Day 4

Seeing that I left my charger at work, and had taken my default battery down to about 38%, I decided to try out the bigger spare. Sure it provides a hefty chunk of power, might be great for long road trips or plane flights. But I see two problems. 1) (the minor issue) This battery is bigger, and therefore requires a seperate cover – adding approximately 1/2 inch to the X50v. 2) Because it requires a seperate cover, and doesn’t lock into that cover in any way, it isn’t very easy to carry around. So once I got back to the office and charged up the original battery, I swapped them out again. Mine currently resides rubberbanded to the cover and in my laptop bag for just-in-case purposes.

Tweaks2k2 is turning out to be a very handy application. While you certainly could make applicatoins High-Res aware on your own, Tweaks2k2 will do this for you using “Brute Force VGA”. As it turns out, iGuidance won’t truly be VGA compatible until Q3 2005 (that is when the next version is tenatively scheduled for release). But using Tweaks2k2, I was able to force the application to be High-Res aware, and it refreshes much better now. I still need to fiddle with the settings a bit more to make everything easier to read and I will let you know what else I find.

I also installed Skype for the first time. I’ve only been able to do some very preliminary testing, but if you want to help, PM me your Skype address and I’ll give you a ring next week.

Before I left the office today, I packed up the charger+adapter so I could keep playing with it while I’m out of town the next few days. A tip: If you had an iPAQ, steal the little rubber cable that hp included with your cradle and use it to tie the Dell adapter to the power cable/charger. Very handy for keeping the bits together while travelling.

And speaking of travelling, I’m going to be out of town this weekend and am going to try to write and post tomorrow’s report completely from the X50v (a special keyboard should hopefully arrive before I leave).