Nokia Lumia 1520 Review

Posted on February 24, 2014February 25, 2016 by Adam Fowler

Nokia’s shot at the growing phablet market.

On the 11th December 2013, Nokia released its latest Windows Phone in the Lumia range – the 1520.

Following up from the Lumia 1020 with its flagship 41 megapixel camera, Nokia went for a different extreme on the 1520 with a 6 inch display.

Other impressive specifications include a full HD 1920 x 1080 resolution on the giant display, a 20 megapixel camera (which is still better than most other smartphones on the market), a quad-core processor, and finally a 3400mAh battery. That beefy battery is supposed to provide 32 days standby time, and my heavier real-world use averaged 2 to 3 days between charges.

Software-wise, this is the first phone to run Nokia’s “Black” update which will end up being available to all Lumias, so that’s no reason to consider this particular phone. The hardware is what makes it or breaks it, so that’s what this review will focus on.

Lumia Black

Good

Weight wise, it’s not a light phone at 209g. It is much heavier than an iPhone 5S at 115g or a Samsung Galaxy Note 3 at 168g, but I don’t consider it too heavy.

The screen is the number one reason I’d recommend this phone. The amount of real estate you get will make you reconsider using a laptop to do lighter tasks, and the large number of tiles you can fit on a single screen means you can glance at your phone and see everything you need to know.

The home screen fits a crazy amount of fully customisable tiles.

The long battery life means that you’re much less worried about charging your phone at every chance you get, which is a refreshing change from most other smartphones.

“Battery” app – free from Enless Soft

Bad

There is only one official case for the 1520, and that’s the CP-623. It’s the standard ‘clip on the corners’ cover that most other Lumias have available, but with an added protective flap. The flap doubles as a stand, but it’s not stable enough to actually use the phone while in stand mode. It can only be stood sideways, and many things don’t actually rotate sideways (like the all-important home screen) so it has very limited functionality.

Other accessories like official charging stands and car chargers don’t fit this gargantuan particularly well either. They do work, but it’s a bit of a balancing act to put the 1520 on a charging stand, and a very tight squeeze to fit in the car charger when the official case is attached too.

Other

I’m still not sure if the size of this device is a good or a bad thing, and that should come down to individual taste. When I first held it, I thought it’d be too big. Initially it felt a bit weird both sitting in my pocket as well as just holding it, but after a week or so I’m now used to it. I came from a Nokia Lumia 1020 which is still a decent 4.5″ screen, but this phone does take some getting used to. You’re going to need a large pocket to carry it around.

Summary

The Nokia Lumia 1520 is a solid phone. It’s faster than any other Lumia before it, with the best battery life and screen so far in the Lumia range. Once you get used to its size, it may end up being your default ‘go-to’ device for most basic tasks, as it’s already in your pocket (or half sticking out of it). I’m already worried how I’d go back to a smaller phone, and that’s a good sign.

Nvidia GTX 560ti to AMD R9 280X Upgrade

Posted on February 16, 2014 by Adam Fowler

It was time to update my graphics card. I decided this because I’d been playing a lot of Battlefield 4 and there was some occasional screen ripping. So, did I see much of an improvement with this jump?

My system specs are:

Motherboard: AsRock Z68 Extreme3 Gen3
CPU: Intel i5-2500K CPU @3.3Ghz
HDD: Corsair Force 3 SSD 120gb
RAM: 2 x 4gb 1333mhz DDR3 G.Skill
Graphics: 1GB NVidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti with GeForce driver 334.57 Beta

First I thought I’d run the inbuilt Windows Experience Index to see how that went. In Windows 8.1 I was surprised to not actually find this option, and found out after reading this article that Microsoft had now made it command line only.

NVIDIA GTX 560ti

My results were:

CPUScore : 7.8
D3DScore : 8.2
DiskScore : 7.3
GraphicsScore : 8.2
MemoryScore : 7.8

Next up was a 3DMark Demo, which had the following results:

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/2456981
(note – no idea why RAM is running at 800mhz, so will investigate later)

FIRE STRIKE 1.1 3132

CLOUD GATE 1.1 14936

ICE STORM 1.2 156208
Enough tests, time to replace a graphics card!

—

I purchased a 3GB Sapphire AMD R9 280X. I could have gone the NVIDIA GTX 760 for a little less, but that was the 2GB variant. There was a 4GB variant, but that was slightly more expensive than the AMD card, so I decided the 3GB was a good middle ground and should last a bit longer with the extra memory.

The install went rather smoothly, until I installed the AMD drivers via Windows Update. They successfully installed, but then doing simple things like right clicking on the desktop took ages to bring up a menu. I decided to uninstall anything NVIDIA I could find, but some of the programs just wouldn’t uninstall.

I decided to use Display Driver Uninstaller which promises to clean up everything relating to the display driver you choose. Word of warning – when it has three options and one is ‘unrecommended’ but you’re being lazy trying to avoid reboots, don’t choose that option. I ended up getting screens that wouldn’t display anything properly, so had to recover to a last known working version of Windows 8.1 (which is rather easy to do!).

Attempt #2 I ran the safe mode option to uninstall NVIDIA using the above tool, and it worked perfectly. After rebooting, right clicking on the desktop was instant and everything NVIDIA related was gone from Programs and Features in Windows.

—

AMD R9 280X

So, first up is an updated Windows Experience:

CPUScore : 7.8
D3DScore : 8.2
DiskScore : 7.3
GraphicsScore : 8.2
MemoryScore : 7.8

The exact same scores. Weird as I’d run the ‘winsat prepop’ and saw it rerun all the tests. I thought I’d try a tool that ran a GUI interface over the command with probably a few extra smarts – CHRISPC WIN EXPERIENCE INDEX which worked easily and is a neatly written and designed bit of software.

This gave different results of 8.5 for the GraphicsScore and D3DScore.

How about the 3DMark results? Here’s the updated results:

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/2457909

FIRE STRIKE 1.1 7244

CLOUD GATE 1.1 19054

ICE STORM 1.2 173745

A huge improvement in numbers.

Back to Battlefield 4 and without changing any settings, everything felt a lot more fluid for movement. I changed the settings back to ‘auto’ and noticed even more improvements – a lot of textures were smoother and generally better looking.

Above: AMD R9 280X – Below: NVIDIA GTX 560ti

Size wise, the newer AMD card is much larger, but this is partly because it’s a higher end video card than the NVIDIA. At time of purchase the AMD was $388AU.

Overall I’m happy with my decision as it gave me the better experience I was looking for. If you’re considering a similar upgrade then keep in mind the added power requirements for a higher end video card.

100,000 Hits!

Posted on February 7, 2014 by Adam Fowler

I am proud to announce that adamfowlerit.com has hit 100k views! I purchased the domain in December 2012 with a total of 52 views for that month (probably all me). January 2014 saw 15,281 views so it’s come a long way!

I wouldn’t have bothered continuing with the website if it wasn’t for everyone’s feedback, comments and discussion. Every comment that isn’t spam (and yes there’s a lot of that, but it gets filtered out really well) means something to me, because hopefully the information I’m posting is helping them.

I.T. is so much based on the sharing of information, and anyone reading this post just like me has searched online countless times to find the answer to a question. If nobody bothers sharing their findings, all this becomes useless.

There’s also a lot of ‘bad’ information out there, but it’s usually written by well meaning people. For me, it’s like the scientific method – I’ll post my findings, but am more than happy to be corrected on any of it. I’m after the truth, which is why it’s important to add to the information I see as ‘bad’ and correct it. I could be wrong then too, and hopefully someone corrects me.

My point is, it’s your responses to what I write that keeps me going. Any feedback positive or negative is appreciated and wanted (unless it’s about my mother) so please share any thoughts you have – article ideas are welcome too.

Again, thank you for making this an enjoyable site to maintain and contribute to.

Password Expiry Notification Script

Posted on January 29, 2014March 27, 2014 by Adam Fowler

Going back to basics can often be a good solution to a problem. Emailing users letting them know that their password will expire soon is usually the most broad way of letting everyone know. If they are using ActiveSync only to get their emails, they won’t be notified when their password expires until it stops working.

With that in mind, I set out to find a simple script that runs daily, to let people know when their password is due to expire.

There’s a lot out there, but I wanted to use PowerShell and set it as a daily scheduled task.

Technet had a great one here from Johan Dahlbom. Except it didn’t work for me, as I recieved the error when testing:

get-aduser : One or more properties are invalid.

After some research, I found this blog post which had my exact issue. It seems that PowerShell v4 which comes with Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 doesn’t like the wildcard for -properties when running a get-aduser command, such as :

get-aduser -filter * -properties *

Richard Siddaway’s solution was to pipe it out and use get-object instead, but that doesn’t give all the same results as the original.

Instead I chose to specify the actual fields needed which turned the command into:

get-aduser -filter * -properties enabled, passwordneverexpires

That worked perfectly. So after adjusting a few parts of the script, I had it working.

I then decided that I didn’t want a daily email going out saying ‘You have 7 days” then “You have 6 days” etc, but just 2 variables – 7 days and 1 day.

So, here is the script (downloadable here: Password Change Notification)

#################################################
# Please Configure the following variables….
# expireindays1 + 2 = At what count of days left on a password do you want a notification?
$smtpServer=”smtp.yourmailserver.com”
$expireindays1 = 7
$expireindays2 = 1
$from = “Name <[email protected]>”
#################################################

#Get Users From AD who are enabled
Import-Module ActiveDirectory
$users = get-aduser -filter * -Properties enabled, passwordneverexpires, passwordexpired, emailaddress, passwordlastset |where {$_.Enabled -eq “True”} | where { $_.PasswordNeverExpires -eq $false } | where { $_.passwordexpired -eq $false }

foreach ($user in $users)
{
$Name = (Get-ADUser $user | foreach { $_.Name})
$emailaddress = $user.emailaddress
$passwordSetDate = (get-aduser $user -properties passwordlastset | foreach { $_.PasswordLastSet })
$PasswordPol = (Get-AduserResultantPasswordPolicy $user)
# Check for Fine Grained Password
if (($PasswordPol) -ne $null)
{
$maxPasswordAge = ($PasswordPol).MaxPasswordAge
}

else
{
$maxPasswordAge = (Get-ADDefaultDomainPasswordPolicy).MaxPasswordAge
}

$expireson = $passwordsetdate + $maxPasswordAge
$today = (get-date)
$daystoexpire = (New-TimeSpan -Start $today -End $Expireson).Days
$subject=”Your password will expire in $daystoExpire days”
$body =”
Dear $name,
 Your password will expire in $daystoexpire day(s). 
To change your password, do these things 
For remote password changes, sign in to this address and change it there’ 
Thanks, 
IT
”

if (($daystoexpire -eq $expireindays1) -or ($daystoexpire -eq $expireindays2))
{
Send-Mailmessage -smtpServer $smtpServer -from $from -to $emailaddress -subject $subject -body $body -bodyasHTML -priority High

}

iRobot Braava 380t Review

Posted on January 27, 2014January 28, 2014 by Adam Fowler

I love gadgets! Having owned an iRobot previously (an old sweeper model) I was keen to try out a floor mopping robot.

As this is unavailable for purchase in Australia, I ordered it from US Amazon who luckily shipped this particular item overseas:

iRobot Braava 380t Floor Mopping Robot – Amazon

The iRobot arrived about 3 1/2 weeks later and I was looking forward to giving it a try, as most of our house is tiled.

The iRobot itself was a little smaller than I expected, a roughly 20cm box and about 8cm high. Unlike the Roomba models, this one doesn’t auto dock itself when it’s done, but instead needs to be placed upright on a stand to charge.

The iRobot has two modes – Sweep and Mop. Each mode uses a different cleaning cloth designed to be used for Dry (sweep) and Wet (Mop). Sweeping will make it go in straight lines back and forth, like a lawn being mode. It’s a dry mop too so at the end of it’s journey it will leave a pile of dust/hair/lego pieces to be picked up.

The Mop mode is what I bought this for, where you add a little water to a reservoir and let the little guy go around your house similar to how you’d run a quick mop over the floor. Instead of going in a straight line lawnmower style, it does a bit of an arc one way, reverses then goes the other way and inches along at the same time. Here’s a graphic to show what I mean:

iRobot Mopping – ignore the tiles getting trippy.

The iRobot can go for a few hours between charges, and I had no problems with it going into carpet or getting stuck – it has a bumper that detects when it hits something, and smarts built into it which maps what it’s learnt on the current expedition (it doesn’t save this into memory).

There’s also a portable little cube that you’re supposed to put as far away as possible from the base station, which gives the iRobot a reference point. I’m figuring this is so if the wheels spin it doesn’t think it’s travelled further than what it really has (either distance or angle).

It actually does a decent job if you don’t have a dirty pawed troublemaker walking around on the wet floor leaving footprints where the hard working iRobot has just cleaned.

Dirty pawed culprit

It runs rather quietly too, since all it’s doing is spinning it’s wheels and slowly soaking out a bit of water. It works well if you turn it on as you are leaving the house so you can come back to a nice shiny floor.

There’s not too much else to say about the iRobot Braava 380t – it works as advertised, it’s not cheap but it’s made and designed very well, and it makes a few little songs depending if it’s being docked for charging, starting a cleaning routine or wants to go back to it’s dock as it’s had enough.

Remember though, this is the equivilent of pushing a wet rag along your floor and that’s it, so don’t expect it to clean up everything. This is more of a maintenance robot than a repair robot!

I’d be tempted to actually try the Scooba version of the iRobot which does actual scrubbing of floors too, but will have to save up a bit more for that one.

iRobot Scooba 390 Floor Scrubbing Robot – Amazon

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