Hasta La Gadget!

Last night I discovered an incredibly dumb — and what I consider to be dangerous — setting enabled by default in my unibody MacBook Pro. In the Bluetooth preferences, it’s the box checkmarked “Allow Bluetooth devices to wake this computer.” Sounds innocent enough, but it could’ve killed my computer.

Here’s what happened: I was in a rush to leave the office to meet a colleague for coffee, so I closed my MacBook Pro and threw my Bluetooth mouse into my laptop bag. After my coffee meeting, I ended up at a bar and took my notebook out to quickly check my e-mail. It was scalding hot all over, and when I opened the lid I was greeted with the gray screen of death. And I realized my notebook, though closed, was still on for hours — the heat insulated by my bag.

After checking the Apple support forums I found a thread where a user reported the exact same problem, and it turned out it was because his Bluetooth mouse was left on in his bag, too; he remedied the issue by unchecking the default Bluetooth setting. I was relieved that the solution was so simple, but I was still pretty concerned that this was a default setting in the first place.

Imagine if I hadn’t checked my notebook for a few more hours. That could’ve caused a serious burn injury, or at worst, a fire. True, it was my own negligence to not turn off my Bluetooth mouse before throwing it in my bag, but I think it’s reasonable to assume many people have done the same thing. (Heck, I often don’t turn off my Bluetooth mouse when it’s on my desk at home, as it shuts down when it’s inactive. Clearly it’s not the same when your mouse is in your bag and you’re keeping it on by walking around.)

Also, I say it’s unintelligent that this feature is turned on by default because for notebooks, it’s useless. Usually when we sleep our notebooks, we close the lid. On a MacBook, opening the lid wakes it back up automatically. There’s no need to use the Bluetooth mouse to wake up the notebook. This setting should certainly not be turned on by default.

MacBook users? If you own a Bluetooth mouse, disable this setting now. Have you seen any other strange settings turned on by default that I should disable? Feel free to point them out in the comments below.

Photo: WzaHk/Flickr

Just because Windows 7 is right around the corner doesn’t mean Microsoft intends to immediately sweep Vista under the rug and forget about it. After some confusion around the ‘nets today, a company spokesperson confirmed with PC World that its policy is to back an OS for at least four years from launch, meaning January 2011 here, but also said it plans to cut ties and drop mainstream support for the three consumer models within three years, before April 2012. Despite the minimum, most Windows variants have seen longer lifecycles — XP, for example, had mainstream support for eight years after launch. Business and Enterprise users will still receive security updates until April 2017. Sure, it’s good to see people will still have the option for Vista further down the road, but we don’t expect a lot of OEMs or consumers will be opting for it once 7 goes gold.

Read – Vista’s fading support
Read – XP’s support lifecycle

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

Microsoft to distribute Vista until at least January 2011, ending mainstream support by April 2012 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 05 May 2009 01:48:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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What do we know so far about Norway? That it likes electric cars, has buses powered by poo, and offers so much snow even its billboards are filled with the stuff. Now we’re learning something else: that it’s in the middle of a pilot program that would put a laptop (a real one, not one of those OLPC toys) into the Bedazzled rucksack of every 16 – 19 year old. The trial is currently underway in a single county, Nord-Trondelag (site of the Battle of Stiklestad in 1030), where 6,000 lappys have been distributed featuring Big Brother-like software. The stuff, provided by 3ami, captures screenshots and keystrokes when students take quizzes and exams electronically. If all goes well Norway will expand this program nation-wide, and since each laptop comes with a copy of Photoshop we’re expecting a whole new generation of expert image manipulators.

[Image courtesy of mrsviennau]

Filed under: Laptops

Norway giving free laptops to angsty teens originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 01 May 2009 08:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The 12-inch HP Pavilion dv2 is designed to bridge (and exploit) the gap between netbooks and standard laptops. Its $750 price is true to that credo, though full-fledged budget laptops have been edging down into that space.

The dv2 is lightweight, it’s thin, and it’s billed by HP as a non-netbook–the first laptop to run AMD’s Neo processor. (The Neo is somewhat more powerful than the ubiquitous Intel Atom netbook processor, though still markedly inferior to even an Intel Core 2 Duo processor.) It has a 92%-sized keyboard and lacks a built-in optical drive, though it ships with an external drive. The dv2 does have discrete graphics and 4GB of RAM. Does it have enough going for it to pass muster?

We’re still not sold on the $250 price tag for Skytone‘s Android-powered Alpha 680, and these video hands-on of the tablet / netbook from netbooknews.de don’t help. While the apps shown off run smoothly — browser, Maps, Skype, Office, etc. — they also serve as painful reminders that multitasking’s just not gonna work when each app takes up the full screen and can only be opened one at a time. Not that we necessarily expected to do nine things at once with an ARM-based processor, but something tells us we’d be reaching for the Jaunty Jackalope before too long. See for yourself in the two-part video series after the break.

Continue reading Skytone’s Alpha 680 tablet, Android interface gets underwhelming hands-on treatment

Filed under: Laptops, Tablet PCs

Skytone’s Alpha 680 tablet, Android interface gets underwhelming hands-on treatment originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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