ACER ASPIRE 4810T-8702 NOTEBOOK

Acer has come out recently with several smaller notebooks that all fall under their 8 hour battery, Go All Day, model line. These nifty new notebooks come in several screen sizes but the model that I am talking about today has a 14” display, 250gb hard drive, 802.11a/b/g/Draft-N WiFi, 3GB DDR3 Memory, Intel GMA 4500MHD Video, and an Intel Core 2 Solo SU3500 Processor (1.4GHz, 800MHz FSB).

It is part of their Ultra-thin (<1 inch) 8 Hour Green Battery Life Systems. It is very light just a little over 4lbs. Great sound and decent video specifications. Priced at around $849 it comes with XP-Pro and is ready to be part of your Business Network Life!

Some of the key features that caught my eye:

1. Thermal efficient cooling – you won’t have fans kicking on. Because of the system  components are all energy efficient you don’t have as much heat built up inside the unit that needs cooled down.
2. High Definition Screen and HDMI output port. Hook this up to your big screen TV though one of its HDMI ports and see the great graphic display.
3. 3 USB Ports, Sound in and out, Video Camera and External Microphone
4. Ultra Thin and Light – For a 14 inch notebook this unit is very, very thin and light and still has the optical drive built-in. Take a look at the picture on the right showing the frontal view. The phone on top of the unit is a new iPhone 3GS which is sleek and thin in its own right.
5. Work all day on an 8 hour battery charge. I love the freedom this feature gives you.

This system is a perfect work companion for the mobile office worker who needs a machine that will do the work and provide all the extras in a small reasonably priced machine. Thumbs up on this sexy new Acer Notebook!

Launch of the new TechSmith Education Community Blog and Website

If I were still in education I would be using the TechSmith products all of the time. Even so, I use some aspect of Camtasia or Jing everyday whether it is to include static image in my proposals or blog notes or to create a quick clip on how to do something on the computer with in a program. I love the ease of use of their products and the integration between them. Camtasia and Jing especially have become my mainstays for quick presentations of products and teaching our clients how to use their computers and software. It is true that a picture is worth a thousand words and when you can include the words as well with your narration then you have everything you need in one package.

With the launch of  these two new sites, as an educator you will have more information that you can take advantage of. Be sure to contact us for special pricing and quantity discounts. If you haven’t tried any of these products yet you can get a free download on their site.

Products:

Camtasia Studio Screen Recording & Presentation

Record your screen simply. Add professional polish. Produce stunning videos at any size. Delight viewers on the Web, CD, or portable devices. Train. Present. Persuade.

Free Camtasia Studio Trial

Snagit Screen Capture & Sharing

Take a “snapshot” of anything on your PC screen. Send it, store it, turn it into a detailed graphic, find it later. Snagit makes it easy.

Free Snagit Trial

Camtasia Relay Lecture Capture and Presentation Recording for Organizations

Camtasia Relay allows you to record and automatically produce and distribute any presentation, meeting, lecture, tutorial or demo, and post it for all to see. Give your audience full access to your content anytime, anywhere.

Free Camtasia Relay Trial

Jing Simple Capture with Instant Sharing

Use Jing to snap a picture or make a quick video of anything on your computer screen...then share it instantly! Learn more.

Screencast.com Content Hosting

Host images, video, and pretty much anything else, while maintaining ownership. Share what you want, how and when you choose. Upload. Manage. Share. Use Screencast.com for free: Sign up now »

Let me know if you  have any questions about these products.

How to Series – OneNote – Updating auto capture locations

Every month I update where my OneNote Captures will automatically default to when capturing a webpage or Outlook email. The following video will show you what I do each month so that I everything works just the way I like it too!

How To Series - OneNote Updating auto capture locations

Back to School – Should you get a Notebook or should you get a combination Netbook and Desktop?

We have been discussing this kind of configuration internally for a long time and I have personally been using this type of setup for myself. I have desktops both at work and at home and I have found that for the times that I need to have a little bit more mobility that a Netbook is filling the need just fine. I feel the netbooks, because of their lightweight design, probably will have less chance of being dropped then a large notebook and will not break your child’s back as they are going from class to class. The 10 inch size screens give you a pretty good display and for the things that they would be used for primarily they will probably fit the bill just nicely. Then if you student is needs the use of a more powerful workstation or larger screen display the desktop will be there for them in their dorm room. Moving data between systems has become even easier with the online cloud storage available from so many sources. So as long as you have internet access you have access to all of your data.

Pricing? A notebook will cost you between $700 and $1500 depending on the model and configuration you choose. A Netbook starts at $300 and you can get a decent workstation for between $500 - $900 dollars. This gives your student the best of both worlds.

Windows 7 arrives: The time is finally ripe

Nearly three years after the debut of the botched Windows Vista, enough is right with Windows 7 to unseat an aging Windows XP

By Randall C. Kennedy | InfoWorld

If you are wondering what reasons you should think about to decide if you should move up in equipment and into the soon to be released Windows 7 operating system, read this article. Infoworld’s Randall Kennedy wrote a great piece describing the history of Windows 7, its XP and Vista beginnings, and how its new interface and functionality can benefit you in your computing experience.

Some key features that I find extremely useful:

• Search Field – The integrated search field in explorer windows and in the Start Menu is fast and extremely useful. Whether you are looking for a document, email, note or a program, just start typing some key words to search on and see what pops up. I use this feature to pull up programs that I don’t use often so don’t have on my taskbar. Once you get used to using it you will never want to go back.
• Explorer Window Breadcrumbs – we have seen this advancement in many programs. This is another one of those things that once you begin using it you don’t want to lose it, and if it is not part of a program you get angry because it is such a useful function. Each of the arrows above points to a point on the bar that I can click on to go back instantly to that folder level. Simple, fast and easy, just what we want. The points build as I am clicking into each folder so it is laying the crumbs for be to be able to follow back from whence I came from.
• Taskbar and Aero Glass – one of the Aero Glass features that has been better utilized is on the Taskbar. As you are sliding across the icons on your Taskbar you will see a representation of the applications that are currently running in each application program. Take a look at the video below to see how this works.

• Pinning – we have seen the concept of pinning items to your Start Menu before but now you are able to do this same thing with Taskbar. Simply right click on an start menu application icon and you have the choice to pin it to your taskbar. Now you have single click access to your favorite programs.This is not limited to just programs, you  can pin documents and other utilities to the Taskbar as well. In XP I made extreme use of the Quick Launch bar, this feature puts this kind of function on steroids.

One of the things that we have seen is the increase in speed when accessing some of our older applications, even over XP. Now we are attributing this to the way Windows 7 as changed the way it accesses database structure from a server but in reality all we know is that it runs like a speed demon. The tests performed by InfoWorld Labs showed greater memory use and slower speeds when compared to XP and slightly overall performance over the current releases of Vista. But in most cases, you will not be putting this program on your older equipment but moving it onto new equipment as you are refreshing. Microsoft in all their meetings with us has stated that you really want to run this program in 64-bit mode and take advantage of how inexpensive memory has become. So if you are configuring a system, don’t skimp on RAM.

Hardware compatibility – having been built from the Vista kernel, Windows 7 doesn’t have the lack of hardware drivers that gave Vista such a black eye when it first came out. Two years after Vista’s initial release hardware vendors have caught up with drives that support both Vista and Windows 7 quite adequately. In one of my previous articles I mentioned how when installing Windows 7 on my Netbook I didn’t have to go out and search for a single driver to get all of the hardware components functioning. It was great. So this is now pretty much a non-issue.

Third Party Application Compatibility – Microsoft has finally recognized that Windows XP is still the Gold Standard for application compatibility and stability. While we saw many programs failing in the Vista environment, Windows 7’s application support has been much improved. Windows 7 key is VXP or Virtual Windows XP Mode which provides a virtualized WXP image for running applications in their native environment. So if an application doesn’t work right in XP compatibility mode then you can virtualize it. “Still, VXP is compelling in that it provides a fully licensed copy of Windows XP that you can run alongside your Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, or Ultimate license. And it's free.”

Going back to hardware. With the new norm in systems being multi-core (dual and quad for now and more coming down the road) and much larger standard memory configurations, you will want in employ an operating system that uses the these and many more hardware configurations. Windows 7 takes advantage of multi-core systems better than XP with its base architecture. You will be better leveraged for the future applications taking full advantage of these capabilities.

We all loved XP but once you begin to work with Windows 7 I think you will be won over.

How it all came together

The Issue: trying to automate all of my different blog postings, picture uploads and other content to one feed location for me to work with. I have two Twitter accounts bappleby (personal) and bobstechtalk (associated with my professional side) and I have one Facebook account Bob Appleby that I wanted all my info to post to. By using friendfeed, I was able to combine several feed services to be pulled and included in this one area. There are currently 58 services that have defined on Friendfeed for you to use to do this. Some of them like the BLOG service, will allow you to add any blog site to your feed which is how I got my Squarespace and LiveSpaces accounts posting. You can also add Twitter and Facebook feeds but be careful if you are planning to pull or push to either of those sites from here, you don’t want to create an endless circle of posts between all of these sites.

Here is a complete list of all of the services currently available through Friendfeed:

Once I had my Friendfeed collecting data correctly I was able to go to Facebook and set up my wall  to pull the RSS feed from Friendfeed automatically. You will find this under the options link right under the share button for posting new feeds.  When you click on options you will get a new link in the same place called Settings. Click on the Settings link and a new dialog box will appear.

You are allowed one Blog/RSS site that you can pull from. Click on that from the list and you can paste the location you want to pull from. I posted the RSS from my Friendfeed into the box and it pulled it down just fine.

 http://friendfeed.com/?auth=PLaYbotBMT4Mia4b&amp;format=atom

Press the Update button and you have it saved and you will see your Facebook Wall populate from your feed from Friendfeed.

Now I mentioned that I am also feeding Twitter. I am doing this from two different programs. One, Friendfeed allows me to post from the different feeds I am pulling from to a single Twitter account. So I set up the Twitter tool in Friendfeed and setup that just my personal blog and SmugMug entries were posted to Twitter from here.

I then set up Twitterfeed pointing to BobsTechTalk at Squarespace and created entries to push posts to both my personal and professional Twitter accounts.

You have a few settings that you can add to the post as shown below.

If there anymore tweaks that I find, I will post them here as update comments. Hope this helps you out with your internet publishing.

OneNote Cut and Paste Features

I have created a simple video showing the cut and paste features of OneNote and show how the search function works on text vs. an image file containing text.

In Office Support Tools

Are you  in charge of creating your organization’s employee manuals and other support tools? You may want to consider adding Video support to your portfolio. There are so many tools out there that will allow you to accomplish this, it is very hard to make the choice of the right ones to use. Let me make a few suggestions for you to look at.

TechSmith is a company that has been producing software to help educators and support personnel to provide simple, professional looking video for quite a few years. I use several of their products to help me produce my   How To  Videos as well as short videos I use to respond to my clients at the office.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words but what is a video worth? I said I used several of TechSmith’s tools and this first one I am going to talk about is free. The Jing Project is a program that is offered by TechSmith that will integrate back into  their other products. Jing has two components that will help you with your presentations. The first is a static screen capture. In Windows 7 you have that component as part of the operating system but you if you are not running Windows 7 you are missing it. There are many times when I am working with an article or proposal that I need to be able to capture part of screen display like I did with all of the images on this page. It is so much easier to be able to call on Jing to capture a little bit of the screen real-estate that I want to include without having to come back and work with my cropping tools to get it just right.

The second component of Jing is it’s video capture. While this may sound like the same thing, it most assuredly is not. With Jing I can capture all of my screen changes and narrate the subject matter at the same time and produce a quick, up to 5 minute presentation on the fly. The only negative, you have to do it in one take or begin again from scratch.

Camtasia Studio is the paid version of Jing on steroids. This product lets you take the next step  forward and create content with much better focus and give you the ability to tie multiple videos and stills together and to overlap them all with a narrative that you can add after the video collection is complete. The big difference here is that ability to edit your video.  Camtasia Studio will allow you to take video that you capture with Jing, Camtasia Studio or from some other static image or video sources and work with the content to achieve your creative result.

This leads me to the last component of the TechSmith Family that I use called Screen Cast. If you sign up with Screen Cast you will be able to easily store and serve up you video creations to the inhabitants of the Wild and Wooly Web (WWW). 

So if you are interested in seeing these programs in action, don’t hesitate making an appointment with me to see them. I will be more than happy to show them off and help you decide if they are the right fit for your business.