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I was looking for a replacement for my five year old notebook which has been acting up lately. I also wouldn’t mind replacing my desktop computer which is even older. After looking around I took a chance on a very small lightweight notebook that can be converted to a tablet, the Asus Transformer T100.

The T100 comes in a couple of different varieties. The more affordable option has 2 GB of RAM and a 32 GB of storage space in flash memory (no hard drive and no DVD). Unlike slate models, it comes with a full version of Windows 8, in fact this version also includes a home version of Microsoft Office which includes Word and Excel. This is kind of underpowered and undercapacity for me. The processor is an Intel Atom processor, which is also kind of underpowered, but it doesn’t use a lot of energy, and still is quadcore. The low power requirements give the battery approximately 11 hours of life whereas regular laptops run 3-6 hours, so there is an upside. I definitely wanted more storage capacity. Of the 32 GB of storage, there was only about 10 GB left after installing Firefox and Chrome and activating Microsoft Office. There is a hidden recovery drive that can be used to restore Windows, but it can’t be used for anything else. I bought a 32 GB Micro SD card at Fry’s to give myself more storage for documents and movies and then set up my My Documents folder to be on the SD card. I think this slows things down because the SD card isn’t as fast as the internal storage, but buying the 64 GB version of the T100 would have been $400 vs. $330 plus an $18 SD card. Still not a lot of storage though. There is cloud storage, but my home wifi is very slow and it is only available when I am home, not at work or on the go. So I could set up a home external drive on my network and have a local cloud, which I am kind of doing by storing stuff like music and other documents in shared folders on my desktop computer which is usually on.
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Today is a snow day after yesterday should have been a snow day and wasn’t, causing a huge traffic jam. This morning when I woke up it was 13 degrees outside and the high today was not supposed to go above freezing, so things weren’t looking good for any snow going away. Around noon I noticed it was kind of cold in the house. I checked the thermostat and it was 61 degrees even though it was set on 66 degrees. I played around with the thermostat for a while, lowering the temperature below 61 degrees and then back up to trigger the switch. I could hear the click of the relay, but I wasn’t getting any heat. I went outside and was surprised that the exhaust for the burner was running. I tried turning on the fan only from the thermostat and it seemed like only the return vents were coming on, not the supply vents. My conclusion was the natural gas wasn’t igniting and therefore the furnace wouldn’t run. Since the furnace doesn’t have a pilot light and just lights itself when needed, there isn’t a lot I can do (like light the pilot light or replace the thermistor, which are about the only things I know to do with a furnace; I went ahead and changed the filter once I went down to the crawlspace).
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I have been eager to get my natural gas bills to try and determine how well my new furnace is working. It should be a lot more efficient than the old one, plus insulation was added to the attic, the ducts are much more airtight, and a lot of work was done sealing air leaks. But there are also some things going on that make comparisons with previous years more difficult. One is it has been really cold this winter. The other is that Eric is here, so I have changed the thermostat setting and am keeping the house at the same temperature all the time now instead of turning the heat down during the day when I’m at work and at night when I’m asleep.

Right now my natural gas provider is Scana. I have been with them for about 5 months. On their website you can download your bill with the gas usage and cost on it. One thing that happens is one month might have a couple of more or fewer days in it due to the length of the month or where weekends fall for the billing cycle. But the other big variable is the weather. Some Decembers are just colder than others. But that’s a really hard thing to determine. But Scana has some information in their usage section that gives you the average temperature during the billing cycle as well as the number of days where the temperature goes below 30 degrees. I don’t know that I could use those numbers to perfectly determine the right gas usage, but it would help to know that the reason I am using more gas is that it has been significantly colder or warmer than last year. The problem is I haven’t been with Scana for long enough to do a comparison year-to-year (and may not be with them next year).

I have looked on the internet before for past weather information, but I have had a hard time finding it. Nobody really cares about past weather, just present weather and future weather. But I looked again and found that Weather Underground lets you look up historical weather information. That’s maybe not that surprising from Weather Underground, since their site has a tendency to bombard you with tons of data from dozens of different weather stations in your area. The data they have for me comes from Peachtree Dekalb airport, so it should be pretty consistent. I was able to pull up information for an entire year and then export that to a comma-delimited file that I could then import into a spreadsheet. Then it wasn’t too hard to come up with an average temperature for the month and a number of days below 30 degrees (Scana lets you pick any temperature you want, so I set the spreadsheet up the same way). Just comparing December 2013 to December 2012, it was definitely colder this year, with an average temperature of 46.3 in 2013 compared to 48.6 in 2012. In December 2013, it got below 30 degrees on 10 days vs. only 4 days for December 2012. 2010 was significantly colder, but I think the data is wrong because it shows the low on December 12 as -2, which seems very unlikely. If I look for data in a nearby zip code, the low that day was 26, but overall it was a pretty cold month with 16 days below 30 and my gas usage was pretty high then, so maybe the rest of the days are right.

To really get it right, I would need to look at the billing period which tends to go from somewhere around the middle of the month. The key thing is having the data, and I’m not sure I want to go in and enter all of the billing dates (though I keep track of those).

Yesterday Eric and I installed his wi-fi router instead of the one I had. His is newer and the range is supposed to be better, so it should reach to his room better than my router does. The DSL modem I have had been getting very temperamental lately, and if you moved it even a little, it would cut the power to it and then make it restart. After installing the new router, everything worked fine for a little while, but then the DSL connection was lost for some reason. I went to check on it and the modem started flashing all of its lights when I could even get a consistent power connection, which wasn’t that often. I ended up calling tech support and they said my modem was probably faulty. They would sell me a new modem for $75 plus $15 shipping. I said that was too expensive. They then tried to upsize me into a modem that also had wi-fi built in. I said no thanks and asked if I could buy a modem on my own. They said it was possible, but they wouldn’t support it. I really didn’t want to spend a lot of money because I don’t even know how long AT&T will continue DSL service before making people switch to U-verse.

I wanted to research modems, but I didn’t have internet, so that made it kind of difficult. Then I thought there must be a lot of people who have switched from AT&T or Bellsouth DSL to something else that probably have modems they aren’t using anymore. I wanted to post something on our neighborhood bulletin board. But, again, no internet. I even called the next door neighbors and asked if I could get the password to their wi-fi, which they gave me, but it was complicated and I never got it to work. So Eric and I head to Fry’s. We found a combination DSL modem and wi-fi router for about $90. We kept looking and found a DSL modem by D-Link for $50. Looking further, we found a DSL modem by TP-Link for $30, so I got that one. It was a third of the price of the one AT&T wanted to sell me and I would get it today.

I brought it home and it had some instructions for AT&T installation using an installer program. I had to run the installer from a mini CD-ROM which was a little complicated because my DVD drive wasn’t working. I think I had turned it off when I had power supply problems. But I turned it back on in the BIOS and it works fine. The installation was pretty straightforward. I gave it my username and password for AT&T service and I was on the internet pretty quickly. Then I just had to add Eric’s router between the modem and my computer and we were back up and running. Eric had me go to Speed Test to check how fast the connection was and he said it was significantly faster than the last time he measured it (I think it was about 1.2 megabits/sec download speed). Pretty good.

I have been looking around for a new laptop to replace the one I bought five years ago. I wanted a 14″ or 15″ screen, over 4 GB of memory, Intel’s new Haswell processor, and a 6-cell battery, which combined with the efficient Haswell, should give me a lot of run time from the battery. I found a really nice HP for $399 (recently $349) at Best Buy that had 4 GB of memory, but could be upgraded to 8 GB, but the HP has a 17-inch screen and weighed over 6 lbs, making it bulky and pretty heavy.

Office Depot had a little netbook type of thing, called an Asus Transformer T100. While it runs Windows 8.1, it has only 2 GB of memory, internal storage of only 32 GB, and has an Intel Atom processor. It has a small 10-inch screen, no DVD drive, and weighs just over 2 pounds. It has a Micro SD slot (no room for a full-size SD card) and I thought I could double the storage by getting a 32 GB card at Fry’s for $18. It even comes with a basic version of Microsoft Office, all for $329. The “Transformer” part comes in because you can remove the keyboard and have a touchscreen tablet. All the keyboard does is give you a USB 3.0 port (plus keyboard and touchpad). So I was deciding whether to go with the big 17″ laptop, the tiny netbook, or wait for a 15″ laptop like I wanted. I decided on getting the netbook thing. I liked the idea of an iPad size Windows computer. Maybe eventually I will get a bigger laptop as a replacement for my desktop computer.

I’m typing on the Transformer right now. I will post a review after I play around with it for a few days.