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Posted: February 10, 2018 |
Yet none of this is really an Asus problem but merely demonstrates how Microsoft account login can bugger things up as it thinks it knows best and avoids any useful dialogue: Replace Office Home and Student with Office 365? Yes/No? That would help. After all, having a standard installer version of Office Home and Student wiped out by an Office 365 subscription version with three months left to run isn’t very clever as far as I’m concerned, although Microsoft might take a different view.Intel's quad-core Atom chip gives this breed of convertible a new lease of life and a very repectable battery life What I take from all this is no matter how much Windows 8 nags you, don't kick things off with a Microsoft account, use a local account first if there could be product conflicts. Incidentally, Asus sent me the Office product code for the machine and it installed perfectly this way. If you really want to play safe, use a local account and back everything up before touching any installers. With any luck, Asus Transformer Book T100 users will be able to do this easily enough using the micro SD card slot. While a few unhelpful quirks cropped up when configuring the Asus Transformer Book T100, none of these issues actually stopped me from getting on and using it. And use it you will, as its size, weight and price make carrying it around an easy habit to get into. In this respect, I found I rarely used it as a tablet, as its keyboard is much better than the toy it appears to be.Still, there remains an element of you get what you pay for regarding the internal storage and the plastic casing that will inevitably get scuffed and inadvertently drop-tested. Even so, given what else is around at this price, the Asus Transformer Book T100 has a certain convertible cuteness that makes it hard to ignore. The original Yoga 11 ran Windows RT on an Nvidia Tegra processor, but that obviously didn’t set the world on fire so a new version, the Yoga 11s, has reverted to full-fat Windows 8 and an Intel chip. The bendy design that allows you to fold the screen right back and turn it into a large tablet still strikes me as a bit of a gimmick. However, the Yoga 11s is only 16mm thick and 1.4kg in weight, so it still makes a fine Ultrabook for work with the tablet mode available for off-duty web browsing.My review unit was priced at £1,100 with an Ivy Bridge Core i7 running at 1.5GHz, along with 8GB of memory and a 256GB solid-state storage. However, a PCMark 7 score of 4299 suggests that the i7 is little faster than the i5 processors used by other laptops in this group, so you should probably save yourself £150 by dropping down to the i5 version of the Yoga.The built quality is excellent, providing good support for the reversible screen. It also has a comfortable moulded keyboard. Connectivity’s a little limited, though, with just one USB 3.0, one USB 2.0, HDMI and headphone for peripherals. The 1366 x 768 resolution of the 11.6-inch screen is a little disappointing too, but the crisp, colourful image it produces is still very attractive and works a treat for watching streaming video in tablet mode. However, the battery only just scrapes past the five-hour mark when streaming the BBC iPlayer, which suggests that a Haswell update might be a good idea round about now.I rather like the creamy white casing of the Book 9 Lite, and its slimline 17.7mm profile. The case is plastic, but still quite sturdy, and it has a good size trackpad and a comfortable keyboard. The 13.3-inch screen touch-sensitive screen only has a 1366 x 768 resolution and its viewing angles leave room for improvement, but it’s adequate for web browsing and watching video. Battery life is respectable, at around 5.5 hours of streaming video, but the 1.4kg weight listed on Samsung’s web site turns out to be 1.6kg on my scales, which makes this by far the heaviest laptop in this group.Connectivity is also a bit of a mixed bag. It only has one USB 2.0 and one USB 3.0 port, although I was pleased to see that it does have a mini Ethernet port, for which Samsung includes an adaptor. However, there are no adaptors for its mini VGA and micro HDMI ports, so you’ll have to pay extra for those.Some dogged detective work by El Reg’s Bob Dormon revealed that the Book 9 Lite has a quad-core AMD A6-1450 processor running at 1.0GHz, along with a fairly conventional 4GB of memory and 128GB of solid-state storage. A PCMark 7 score of 2170 means that it can handle basic web browsing and productivity apps, but still leaves the Book 9 Lite looking overpriced at £499.
Another popular usage case is for handling surveillance video, handling a number of IP cameras concurrently. And there's a good range of third party packages that can be installed with one click, including WordPress and SugarCRM.Synology's success owes much to its web top GUI, accessed through a browser, which is now polished and mature and, thankfully, doesn't suck up system resources. If you can't remember the IP address you've allocated to the box and port (5050) you'll need to download the DSAssistant app for Windows or Mac. This finds the servers on your network and also you to monitor their status.One minor glitch it threw at me was complaining that it needed the latest version of Java. Tech support established this wasn't a complaint about the DiskStation, but about the Mac client I was using.The DS214 I received as a test unit carried the 4.2 software, but not so long ago Synology made the 4.3 update available as a download. In this, the PhotoStation photo streamer gets spruced up, and some other useful features are bundled. At long last, Diskstations now support Mac-formatted (HFS+) disks, something Synology's great rival Qnap has been able to boast for ages. I was also pleased to see bandwidth throttling per user and per protocol added, although 4.2 had already made ground here. Microsoft's Offload Data Transfer (ODX) file protocol is also added, allowing servers to transfer files between iSCSI partitions faster with lower CPU and IO strain. It's supported in Windows 8 Explorer.For users with more money than sense, the SSDs are better supported than before, thanks to support for the TRIM command. Of course, you saturate the bottleneck of the network I/O far sooner than you'll soak up the disk I/O bottleneck, in which case why use an SSD in a NAS unit? Perhaps if you've got very acute hearing and the low noise of the disks starting up is still too much.Running a home server may have once sounded ludicrous, but the low power consumption of the ARM board and aggressive power management of modern drives make them very unobtrusive. They can be set to power up and down to a schedule. The official power consumption is 22.64W in access mode, 20.7W when idle, and 9W in hibernation. That's a little more than its predecessors the DS212 drew 18.2W access/6.8W hibernate and the DS213 18.48W access/8.28W hibernation. For comparison the beefy two year old reference unit (the 712+) draws 27.5W active and 17.6W idle.Synology claims network write speed of 100MB/s in mirrored RAID mode for the new box. To test this I set up a RAID 1 array with two WD Red 3TB disks, and created two test sets of just under 2GB each, one containing a handful of large media files, and one a more typical mix of 1,600 files. I used a 2013 Apple Airport Extreme router - not the fastest - and Gigabit Ethernet.Sure enough, the DS214 matched the claimed performance, recording 108MB/s in write mode for the large files and 103MB/s for the typical mix. Read speeds are considerably slower, and show a degree of divergence: with 46MB/s to read the large media files and 32MB/s to read the large mix of smaller files. If you're on Wi-Fi, of course, just fuggedabout it.
Writes trickle in at around 10MB/s and reads trickle out at around 8MB/s. This is typical of performance across manufacturers, and if you're backing up a household of devices you'll want to do the first over a wired connection. And that would be that, normally. However, WLAN network speeds are improving with more use of 5GHz frequencies and the 802.11ac standard - so it's worth returning to the subject once we have compliant hardware.The DiskStation can stream to your telly - Synology claims full 1080p HD is supported despite the modest ARM processor. However it's amazing to find a complete absence of any legal acquisition options either bundled or promoted - instead, the dark side of the internet is promoted as the default supply chain. The ethics here are dubious and quite avoidable: why not work with the legal supply chain to cache a Netflix stream to avoid stuttering, TiVo style? That kind of innovation must be worth a few pence.A home NAS box is a bit like an iPad - you don't really need one but once you have one, so many things - from backups to photo sharing - are that much easier. Synology's no-nonsense UI and ever-improving hardware are setting the pace in this competitive market. The webtop UI is getting a bit a long in the tooth, but it hits the sweet spot between dashboard UIs which conceal most of the powerful server features and the DIY approach - exemplified by this Sheeva plug server. No-tools assembly and a low price should make it even more attractive. I’ve got to tip my hat to Sony for developing a 13.3-inch laptop that measures 17mm thick and weighs just 1.1kg. I’ve seen heavier tablets, and the weight of this laptop feels insignificant when you slip it into a backpack or briefcase.
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