2007 February 12 « Pale Musings

Jabra JX-10 Review

This weekend I upgraded my bluetooth headset from an older Jabra Bt500 to the Jabra JX-10. Wow! What a step up! I was fairly happy with my BT500 for a long time but this new one rocks!

The upgrade was partial a jealously thing, my wife just got a new Nokia N80 and the JX-10 headset, so I had to at least upgrade my headset to match. In addition, I have not been using the BT500 as much lately. the size of it just seem to annoy me for some reason. When I first got it about a year and a half ago I did not have that issue, but as headsets became smaller I began to dislike it. The battery life was also much shorter than the newer ones so I decided to upgrade.

I really like the weight and feeling of the new JX-10. It is almost forgettable that it is in your ear. The sound quality is very good and the way the speaker sits in my ear I tend to hear it better than the BT500.

The battery life, while I haven’t tested it yet, seems to be very nice. They claim 6 hours of talk time. My wife seems to charge it about every 2-3 days, which isn’t bad considering she hast to charge her phone every day since she uses it as an MP3 player.

I have just connected the headset to my laptop as well and I will be testing it out as an alternative for on-line gaming. It sohuld be interesting to see if I can make that work or not. I’ll let you know.

February 12, 2007 Posted by palehorse | Gadgets, Reviews | Leave a Comment

My [insert desktop search engine] killed my computer!

Knowledge workers use them. Managers love them. System administrators abhor the m. What are they?

They are desktop search engines (DSE). There is a growing market of DSE’s available from such powerhouses as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to DSE specialists like X1. It is a noble goal! Allow the knowledge worker to easily find information from the myriad of documents formats used on local and networked resources.

Unfortunately reality sets in over and over again. Desktop search kills machines. I just finished removing the Windows Live search component from one of my coworkers workstation. Her machine had recently began taking an inexplicable amount of time to boot up, approximately 15 minutes. Unbelievable! After some research I found the newly installed Windows Live Search…..ugh!

This is not the first time, nor the first DSE that has caused similar issues. I have tried DSE’s from Google and X1 in the past with similar results.

So what’s the deal? I know that the indexing process must be incredibly complex but the developers of these utilities must learn that it is crippling machines, even some of the newest ones available! C’mon guys, this is a great idea and people do need this type of functionality but not at the expense of their normal productivity.

February 12, 2007 Posted by palehorse | Development, Internet, Operating Systems, Windows | 2 Comments