laptop

I had a chance to stand in line and look at the iPad^® this past week. As I always am with Apple^® products, I was very impressed with its quality and its display. It seemed to be an iPod Touch^® with a monster steroid problem, a little big to clip to your belt and too limited to replace your laptop.

Other than the ability to use its 802.11n Wi-Fi connection (and optional 3G) to download books in full color (as opposed to Kindle^®’s gray-scale), surf the Internet, do email, watch videos, listen to music and download Apps from the Apps Store, I’m not sure what to think of it. It still won’t multitask and doesn’t support Adobe^® Flash^® which is a disappointment. If you properly synch it, it will do the same calendar functions as your iPhone, BlackBerry^® or other phone so, I ask, is it the future or just another half-step?

I’d like Certified Legal Nurse Consultants to let me know what they think of the iPad and how they might apply it to their legal nurse consulting business, versus personal use. One thing I came up with would be its terrific ability to show graphics to an attorney-client when trying to explain an injury. I’m sure Apple will eventually authorize Skype for the iPad – that’ll change how we make video calls. What can you think of?

If anyone out there plans on buying an iPad, click here to comment and tell me. If you’re dead-set against buying one, click here to comment and let me know why not. Either way, I’d love to hear what uses the CLNC^® community will come up with for this nearly way-cool device.

Keep on techin’,

Tom

The other day, an Institute staff member came into my office and complained that her computer was running slowly. I asked her if it was slower than normal and she looked at me sort of funny, then said yes. We went back to her desk to assess things. She had her usual 30 programs running with more open windows than a New Orleans nunnery in the summer.

I then asked when she had last turned off her computer. This was a trick question because policy at the Institute is to let computers run overnight (to download updates, etc. that our techies shove out) and then restart them every Friday at the end of the day. That way when staff members log in on Monday, the installation process is either complete or it goes pretty quickly. She told me it had been two to three weeks since the last shut-down. Hearing that, I immediately told her that both she and her computer had memory leaks and she needed to shut the computer down for at least two minutes, then restart it.

Next, I went back to my office to sit on my laurels and wait for her call. A few minutes later she called to let me know it was running as fast as it used to with no hint of residual slowness. My memory-leak diagnosis was right.

One of the issues that legal nurse consultants will run into are memory leaks (both with themselves and their computers). The brief and overly simple explanation is that the longer a computer runs without being restarted and also the more programs you have open at the same time, the better the chance that some program, driver or piece of hardware won’t let go of its allocated memory when you’re done with it. You will not be aware this is happening, but your available memory can be eaten up by programs or devices that technically aren’t in use, causing your computer to run more slowly.

The way that a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant cures this leak is to first, make sure to have the most current versions of all software and second, to restart your computer on a regular basis. Whether you have a desktop or laptop for your legal nurse consulting business, my advice remains the same. Shut it down at least once a week or whenever it starts to run slower than a teenager mowing the lawn. I know a lot of laptop users who simply put their computer into sleep mode or hibernation. That won’t solve the memory leak issue. You need to shut it down and let everything clear out of the system.

If your computer is still slow, follow the steps in my earlier Tech Tip on cleaning up your computer system. In fact, this should be one of the first things you do in this new year (even before you get around to breaking your resolutions).

Keep on techin’,

Tom

I don’t like restraints; I’m a mobile user. I can pick up and go at a moment’s notice and I don’t like to be held down. Vickie snaps her fingers and I say, “How far are we going and how light are we packing?” That means my laptop and wireless card go with me just about everywhere. I use them on planes, trains and even in speeding automobiles (with someone else driving). I use my laptop at home, at work and at the CLNC^® 6-Day Certification Seminars. I also use it at Starbucks^®, preferring the security of my own wireless card’s network to one that might possibly be spoofed by some villain.

At each of these locations, I have a different configuration for the program icons on my desktop. What this means is that I have my mobile (laptop only) configuration. At home I have my w-i-d-e screen monitor (docked) configuration. At the office I have my dual monitor (docked) configuration and at the seminars I use the laptop screen as one monitor and have an extra monitor shipped ahead for me (come on, once you go dual, going single is cruel).

Here’s the issue. Every time I boot the laptop I end up with a different arrangement of my icons. Even if you’re one of those BORING legal nurse consultants who have right-clicked in an open part of your screen, then selected “Arrange Icons By” and then selected “name” and “align to grid,” chances are if you move to a different screen-size or screen resolution those icons will shift around. Maybe there’s a little OCD working here, but gosh darn it, when I line up my icons logically, I want them to be in the same place even if I’m not. You don’t want to end up spending your legal nurse consulting business’s billable hours looking for certain icons. Early this year I downloaded and installed RocketDock to get most of those icons off my desktop. That works pretty well but I’m lazy by habit, if not by nature, and still keep some icons on the desktop representing short-cuts to certain programs that either won’t run on the RocketDock or that I just don’t want to have to fish for.

Having icons go wild can also be caused by Windows^® issues. Sometimes after you’ve installed or uninstalled a program or when you boot Windows, it may completely rearrange your icons for you, no explanation – just sorry dude here’s your new layout. Then you have to spend hours (well, minutes) laboriously rearranging them until they’re “just so” once more.

If you’re like me and don’t like Windows rearranging your icons at will and wish you could find some way to restrain them, now there is! You can follow this link to CNET and download a wonderful FREE product called DesktopOK. It will allow you to set and save different layouts for your desktop icons. You simply arrange them the way you want, fire up the program, hit “save” and it will save the layout for you by screen resolution (I haven’t figured out a way to rename the layouts yet to simple things like home, loose, drudge, seminar, etc.).

This program works on Windows XP and Vista (I don’t know about 7) and is easy to install and download. You can set it to run when Windows starts up (which I like) or whenever you want to trigger it. Then, next time your icons are more scrambled than the eggs you had for breakfast, you simply left click the DesktopOK icon in your Windows tray. When the program pops up on your screen, you then double-click on the screen resolution setting you’re using and it will reset your icons back to that state. Cool!

I will toss out my usual warning that this is pretty much unsupported freeware so you use it at your own risk. I’m taking the risk and I like it!

Keep on techin’ (in good order),

Tom

Last week I talked about what to do when you or someone not close to you anymore, spills a drink onto your laptop. This week I’ll discuss something that’s even more common – a wet cell phone. We’ve all seen or heard legal nurse consultants on their cell phones in the restroom, working by the pool, in the rain or snow or just being careless. Eventually, during your legal nurse consulting career, you’re going to do one of three things (four if you count throwing it at a difficult attorney-client) to your cell phone: drop it and break it, lose it or drop it into something very wet and bad for it.

Just like a spill onto a laptop, there are varying degrees of nastiness that can happen with a wet cell phone. It all depends on what we’ve dropped our phone into. A simple spill or dunking in water or other plain unsweetened liquid may not be so disastrous. Simply pull the battery out as quickly as possible. Don’t stop to say goodbye to that attorney-client if you’re on the phone when you step into the deep pool of water. You want to avoid shorting out any electronics. Keep the back off the phone, pull out the SIM card if you can (slide the holder back then lift out the card), shake the water out of the phone and disassemble it as much as you can (usually it’s not much). If it’s an iPhone (I don’t know why any Certified Legal Nurse Consultant would want one of these), you should try and open it up. You can use any small plastic wedge along the seam to do this – I recommend using plastic and not something metal. What’s the right piece of plastic? Our contract techie used a guitar pick on his – but he said he was just taking it apart to see what was inside, not because he dropped it in the loo (yeah, sure).

Next, set the pieces in a warm dry place. Avoid direct sunlight as you want to keep condensation from forming on the unseen parts. Let it sit for a day or so and then (here’s the fun part) bury the pieces in a large bowl of dry, uncooked rice (white or brown, long-grain or short). Yes, I did say dry, uncooked rice (Note to self: Cooked rice did not work). Let it sit buried for at least two days, three if you can. While it’s drying out, dry yourself out from your cell phone addiction. Let people know you’ll be off the grid for a couple of days. You can even tell them “I’m drying out” to see what reaction you get. After the third day, pull the phone out, wipe and blow out (mouth or canned air) any dust or other residue from the rice, reassemble it, put in the battery and let there be talk, email, apps, music and all the other stuff that your phone does for you (if the CLNC^® gods and goddesses are smiling at you). If it doesn’t fire up – take it back to your phone shop and tell them, “It just stopped working.” They’ll know what really happened.

If you happened to drop your phone into your margarita during the party your favorite attorney-client threw to celebrate winning that big medical malpractice case, or if your two-year-old slam dunked it into the toilet with her toys or if you just spilled your half-caf, double-shot, triple-caramel-whipped latte into it, we’re back to square one. Again, get off the phone, open it up and shake it out. Get out that can of circuit board cleaner you bought at RadioShack^® and wash out the sugar, sweeteners, cream and or saltwater (if you were deep-sea fishing). Wash it out with the circuit board cleaner. It’s already wet and now you’ve got to get out the gunk. But don’t dip it or soak it, that’s a recipe for further disaster. After you’ve rinsed it with the cleaner, follow the steps above to dry it out and fire it overhand into the rice bowl! With any luck, it’ll work when it comes out and you can get back into the swing of your legal nurse consulting business without too many days off the grid.

I’m hoping that all Certified Legal Nurse Consultants never have to dry out or dry out their phones or laptops. But, if you ever do spill your drink – at least we now know how to recover a phone or laptop. If you drop your attorney-client into the pool, recovering the business might be more difficult.

Keep on techin’,

Tom

A couple of months ago I jumped on an airplane to Las Vegas for the Institute’s CLNC^® 6-Day Certification Program. I normally work on flights. I carry my own water, jack my iPod^® Classic into my Bose^® sound-reducing headphones and crank up Prince. I’m so self-contained that the only thing that can ruin my flight is when the guy in front of me leans his seat back into my lap so he can sleep.

Even before we take off, I have my laptop on my lap waiting for the double bell that allows real business travelers to work and fake business travelers to sleep (or suck down as many free drinks as they can if they’re in first class). Vegas can be 3½ hours from Houston and this time I got lucky – no sleepers. I cranked up the laptop, got to work, didn’t look up until final approach into LAS and I didn’t think anything of it.

In Vegas, I was comparing flight notes with another staff member who told me her laptop conked out somewhere around West Texas, about 1½ hours into the flight. We have the same model laptop so I was a little confused why I could work for 3 hours and she couldn’t (no it’s not just stamina). I volunteered to take a look at her laptop (it makes me look good even though it’s my job). After two minutes, I figured out her issues, at least the ones related to her laptop. One of those issues was the strain on the laptop’s battery.

Based on this experience, here are some steps and tips to extend the life of your laptop batteries whether you’re flying across the country, working in the medical library or soaking up the free Wi-Fi at Starbucks^®.

Keep a Low-Power Profile

• Right click My Computer on your desktop, click Hardware and click Hardware Profiles. If you’re undocked, copy the profile you are in and rename it to Undocked-Normal.
• Click Start, Settings, Network Connections and Panel and disable your Wireless Network Connection. (When you’re in the air or out of range of the wireless Internet, the computer will keep trying to connect and runs down the battery trying).
• Highlight the current profile, click Rename and name it Undocked-No Wireless.
• Dim the laptop screen a couple of notches. You don’t need a tan while you work, so maximum brightness is not necessary.
• Click Start, Control Panel and Power.

• Next time you boot up your laptop it will give you a choice of which profile to select so if you’re out of range of wireless, pick the Undocked-No Wireless and your laptop battery will get extended life.

Stick It in Your Ear

• Don’t listen to music on your laptop – get an iPod or Zune^® and use the ear-buds or a Bose headset.

Empty It Out

• Don’t watch DVDs or listen to CDs on your laptop and make darn sure you don’t have a CD or DVD hiding in the built-in player.

Ditch It and Stick It

• Pull out the CD/DVD player and replace it with a second battery.
• Buy the battery with the highest number of cells (6-12) and look for a high watt-hour (WHr) rating. The more cells and higher WHr, the longer it will last.
• You probably won’t be listening to CDs or watching DVDs on the road but if you think you will, just toss the modular player in your computer case and only use it when plugged into a wall jack.
• Some computers have portable battery packs you can attach – consider one.

Juice Up Every Chance You Get

• Use your charger right up to the last second in the airport or Starbucks. Any time spent on the ground using your battery is less time in the air on your battery. Don’t be afraid to top off unless you have an older non Li-ion battery.
• Once you’re on the ground, run the battery(ies) completely down and charge them overnight. Do this each night. It’s always good to run through a full power cycle as often as possible.

Make New Friends at the Airport (You Won’t See Them for Long)

• I carry one of those goofy power plugs from my local hardware store that allows me to plug three cords into one wall plug. If I need to juice it at Starbucks and some sandaled, goatee-type is already plugged into the wall socket I can usually talk him (or her) into letting me share by plugging in the adapter so we can all make nice.

I’ve flown New York City to San Diego on one charge using the above methods and highly recommend them. The only problem is my batteries last so long I can’t use the dead-battery excuse so I can shut down and dig deep into the latest Lee Child thriller.

Here’s one last tip. If your airport doesn’t have free Wi-Fi (a lot do), find the closest airline club, one club-member benefit is usually free, unsecured, wireless Internet. You’ll locate it quickly by looking for the laptop owners crouched against the club’s wall desperately downloading email.

Keep on Techin’, (and I’ll see you at the wall socket!)

Tom

I haven’t gotten into the “cloud” yet. Something about keeping my documents in the vast reaches of Cyberspace doesn’t appeal to me. But for a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant who needs to move documents from one computer to another, I tend to prefer “sneakerspace.” This is where USB flash drives (or memory sticks) stand out. I don’t like to email confidential documents and burning them onto a CD is time consuming. Instead I jack a USB drive into one of the spare ports on my computer and drag the document(s) onto the drive. The hardest part is remembering to get the drive back from the recipient. It’s also another way to carry or send a set of your important data, reports, presentations, graphics, etc., from one location to another without having to carry a laptop or burn multiple CDs.

The first and smallest form of USB memory is the flash drive. A couple of years ago these were expensive – today I get USB memory sticks in the mail as gifts from vendors! There are no moving parts – just a solid stick of memory (like in your digital camera). If you buy one, SanDisk^® makes a great 4GB USB flash drive called the Cruzer^® Micro that retails at $35 (nobody pays retail anymore – I’ve seen them as low as $10 on Amazon.com ). First thing I do with mine is delete all the programming that comes preloaded. If 4GB isn’t enough for you they also come in 8GB and 16GB models. Go for as big as you can afford to lose (yes, you do lose them). Other manufacturers are Kingston^® (8GB DataTraveler about $18) and Corsair^® (Flash Voyager series – 8GB – about $25before rebate or 64 GB – about $125 before rebate. Make sure whatever flash drive you buy is USB 2.0 for faster data loading and transfer.

If you really want to have some fun with your USB flash drive – buy a USB Geek Teddy Bear for $17. It’s only a 1GB flash drive but the draw is that the drive is hidden inside a 3″ x 4″ teddy bear. You pop its head off and jack the bear’s neck into your computer. The decapitated bear looks really funny and it will definitely get plenty of attention at the next continuing legal education conference you attend to meet attorney-prospects.

Portable hard drives or pocket drives are the next step up in the world of portable data. These are small (20GB or so) external hard drives. Prices start around $40 and go up. Western Digital^® has a 500GB My Passport^® series selling for just over $100. After you load all your music onto your iPod you can drag it off your computer and onto one of these, freeing space on your hard drive. You can also store all those unedited photos from your vacations and keep one drive (or partition if you speak geek) as an archive for your reports and the research you’ve done for your attorney-clients. Many of these come with software that will allow you to automate back-up for your data at a time of your choosing.

If you really want to step up in the world of storage, shell out for a Terrabyte (1,000GB!) external hard drive (available from a variety of manufacturers). Some plug into your home network allowing you to back up all the computers in your home on one drive. Others may only connect to one computer at a time. Some of the more complex drives are even RAID Level 1 with data redundancy and hot-swappable drives (if you don’t know what that means, you probably don’t need to know – yet).

Remember, it’s not “if” your computer will fail, it’s “when.” Murphy’s Law says it will go at the worst possible time. The savvy legal nurse consultant is always prepared. You’ve got an Epi-kit in your purse now, you can keep your data there too.

Keep on techin’ (and always read the reviews before buying),

Tom

A lot is being said now about the newest form of laptops – the netbook. Laptops were originally designed to be semi-lightweight, portable computers that a legal nurse consultant could easily carry from home to the medical library, to work, to wherever. Soon form was forgotten and notebooks became larger, more powerful and screens became wider. Before long, laptops were “desktop” replacements and almost as heavy to carry.

My old Compaq laptop had such a small form factor that I could easily open it on an airplane and work even if the hospital administrator slacker in front of me decided to crank his seat all the way back and sleep on the flight from Poughkeepsie to Sioux City. My new Dell hardly fits on the seat tray and Vickie has to belt my elbows to my waistline before I can type. Sure I’m envious of your Apple^® MacBook^®, but I can’t wait to see you try and open it up while seated next to me in steerage.

Netbooks and mini-notebooks are the backlash. These are tiny laptops usually weighing under three pounds with 10-inch screens, Windows^® XP and Microsoft^® Works (Linux and OpenOffice, if you’re daring), a relatively small hard drive, 80 GB or so, or a 40GB SSD (solid state drive), 1GB of RAM and a 1.6-GHz Intel Atom processor. They are priced at just over $400. That sounds like a pretty good deal – but is it? Sure, it is a computer but they’re not designed to be used by a hard-working, multi-tasking Certified Legal Nurse Consultant. These are designed with one purpose in mind – portability.

They’re great if all you want to do is surf the web. You can do research for your legal nurse consulting business, stay in touch with your attorney-clients via email and maybe do a little word processing (such as drafting that report at the library or taking notes while interviewing a potential plaintiff). Do not, however, expect much performance from one of these. They’re better than trying to surf the Internet on a smart phone, but don’t try to edit photos, include graphics in a report or render a report into a PDF. Netbooks generally do those tasks – but you’ll spend a long time watching the onscreen hourglass. And, if you’ve got big hands or thick fingers, the tiny keyboard will make you crazy. You may also need to consider an external CD/DVD drive if you plan on installing software other than what’s preinstalled.

But, you can tuck the netbook in a backpack or purse and travel fast and loose. We have an old Fujitsu P-series Lifebook (yeah – it’s old and slow) that’s about the same size and weight as a netbook that we carry on vacation. With my Verizon Wireless Internet card or the hotel’s wireless, it keeps me on the Web, in the know and weighs a little over three pounds (and it’s paid for).

If you’re considering a netbook purchase, here’s some basic specs:

• Windows^® XP.
• 80-120 GB hard drive (not solid state) running at 5,400 rpm or higher.
• 1-1.5 GB of RAM.
• Largest keyboard supplied by that maker (92% is great!)
• Built in Wi-Fi card (802.11b/g) and an 10/100 Fast Ethernet jack.
• 6-cell battery, if you’ll be traveling or using your netbook away from your office.
• Built-in speakers.
• VGA-out so you can plug in an external monitor at home.
• Two or more USB inputs/jacks (one for your USB hub at home).
• Microsoft^® Works with the Office 2007 Compatibility Pack.
• Norton or MacAfee Internet security software.

If you have money for just one computer this year – buy yourself a full-fledged notebook as a desktop replacement and skip the netbook. Then get yourself a dock and all the other stuff discussed in my earlier Tuesday Tech Tip Extend Yourself with a Hub, published December 23, 2008. You’ll have a better experience and get more out of it.

If you have the money and the need to buy yourself a $400 convenience – consider a netbook. It’s a convenience you won’t regret.

Keep on techin’,

Tom