What's up with Hatim

I have to come clean, I am posting this blog from Windows 7. I do have a very good excuse, my clients, my boss and my parents all require me to be in a windows machine.

You will ask how come? As I have previously mentioned that I have a DIY video conference system in my parent’s home. Apparently with Skype 4.0 which is not available for Linux yet, you can have a much better video call quality. It may also have to do with the webcam driver for my laptop, which is not at par with the windows based driver.

My clients (or to be politically correct, my boss’s clients) are mostly on windows and require help with windows based systems as well as expect windows native solutions (so even working with Java based technologies, I am still expected to come up with .exe files and installers)

But it’s not that bad. I am coming back to windows after a very long time and after good changes in it. Windows 7 is actually a very slick system, but it does lack the raw power of any linux system. Hopefully I will be able to own a second machine in coming future to have as a windows only machine (I am thinking about Nokia netbook with 12 hour battery life). FYI I have a genuine windows dvd, thanks to Chalmers academic alliance with Microsoft.

One thing which I discovered while on my new system is that my extended screen was flickering rather bad. I  googled (binged?) it up and found that it could be my battery or the charger. Taking out the battery did solve the problem, I have yet to get my charge cable checked to see which problem is it (battery or charger). But while digging up information on battery health I came across page from BatteryCare(which I discovered thanks to lifehacker) detailing proper laptop battery usage guide. I had never really read up on battery care before so I will try to follow these suggestions from now at least.

I now have a battery wear level of around 30% on my laptop which considering my usage and the life of the battery (18 months almost continuous use) is not that bad.