posting the best of them to Flickr.  That exposure (pun intended) has led to some of my photographs, which I put out under a Creative Commons license, being used for various websites and even music CD artwork.  Friends have been somewhat surprised to find out that my camera was a miniscule Canon Elph point-and-shoot with limited resolution and zoom.  A friend loaned me her Canon superzoom camera last weekend, and I greatly appreciated its 10x zoom with image stabilization.  So I decided I’d ask for the positively reviewed Panasonic DMC-ZS3 for Christmas, with its Leica lens, 12x zoom with stabilization, and compact, light body.  But then my credit card company sent me a flyer urging me to use some of my WorldPoints.  I’d forgotten about them entirely, as I’ve never used them in the many years I’ve had the card.  I was shocked to discover how many points I had, more than enough to buy the camera, with a friend buying some accessories as an early Christmas present.  One problem with the old Duotronic computer was that the external card reader I’d bought a few years ago couldn’t handle the large SDHC cards these new cameras use.  So I was glad to find today, when loading in my first photos from the new camera, that the new computer’s built-in multi-card reader rapidly imported pictures from a 16 GB SDHC card.

Tweaking the Transfer

I was careful to deauthorize my iTunes music on the old machine, since some of those files are still DRMed, and told iTunes to organize and consolidate its files before making the transfer.  It all came through okay, although iTunes did lose its database pointers to a couple dozen files, forcing me to relocate them for it manually.  They transferred over; iTunes just didn’t know where they were.  The transfer wizard got most of the application settings over okay, although when installing older applications I sometimes had to copy their files over from the hidden “C:\Documents and Settings\username” directory in Windows XP to the hidden “C:\Users\username\AppData\Local” or “C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming” directories in Windows 7.  Another hiccup came when trying to sync my iPhone to the new computer.  It complained that the Audible audiobooks were not authorized for that computer.  I’d forgotten they are separatedly DRMed.  iTunes claimed the computer was authorized with Audible, but that was an artifact of the imported settings.  I couldn’t get it to work until I deauthorized the old computer’s Audible account and then tried again to play an audiobook in iTunes on the new computer.  That let me re-enter my Audible account information and authorize the new machine.  As the folks at Buzz Out Loud are fond of saying, DRM only annoys law-abiding users, since pirates know how to defeat it and get their music and books DRM-free via BitTorrent sites.  Count me as annoyed, but not enough to become a pirate, arrrrr!

Mozilla Thunderbird

I flirted with the idea of abandoning Mozilla Thunderbird and just using the online Gmail interface for email, but I like having my own local copy of my emails and dislike the inherent slight delays for web-based email access, so I stuck with Thunderbird, which I interface to Gmail via IMAP.  An annoyance under Windows XP was that my employer’s Outlook WebAccess client was incompatible with the new Internet Explorer 8, and its Firefox interface was limited.  So I had downgraded XP to Internet Explorer 7 to get the full functionality out of Outlook WebAccess.  Thankfully the Windows 7 iteration of Internet Explorer 8 works better, albeit still with some bugs, with the WebAccess client. It is a shame Microsoft can’t get their act together on this core functionality – more power to Gmail, I suppose!  I still use Firefox for all other web browsing, invoking the IE Tab plug-in when I need to view an online PowerPoint, such as my own Failure By Design presentation.

Driving the Printer Crazy

On the hardware front, Windows 7 can make use of Vista drivers.  I searched online for Windows 7 drivers for my Hewlett Packard Photosmart 7960 inkjet printer and ScanJet G4010 scanner, but they said to use the installation defaults, and Windows 7 installed them without a hitch.  The scanner interface is much more attractive than the XP version, and has the same design as the improved Camera wizard, letting you automatically name imported pictures and scans with the date and a tag.  Some vendors will take advantage of the new Device Stage feature, but I’m quite pleased with how even my older hardware works with Windows 7.

That’s not to say I didn’t encounter one hardware problem.  While the inkjet installed just fine, things did not go as smoothly for my Brother HL-5150D laser printer.  When I plugged it in, Windows 7 did not recognize it, and all I could find at Brother’s website was a 64-bit Vista driver.  Installing it with that driver left Windows 7 confused about the printer’s connection, and in desperation I picked one of the USB ports from a list.  That left Windows 7 utterly confused about whether that port was for the HP inkjet or the Brother laser printer – obviously I made a poor choice.  Printing became unreliable on both units and the Troubleshooter in Devices and Printers did its best but could only get one printer working at a given time.  After some reboots and continuing trouble, I finally yanked both printers out, removed them from Devices and Printers, and reinstalled them both, being careful to pick a different USB port when dealing with the Brother.  That finally set things right.

Happy Computing

It was worth the weekend to set up the new system.  I thought the initial transfer would only take overnight on Friday, but its glacial pace left me time to go on a long walk on the Pathfinder Parkway on Saturday morning, and a rainy Sunday gave me time to create this absurdly long blog post about my experience.  I’m so delighted with Windows 7 that I’ve bought a Family Pack to install on good old Duotronic as well as my netbook.  Windows 7 runs like a charm on this hot new system, and I’m interested to see the hit it takes when running on a five-year-old desktop and a tiny netbook.

Trapper Kindle

Regular readers know I love my Kindles, but here’s a possible improvement from lunchbreath: The Trapper Kindle.

Trapper Kindle

Take One Tablet to Feel Better?

Gizmodo's vision of an Apple Tablet

Since the summer of 2008 my mobile computing experience has improved tremendously thanks to my netbook, iPhone, and Kindles.  My netbook was a tiny lightweight marvel on my recent trip to Oregon, and I used it to daily process and post photographs, blog entries, and short video clips.  But I don’t like to use it for reading or web browsing at a restaurant or even at home, preferring something more the size of my Kindle.

My Kindle seems ideal for reading novels and long internet articles I’ve saved with Instapaper.  Its larger non-backlit screen is far easier on my aging eyes than the iPhone.  But as a web browser the Kindle is an abomination.  Throughout my long trip to Oregon, I never used the Kindle, instead using the iPhone when out on the town or trail and switching to the netbook in the hotel rooms.  But I would have enjoyed having something the size of the Kindle with the iPhone’s browsing prowess and computing power when out on the town and also here back at home around the house.

I’ve hacked my Apple TV to attempt to get decent couch surfing, but that flopped.  The hacks make the Apple TV hesitate and stutter and I have not found a nicely-sized radio frequency keyboard with trackpad or trackball.  I have a Gyration unit, but grabbing its gyroscopic mouse to navigate and also trying to balance its accompanying keyboard is a pain.  Since the only real use I’ve made of the Apple TV hack has been to watch Leo Laporte’s streaming video webcasts on the Apple TV, and Apple has improved its Remote application on the iPhone to provide improved control of the Apple TV, I’m tempted to dump the hack to improve the unit’s performance.

So I’m excited by the prospect of an Apple Tablet, which is probably coming in 2010.  If it is the size of the Kindle but has the multi-touch interface of the iPhone and can run iPhone applications, I’m sold.  Obviously it will have WiFi, but the unknown is the cellular connection.  Will it have a WiFi-only version, like an iPod Touch, and also a subsidized 3G version like the iPhone?  If so, I might opt for the WiFi-only option.  I envision using it most around the house for couch surfing and sometimes at a WiFi-enabled restaurant.  It would be far more convenient to have a 3G cellular connection for it, but I’m not willing to fork over another $70/month to AT&T or some other carrier for that.

I’ve written before of the similar CrunchPad unit, but as its rumored cost rises to that of a netbook and with its singular focus on web browsing at the expense of the power of iPhone-style computing applications, I’m leaning toward paying what will no doubt be a high premium for an Apple Tablet’s greater power and flexibility.

UPDATE:  3.5 months later the CrunchPad project went belly-up.  I kept using my netbook for couch surfing.

Oregon Trails 2009 Tools and Ratings

In this final post about Oregon Trails 2009, I rate my accommodations and describe the tools I used to plan and execute this successful adventure.  See my earlier 10 blog posts for daily descriptions of my journey about northwest Oregon.

Hotels and Motels

Here is my personal rating of the hotels and motels I used on this trip, with true daily cost, from best to worst:

1. Fireside Motel in Yachats ($124.20; gorgeous location)
2. Microtel in Seaside ($97.12; continental breakfast, convenient, and quite pleasant)
3. Quality Inn in Bend ($120.99; continental breakfast, hot tub in the bathroom)
4. Best Western Agate Beach Inn in Newport ($163.09; nice beach location, but hotel beginning to show some wear)
5. Motel 6 in Lincoln City ($76.24; convenient and clean)
6. North Portland Motel 6 ($67.49; lousy location, but nice room)
7. Downtown Portland Motel 6 ($67.49; convenient location, decent room)
8. Motel 6 at The Dalles ($68.66; shabby and a bit nasty)

All of the establishments provided free wi-fi, showing that even the budget motels have caught up with modern times.  Note that my ratings don’t take into account in-room entertainment, since only once on the entire trip did I turn on a television.  (Those who know me won’t be surprised at that.)

Planning the Trip

This trip was fairly easy to plan, since I’d been on a long loop through western Oregon in 2006 guided by the AAA TourBook and Oregon: An Explorer’s Guide by Mark Highberger.  I consulted the latter a couple of times on this trip, but truly essential to this hiking-focused trip was the excellent Hiking the Oregon Coast by Lizann Dunegan.

Google searches turned up various sites to fill in details on some hikes, particularly the Eagle Creek hike along the Columbia River.  I used Tripit.com to share my trip itinerary, including hotel and airplane info, with friends and family and for easy access from my iPhone.  I also took along printouts of my reservations since technology can fail.  I booked the plane tickets, car rental, and hotel rooms online ahead of time, sometimes using AAA’s website and other times going directly to a vendor’s website.

Executing the Trip

Restaurants

While on the road Yelp.com was a godsend for restaurant recommendations, and easily accessed with my iPhone as needed.  Only one place I picked through Yelp didn’t meet expectations, while others were unexpectedly great, sometimes exceeding anything I’ve found back in Oklahoma.

Navigation

Trixie the GPS for navigation was of course instrumental to helping me go solo on this trip. I never consulted a paper map, and only in Bend did one recent road change cause consternation.  I’m grateful that GPS units now have large touchscreens – they are much easier to use than my old Garmin Quest unit was.

My dayhike attire: Tilley hat, small backpack, cargo shorts, trekking pole, hiking boots and socks.

Day Hikes

I don’t hike for more than seven hours at a stretch, so I use a tiny backpack that can hold three water bottles, trail snacks, hand cleanser, and my personal technology devices.  I prefer cargo shorts since they provide easy access to the camera, iPod, and BluePack powerpack.  Next time I might pack light cargo pants as well, since I missed those extra pockets when wearing jeans.  I forgot to pack a first aid kit, although I never needed one.

This was the first trip I used Swiss Gear Lighted Hiking Pole, 2 Pack trekking poles, Columbia Sportswear Men’s Coretek WP Hiking Boots, and Thorlo Men’s Coolmax Lt Hiker Crew Socks.  Given that I took three hikes of over 10 miles, sometimes on treacherous terrain, I was very glad to have all three this time out.  Trekking poles that collapse are important to me, since I don’t use them all of the time.  But they greatly improve your stability on rough terrain, allow you to use your arms to help propel you up a steep trail and cushion your knees when descending.  The hiking shoes helped my feet hurt less on long hikes, although I was still grateful for my ibuprofen tablets on the trail when the aches set in.  The light hiking socks seemed to help somewhat, but I don’t think they were cost effective given that I refuse to wear a pair longer than one day at a time and don’t like wasting time with a laundromat on a trip.  And of course I wore my Tilley hat throughout the hikes.

Netbook and iPhone

For photo and video editing and uploading and blog posts I travelled with my ASUS Eee PC 1000H.  I loved its small size and found it quite adequate.  I uploaded all photos and video to my Flickr account, with a different set for each day, and then linked to those photos and the set’s slideshow in my WordPress blog posts.  My Facebook account imports my WordPress blog posts and Brightkite and Audioboo post to my Facebook profiles.  My FriendFeed and Twitter accounts draw in turn from my Facebook posts.

Tracking with Brightkite and Audioboo

I used my iPhone on the road to get information and post updates to Brightkite so loved ones could track my location through the day since it was a solo trip.  Brightkite posts your position with a map and lets you include a brief note or photo if you like.  The iPhone app crashed sometimes and was balky on the slow Edge network in most of Oregon – it still needs improvement, but it worked well enough.  I used the Audioboo app a few time to post audio updates, but didn’t find it all that compelling.

Photography

This trip was all about photos, and I am still using my old Canon Powershot SD300 4MP Digital Elph Camera with 3x Optical Zoom (don’t buy it – that model is WAY out of date!) supplemented occasionally by my iPhone 3G.  The PowerShot also takes adequate movie clips for my purposes.  The old 4.0 megapixel camera has plenty of resolution since I’m mainly posting to the web and my living room Apple TV, and I greatly value its tiny size and ease of use over a big digital SLR.  A larger camera with a big lens would allow for better zoom, depth-of-field effects, much better flash photography and would reduce low-light photography problems.  But I don’t want to hassle with a big camera, particularly on day hikes, and I don’t really want to fiddle around with camera settings too much.  I’d rather find something great to shoot, work out how best to compose the shot, git ‘er done and move on.

Learning While Travelling

On the trail, in the car, and on the plane I kept myself entertained with my Apple iPod nano 8 GB Black (2nd Generation).  I pre-loaded it with a variety of lectures from The Teaching Company and podcasts, liking to learn as I hike.  I also threw in some relaxing songs for the trail.

GPS on the Trail

I tried using the GPS MotionX app on the iPhone on the trail, but it had trouble getting a consistent GPS signal and couldn’t download a map without cell service.  So I really only made good use of it on a couple of the hikes.  If you really want to hike with GPS, you need a more sensitive dedicated hiking unit.

Battery Life Issues

While the old iPod Nano had plenty of battery life, the iPhone is a power hog, especially when you are surfing the web and using its GPS unit.  The very convenient solution was my Dexim BluePack S3 for iPhone/iPod, which was easy to charge up in the hotel room and could recharge the iPhone multiple times in a day if needed, as well as charge the iPod.  It has cabling so you can charge the BluePack and also charge your other devices while only using one wall jack, a big plus in hotel rooms.  The only drawback is there is no easy way to strap the BluePack onto the iPhone while charging it on the trail, so I just slipped them into a pocket side-by-side, sometimes linking them together with a rubber band.  If you carry an iPhone on the road, the Dexim unit is highly recommended.

What I Did Not Use

I didn’t have time to read much except during the plane flight.  So I shouldn’t have bothered bringing my Kindle – the Kindle app on the iPhone would have sufficed.  I also shouldn’t have bothered packing a car charger for the iPhone, since charging the Dexim BluePack each night meant I had plenty of power available during the day.  I also had no use for my iPod/iPhone cassette adapter, since the rental car had an audio input jack.

This post concludes my 2009 Oregon Trails.  In addition to the photos from this trip, Flickr has photos from my 2006 trip to Oregon and my trips to Seattle and Victoria, BC in 2005 and 2008.