Notebook | Technology Blog

Notebook Hardware Control

December 14th, 2008

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When you are working with notebooks on the road you have to ensure that you make the best of the remaining battery power. Nothing’s more annoying than a notebook that is automatically powering down because of a battery running out of power. One way to take care of this problem is to reduce the power needed when working with a notebook running on battery.

One of the bet ways to save battery is by reducing the power of several core components such as the processor or graphic adapters.

Notebook Hardware Control is a free software program that has been designed to take care of the needs of notebook users. Power management is however only one - very extensive - option of the software.

Track the location of your notebook with Adeona

July 14th, 2008

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Adeona is a free Open-Source software that works completely independent. The application is running in the background and automatically recognizes a change of location by analyzing the network connection of the notebook. If someone would connect to a WLAN the software would automatically do IP lookups to determine the current location of the notebook.

Those information would then be compiled, encrypted and the OpenDHT distributed storage service is used to store location update of the notebook. Those location updates can then be retrieved from another computer revealing information about IP addresses (internal and external), the time, access points and nearby routers.

This information can be filtered to display only data of a specific date range. This should be tested at least once to make sure everything has been setup correctly.

Optimize Firefox For Low Traffic Volumes

July 13th, 2008

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I sometimes connect my Nokia N73 mobile phone to my Toshiba notebook to connect to the Internet and do some urgent stuff like checking and replying to mails, writing articles on my websites or doing research. I do not have a flatrate for the mobile phone which means that I had to chose between a time or volume based account. I decided to go for the volume based account which basically means that I’m charged for every Megabyte of data that I transfer in either direction.

Bandwidth is normally not a huge deal on my local computer and I do not pay that much attention to the amount of data that gets transferred which was a huge problem at first when I started using the mobile phone and notebook combination. It’s an unusual situation but I managed to adapt quickly.

I went on a quest to optimize firefox for low traffic volumes meaning that everything that was not necessary to grab the information of a website had to go. Here is what I changed:

Ask The Readers: Mobile Device Recommendation

July 12th, 2008

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I want to buy a new mobile device and think that the best way to find one that suits my needs is to ask the readers here at Ghacks. If a device like this exists you will surely know about it recommend the best fit for my needs. I will start this article by describing what I want to do with the mobile device and what it has to support. Those are the two most important aspects. At the end I will list those things that I do not need necessarily and that I do not need at all.

Since it is a mobile device I would like to be able to check my emails, manage my web server using SSH, connect to the Internet and write articles for my websites. The device has to support WLAN and make use of a QWERTY keyboard. I could live with an add-on keyboard that has to be purchased separately.

The device should be lightweight. I’m not sure if all those sub-notebooks like the Asus EeePC or MSI Wind fit the bill, prefer something for the pocket instead. It does not have to be state of the art as long as it does the job. The performance has to be sufficient for the tasks and there should not be huge delays because of a lack of CPU power or system memory.

Install the latest Nvidia Drivers on your Notebook

July 9th, 2008

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Graphic card drivers for notebooks are usually not updated that often by the manufacturer of the Notebook. Nvidia on the other hand does not provide access to many graphic card drivers for Notebook graphic cards on their website and the desktop graphic cards cannot be installed on notebooks.

The guys from Laptop Video 2 Go have come up with a solution to this problem. They provide an inf generator and driver downloads so that most notebook users can updated their notebook’s graphic card by downloading those files from the website. The modded inf files not only work with most notebook graphic cards but do provide access to several hidden features as well that fix issues and add tweaks to the drivers.

Basically the user selects a driver that he wants to install, downloads the modded inf file from the website, replaces the inf from the driver package with the modded one and starts the installation of the driver.

Easy WiFi Radar

May 24th, 2008

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I have been playing around with a software called Easy WiFi Radar on my notebook for quite some time which is probably the easiest way to find and use open wireless connections. The main advantage of the tool is its simplicity. All that needs to be done on the part of the user is to click the button of the application to start it.

It displays a radar like image with different colors dots. Green dots mark free wireless connections while red and yellow ones mark inaccessible ones. Once a green spot has been discovered by the software it automatically tries to connect to that Wireless access point to access the Internet.

It’s opening the default browser and loading a test website. A message stating the success will be shown if the connection was successful. It is truly amazing how easy it is to find open wireless access points in towns. Should be harder if you are living in a rural area though.