Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Acer Aspire One 725-0687 $160 at Walmart

I found a fantastic deal on an Acer netbook on December 23 while shopping at one of the local Walmart stores.  The netbook has 2GB of memory, 4-cell li-ion battery, 32GB hard disk drive and an AMD dual-core C70 processor.  It also has a VGA and HDMI port, 2 USB 2.0 ports and one USB 3.0 port and of course, an SD card reader.  One of the surprising features was the system was preloaded with Windows 8.

The primary reason I wanted to purchase the laptop was actually the color but for $160 I could not resist.  The cost of Windows 8 is about $80 so for the cost of 2 copies of Windows 8, I now have a brand new netbook laptop.

Stay turned for a review of the system, Windows 8 and installing Ubuntu 12.10 64 bit in dual boot configuration.

Monday, December 10, 2012

Apps on Droid 4 gone when USB connected

I have been an avid fan of Android since I got my HTC EVO 4G back in July of 2011.  I now have a company supplied Motorola Droid 4 that I use exclusively because it is faster (dual-core) and has more storage. 

On my last business trip, I had the stock cable (USB tethering won't work if you don't) connected and noticed that some of my apps where not available.  Turns out that the default setting SD sharing setting is as a mass storage device.  A quick Google confirmed that a mass storage connection unmounts the SD card so Android cannot access anything on it because I suppose the OS will have exclusive access to the SD card.

The solution?  After connecting the USB cable, a notification message appears indicating how the device is connected.  Opening the status message allows the device to be connected as a media device (MTP).  This setting does NOT unmount the SD card and allows apps and music that are on the SD card to be accessed by both the tethered computer and Android.

Thank goodness for Google!