From Windows Vista onwards, now you can do this from the Command Prompt! The command required to do this is mklink. You will need administrative privileges to do this, so remember to run your cmd.exe in administrator mode.

This is the description of mklink from Windows 7:

> mklink /?
Creates a symbolic link.

MKLINK [[/D] | [/H] | [/J]] Link Target

/D Creates a directory symbolic link. Default is a file symbolic link.
/H Creates a hard link instead of a symbolic link.
/J Creates a Directory Junction.
Link specifies the new symbolic link name.
Target specifies the path (relative or absolute) that the new link refers to.

Note from the description that you need to differentiate files and folders as different types of symbolic links in Windows. This is probably because the Windows file systems treat directories differently from files, while in *nix systems directories are also considered as files.

/D and /J should be used on directories. To the best of my abilities, I couldn’t differentiate these 2 options, except that Junction points cannot be built on remote directories (that’s kind of a weaker version of /D isn’t it? So why make 2 toggles..).

/H are hard links, but they are only allowed for files, not directories.

Finally, as you should expect, deleting a symlink or hard link does not delete the original file or folder. Deleting the original file does not delete the hard-linked copy of the file.

Booting up

I took this video when I first booted up this machine.

In total, it took the device 2 whole minutes to get started up. Hello HP, this is a tablet, not a PC..

Some of you are already thinking, it doesn’t matter, most of the time the machine will be sleeping, not shut down. Yes, I agree with you, you’ll probably never need to reboot this thing. It’s not an extremely bad problem, but people just don’t like waiting. Besides, a long loading time means it is loading tons of services and applications in the background, and that’s bad.

Screen size

The huge 9.7″ screen makes it very easy to organise and look at information. I might not have liked a tablet as much if it offered only 7″ screen estate.

I also found it extremely easy to type on the HP Touchpad, no small thanks to the 9.7″ huge screen size. I could even type with both hands, so it was really enjoyable typing on the Touchpad. I can never get myself to type on a smartphone properly, especially if I’m walking and typing at the same time. I’m pretty sure I can do that with the Touchpad.

Touch Accuracy

The Touchpad has an amazing touch accuracy. There’s also this ripple effect on the screen each time you touch it, so you know exactly where you clicked on. It makes the tablet so much more fun and enjoyable to use!

Speakers and Beats Audio

With Beats Audio™ in the Touchpad, the sound quality it provides should be phenomenal. Unfortunately, the in-built speakers are too weak to provide any justice for it. And doubly unfortunately, I don’t have a good enough pair of earphones to test the power of Beats Audio. I guess I’m missing out a little here..

Multitasking

WebOS was designed to allow multitasking, unlike current generations of major phone OSes (iOS, Android, WP7). Each application running in the background shows a screenshot of itself, and you can navigate through them pretty much the same way the Blackberry Playbook does. Webpages load even when they are zombified in the background, as expected. When an application launches an external window, it appears partly overlayed on the original application, so there is an implicit grouping of windows by application.

Lag..

No doubt about it: The Touchpad lags worse than an iPhone 3 running iOS4. When navigating through the apps at the multitask screen, you see noticeable lags in the system. The worst experience was when I brought up the in-built Calendar application. After syncing with my Google Calendar, I tried browsing around the calendar. Each flick I made with my finger took 1-2s to load completely, and the animation was choppy (3 fps?!). I’d rather do without the animation. I don’t know what’s wrong with it, since this thing has a good CPU and a decent amount of memory.

Animation

Animation makes an OS feel alive. But too much animation makes an interface look slow, as a user has to wait for the animation to complete before giving it the next command. The WebOS brings “too much animation” to a whole new level: it disrupts the entire system. I was able to close applications while it was still loading, and WebOS would still believe that it was open and continued “running” in the background. Awesome..

Video Playback

… is extremely stupid. They only allow mp4 files encoded in H.263 or H.264 codec. Which practically excludes nearly the whole world of video, except Youtube. I chanced on a failblog video recently on my Facebook, and tried to watch it on the Touchpad. Hmm.. Nope. It doesn’t load.

Integrated Skype

Skype has been integrated into the video call application, so it was pretty easy to set up and use. Since the Touchpad has a front-facing camera but no back-facing camera, I’m guessing that HP designed this from ground to be primarily for communications, not as a gigantic camera you use to take photos of your daughter’s birthday party.

Sadly, WebOS has blown it here too. The interface is beautiful, but the price for this beauty is significant lag when navigating around in the video call app. No prizes for guessing that the rendering of the video chat also lags. In one Skype call with my brother just 1m beside me, I measured a 2s lag from the time he performed an action to the time I saw it on my screen. At 3fps. BAD!!! And finally, remember the animation problems I mentioned earlier? In one of the test calls, I managed to close Skype just before the application loaded, and somehow the call persisted and I could hear the call going on. I managed to replicate the problem a few more times, so this is not a 1-off problem!

System Notifications panel

The notifications panel is on the top of the screen, and is always visible. I like how they packed in the most commonly used features in a single menu, which you can turn on and off with at most 2 clicks.

Notifications Panel

Icons appear conspicuously beside the notification tray whenenever there is a new notification. Otherwise, the panel remains very clean. I have rarely encountered a situation where I saw more than 3 icons at once.

VPN

I don’t have a VPN to connect to, so I couldn’t test the option. This was obviously made to cater for the business user, but now that this thing has gone EOL I’m not sure if this feature be prove any more useful to others in future. Still, kudos to WebOS for having this built into the system!

Facebook App

The Facebook App is one of the most well-designed app in the WebOS suite of default apps. The commonly used features are grouped together logically. When you click on a link in one of your feeds, it opens up the link within the app, instead of bringing you to the browser. This way, you’re working within the application all the time. You will also see some lag when using the app, but overall the well-designed user interface gives it the thumbs-up it deserves.

Youtube App

The Youtube App, unlike the Facebook App, is a complete disaster. This is how the Youtube App works:

1. The Youtube App starts.
2. Youtube App launches the browser, and redirects it to youtube.com, appended by “/?client=hp-touchpad“.
3. Clicking on any video removes the “/?client=hp-touchpad” request, and the browser proceeds to play the youtube video like it would on a browser.

Essentially, the app is just a redirect to youtube.com… I’m not even sure why they bothered to release it.

Adobe Reader / Kindle Reader

One of the reasons why I bought the Touchpad is to use it as an eBook reader. The Adobe Reader comes bundled by default, so it was a nice touch by HP. The Kindle app is also bundled if you chose “United States” as your current country. Overall, both apps are easy to use, although (guess what?) lag is visible whenever you “flip a page” in either app.

Conclusion

The Touchpad itself is a great, sleek, and well-designed device. If HP did not decide to sell off its PC business, this would have been a great contender to the iPad family.

WebOS, on the other hand, is under-developed, but overpolished. The user interface is very intuitive, and feels great in many places, but in many other respects, the OS just plain fails. Video codec support would be one of the biggest gripes I have on the system. If it were released into the wild with enough user feedback, the WebOS with its multitasking ability could take a sizeable bit of the Tablet OS pie. Now we’ll never know.

The original Touchpad box before opening. Feels very beautiful and polished.

The box is carefully covered by a layer of plastic.

The touchpad and its box of accessories on its left. I like that there are a few labels (power, volume, home button) on the plastic screen cover.

The accessories that came with the Touchpad. It came with the 110V American charger too! Awesome!

As shown in my previous post, the full contents of the Touchpad. A box of manuals and instructions seats below the Touchpad itself.

Review will come later, as I am still exploring the innards of the WebOS.

Sneak preview of what’s going to be posted next: The Unboxing of ….

If I had to make a guess, I’d say it’s most likely in these directories: C:\Users\<your username>\My Documents
C:\Users\<your username>\My Music
C:\Users\<your username>\My Pictures
C:\Users\<your username>\My Videos

Am I right? 90% of you will say yes; hence the need for my post.

The problem with this configuration is, your data is on the same drive as the Operating System (OS). And that makes it hard to separate your data from the useless OS files when things go wrong with your OS, and you need to reinstall.

As a technician for many years, my experience has told me that if I need to reinstall another person’s computer, I usually spend more than half of my time trying to backup his data, and most of those backed-up data end up being useless junk OS files that take up space and time to backup. So if I know I’m backing up useless OS files, why do I still do it anyway? Because it’s more convenient and faster than picking through the pieces to find out what is important. And any technician reinstalling your computer will most likely have to do this, or risk losing some personal file or information that you had.

So I’m going to help you make your life (and mine as a technician) easier: With minimal guidance, you can save yourself lots of money, because your technician will spend less time reinstalling the computer. The technician will also be grateful because he doesn’t have to spend half a day picking through files worrying that he has not backed up some of your data.

Data in a drive

Some of you might have seen multiple hard disk drives on your computer, like this:

In order for you not to lose your data when the OS is reinstalled, you need to separate out your data in another logical drive. C: is used to install your Windows and applications (MS Office, iTunes, World of Warcraft, etc). Applications have to be reinstalled if you reinstall an OS, so you can afford to lose these files if the OS goes down.

The magic happens in D:. All your data like music, videos, pictures, documents, powerpoint slides for your presentation next Thursday, should be stored in this D:. In fact, Microsoft has already helped you by “sorting out” the major kinds of data you will have:

The magic steps

Most of you have made use of these folders for a long, long time. Well, there’s no point in changing habits, but I’m going to help you move these folders into the separate data D-drive. I’ll use “My Documents” as an example:

1. Create a new folder with the name “Documents”
2. Right click on “My Documents” icon in your user folder, and select “Properties
   
3. Select the “Location” tab
   
4. Click on the “Move” button, and navigate to your D:\Documents folder, and click “Select Folder”
   
5. Click “Apply”. A confirmation dialog will ask you if you want to move all files to the new location. Click on yes.
6. You’re done! From now on, double-clicking on “My Documents” will bring you to D:\Documents instead of C:\<username>\Documents.

Now you can repeat the steps above for all or some of those data folders inside your user folder. For example, I don’t use the “Saved games” folder, so I don’t need to migrate that to the data D:.

If you are one of those who regularly put nearly all your working documents on the desktop so you can access them any time, it is recommended that you migrate the “Desktop” folder as well. (Win XP folks, sorry you ain’t so lucky, Desktop in Win XP isn’t a migrate-able folder. I don’t know if you can do it for Vista either).

Finally, for those of you who are sharing a computer with your family at home, don’t worry. You can always create different folders and point each user’s documents to it. For example, if John and Mary shared the same computer, they could create folders called D:\John and D:\Mary, and migrate all their own data folders in it.

I found a solution for Win 7 Enterprise / Ultimate: manually install a language pack. Ugh, wasn’t not doing that the reason why I liked Win 7?! And why only Enterprise/Ultimate? I am only using Win 7 Professional, so I need to find another way to make this work.

So after more googling around, I found this trick, and it worked for me. It should also work if you’re trying to fix the problem for other Asian languages. I’m not sure about the rest (Arabic, etc) but I’m pretty sure this will also do the trick. If you tried it for non-Asian languages and it works, please comment below so others can learn from your experience

1. Go to Control Panel, select “Clock, Language, and Region”
   

   Control Panel, "Clock, Language, and Region"

2. Select “Region and Language”
   

   Control Panel, "Region and Language"

3. Go to the “Administrative” tab, and click “Change System Locale”
   

   Administrative tab, "Change System Locale"

4. Change your System Locale to “Chinese (Simplified, PRC)”. Or, if you’re fixing this for other languages, select the one you need it to recognise (Japanese, Korean, etc)
   

   Change your System Locale to the language you want recognised

5. Click “OK” and restart. You have to restart the computer through that dialog box, otherwise it doesn’t recognise your System Locale change.

Now your programs will recognise those Chinese characters, but in some software, it will show all menus and instructions in Chinese. I don’t want that, I just want the Chinese to show up properly. So to fix that, repeat the steps up there, but change your System Locale back to “English (United States)”. Magically, it still recognises your Chinese characters that it previously showed as squares!

Cost (US cents per gigabyte, quoted by Amazon today)

1. DVD (still dominant in computers) hold about 4 GB of data. The cheapest one is 20USD for 100 pieces, so that’s 5 cents/GB of data.
2. A Western Digital 2 TB hard disk costs 99USD. That works down to also about 5 cents/GB of data.
3. 25GB Blu-ray disks are selling at 87 USD for 100 pieces. That works out to 3.5 cents/GB.

Seems like the the Blu-rays won. However, remember that these disks are write-once, whereas a hard disk can rewrite multiple times. Even as an archiving option, I would choose a hard disk, because so many elements can destroy a round disk (heat, sunlight, etc), whereas the hard disk can withstand much harsher environments. In terms of cost, the round disks have a slight advantage at Blu-rays, but hard disk technologies are quickly catching up!

Usage frequency
Can you tell me when was the last time you popped a round disk into a computer? (Don’t count BDs into gaming consoles.) You probably don’t remember. Now can you tell me when you last popped a USB thumbdrive into a computer? I think the answer is very likely “within the last few days”.

Why? Again, most likely because a DVD or BD is usually write-once, but your objective was most likely just to transfer data files from one computer to another. Burning a word document into a DVD drive just to transfer it into another computer sounds like trying to attack a nail using a sledgehammer. The DVD drive in your computer is most likely underutilized, and should best be gotten rid of because it’s a waste of resources.

In fact, 2 years ago, I made my family computer optical drive-less, and “conveniently forgot” to tell them about it. Over the 2 years, nobody in my family has ever complained that they needed the DVD drive. As this is only my personal experience, I would still recommend you have at least one computer with a DVD drive in your family, so that you can make ISOs and run them on the optical drive-less computers using virtual drives. In my house, my laptop is the one doing this job, since it has a DVD drive built-in to it.

Speed
The speed of reading from a hard disk (7.2k rpm usually gives over 100MB/s) is much faster than that of a DVD (24x gives 30MB/s) or even a Blu-ray (2x gives 72MB/s). Loading data from an ISO on the hard disk is faster than reading data from the optical drive.

The Internet and cost of bandwidth
Internet data transfer speeds have increased to the point where almost every download seems to be instant. On top of that, the cost of having such a cable line has become so low almost every household can afford it. So, why can’t you store the data that you wanted to store on those disks, online? Yes you can. It’s called the cloud. You can store all the data you want on the cloud, and access it from anywhere as long as you have an Internet connection. So there’s really no point keeping those DVDs around: make ISOs of them, put them on the cloud, and you can access them from anywhere with Internet. You don’t even have to bring that odd-shaped CD case around!

The future
So far, the only real use of DVDs / BDs I have seen are:

1. DVD or Blu-ray movies for home theatre systems, and
2. Blu-ray discs for game consoles (Xbox, PS3, Wii).

But, the future of home theatre is the cloud. The rise of Internet speeds and dip in Internet cost will eventually pave the way to fully streaming video even for a HD home theatre movie. BD and DVDs will have no future in here.

Although it looks like Blu-rays will still be here quite a while for game consoles, but just like home theatre systems, I believe that one day, Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are all going to open their own cloud store to sell games for their game consoles. You just pay for a game, download it to your console (which already has a hard disk in it), and start to play.

I see a world, 10 years into the future, when there won’t be any more DVDs and BDs, or in fact any “other discs” around. Do you see it?

The upside of this? Quite a few:

1. Supposedly, *much*, *much*, faster installation times. This has been quoted in many articles as one reason to move from DVD installation to USB installation, but a quick check on read times for USB 2.0 and 24x DVD drives on Wikipedia (citation required ) tells me this is wrong. Both theoretically give you 30MB/s thereabouts.. So unless someone decides to run a fair test and install the same OS on the same computer using DVD and USB and time them, I won’t be able to say for sure this is one good reason
2. However, you get to install an OS on a optical drive-less computer! I’ll probably post next about why I think an optical drive-less computer is awesomely cool. Here’s a list of reasons why I think an optical drive-less computer is awesomely cool.
3. If you do OS installations often, you really don’t want to lug a big CD case around with that installer. A thumbdrive is easier to carry around (This applies more to tech helpdesks though, rather than normal humans).
4. You can store the custom drivers on the same USB drive, but you can’t do the same with a DVD (unless you burn a new one). In fact, you can make new folders on the USB drive and use it as per normal. All they ask is for you not to touch the folders already created for the OS installation.

Woops, I ran outta plus points. Anyone who can think of more can comment on this and I’ll edit this article to include it.

I think almost all computers for the last 5 years are BIOS-equipped with booting from USB. If your friend had a computer that needed reinstallation, chances are it was bought in the last 5 years, so this can help him/her.

Actually, there are already quite a number of articles teaching you how to do this. Searching for “USB install windows 7″ on Google (today) yields this and this article on the 1st and 2nd spot respectively. Following the instructions on those links will give you all you need to install Windows 7 from USB, except..

These caveats below weren’t mentioned, but I bumped into them while trying to follow the instructions. I’m writing them here so anyone who sees my article hopefully doesn’t waste time with the same mistakes I made.

1. If you’re like me, you probably hung to Windows XP for your dear life, not moving on to Vista, and finally decided that Windows 7 is good enough that you want to make a great leap forward. If so, I’m sorry, the diskpart utility in Win XP does not support USB drives. My recommendation? Borrow a friend’s computer that already has at least Win Vista installed. Vista and 7 both have diskpart which supports USB drives. This chicken-and-egg problem had me muddled for awhile.. And if you really don’t feel like troubling your friends, you can use your Win 7 DVD (or the ISO of it) to first install it as a virtual OS (I like VMWare or VirtualBox), and use it to configure your USB drive, then reinstall the real computer. I used the Virtual OS way to get my USB drive configured.
2. Windows comes in 32-bit and 64-bit OS. If by chance you’re trying to install the 64-bit version and the OS you’re using to follow instructions is 32-bit, you will get stuck at the “BOOTSECT.EXE /NT60 <usb drive letter>:” command. I’ve not tried what happens if you wanted to make a 32-bit USB installer using a 64-bit OS. I think it should be backward compatible, but no guarantees on this! The solution to this is just to shrug your shoulders and find a friend who’s using the same 32- or 64-bit OS as the one you are going to install.
3. It’s all nice and happy and you finally reach the Windows installation part! But for some reason, Windows 7 installer will create an extra hidden system partition during the installation process. Searching online tells me that this is supposedly a safety feature to make it harder for viruses to attack the core components of Windows. Hmm… nah not interested. I prefer my drives to be cleaner in partitions. The solution… remove the additional drive before the OS installation phase.

Now to let you in on the biggest secret.. If you followed all the instructions on those 2 articles, good for you! But for lazy bums like me.. this is so much easier than pasting lines of command into DOS It has the additional advantage of circumventing problem 2 (32 vs 64 bit problem) too! Thank you Microsoft for creating such a useful tool!

Solution: the wait() and notify() methods in a Thread class. To understand why they are named this way, you must first understand the role of locks (aka mutex/semaphore) in thread synchronization. I assume you have a basic understanding of what locks are.

Locks in Java are pretty simple, and you only need to know the synchronized keyword. Each object in Java is its own lock, so you may lock on any variable or object that you have a reference to. If you’re going to use thread synchronization, then it’s most likely that the thread in charge of notify() has is a reference to the other thread. So the waiting thread should put a lock on itself. In terms of code:

// put this code in the thread that should be waiting
synchronized (this) {
  wait();
}