I am sitting here in near darkness, as I have been for hours and I have been kicking around in my mind some thoughts on my gear for the next hurricane. God forbid there’s not another one to go through but this is the Texas Gulf Coast.
In spite of all of my mobile gear, the many laptops and batteries, EV-DO connectivity and the like there is one thing I don’t have that I really missed. A wired mouse. You know, one of those old school mice with an actual wire to connect to the computer? While I was working away in the dark on the various laptops I wished more than once for a mouse to make that work easier. Search I did but in vain, it seems I have converted everything over to wireless and the mice were no exception. My desire to conserve battery power as much as possible kept me from plugging one of the wireless mice into my laptop to work. I know, it probably would have used so little power that it wouldn’t have made any difference but I didn’t want to take a chance so I went mouse-less. Next time I’ll have a cheapo wired mouse in the drawer.
My household is in a unique position in that we have three different cellular carriers in use. We also have 3G with all of them so I am in a unique position to offer insights into how they have performed in this emergency situation. T-Mobile is not 3G in my house but I tested the voice network periodically throughout this ordeal. My results were sketchy, the signal strength varied although it never went away completely. AT&T has shown good voice signal but the EDGE network on the iPhone has been less than stellar. My house never has 3G signal but EDGE normally is full bars strong but the storm has affected that. I find the EDGE signal bars to bounce between one and three and as a result the bandwidth on the iPhone has been pretty bad. Most of the time it will do email, albeit slowly, but surfing the web on the phone has been awful. Verizon has been the champ as they usually are. The EV-DO network has been rock-solid and the signal/ bandwidth has never wavered. Voice calls have worked flawlessly and text messaging has not failed once, something I can’t say about the other two carriers. Game Verizon.
I have once again been totally impressed with the HP 2710p which has been my major conduit to the outside world throughout Hurricane Ike. The battery life with the slice battery has been amazing and the utility of working with the HP on EV-DO has been awesome. I have really come to appreciate a unique feature of the 2710p that I admit I haven’t used much. The Illumi-Light (I think it’s called) is a little light on the top of the screen next to the webcam that pops out when you press a button. The little light gives just enough light to illuminate the keyboard and this has been so useful in the dark. This feature absolutely rocks in this situation and I am happy that HP kept this feature on the new 2730p. It’s amazing how it’s often the little things like this that make a huge difference in trying circumstances like living with Ike. The above photo of the 2710p shows the little light in action, forgive the darkness of the photo as it’s unavoidable.
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