Tip o’ the Week #293 – STOP SHOUTING ON CONF CALLS

Posted on September 11, 2015 by ewand

clip_image002

Keeping track of the characters on conference calls could be a new type of buzzword bingo – from the people who stay muted the whole time (the only word they say being “bye”, at the end), to the unmuted furious typer/clicker/lunch eater/talker-to-somebody-else.

This brilliant spoof of conference calls in real life features most of them, but not the blast-radius shouter that is probably more of a nuisance to people physically sitting next to him/her than to others on the call. Sure beats real meetings, mind.

Thanks to Brett Johnson, for pointing out that there’s a feature in Windows that might help reduce the volume of the well-meaning noise pollutant, something known as Sidetone. Turns out, this has been in Windows for ages, if you have a headset that supports it.

clip_image004 What Sidetone does is to play your own voice back into the audio stream you’re listening to, so if you have a headset that covers your ears entirely and blocks out background noise, you don’t completely isolate yourself and end up shouting to compensate.

To access the setting, plug in your headset then right-click on the volume icon in your system tray and select Playback devices to open the Sound settings applet, then double-click on your headset and look in the Levels tab.

Try it out and have a play with the levels, with a willing guinea pig: it’s a surprisingly subtle effect, but one that you won’t want to overdo.

Now, all we need to do is to build a Skype addin for meeting organisers to subvert the Sidetone on chosen attendees, to put a bit of a delay into the replay of their spoken voice, which could effectively deal with some of the other characters on the calls… and now we know how Garth from Wayne’s World achieved his effect.

Tip o’ the Week #174 – Presenting tips from the pros

Posted on May 23, 2013 by ewand

This week’s tip comes after another successful “Tech.Days Online” session in late April, delivered by a host of specialists covering a range of developer and IT Pro topics. The Tech.Days Online programme of events is interesting in that it’s delivered “live” to thousands of virtual attendees: in other words, you could visit the Chicago auditorium and see the whole thing being presented to an empty room, except for the camera and audio crew and perhaps a few interested supporters.

Andrew Fryer suggested this update of an old feature of the somewhat-maligned Windows Vista. Pressing WindowsKey+X on a Veesta machine would display the Mobility Center, a collection of tools that are relevant to laptop use. In Windows 8, the Win+X combination has grown somewhat, and throws up a list of potentially useful utilities and quick access to the more commonly used (by technical types, anyway) aspects of the Control Panel. On a laptop, Mobility Center also features here.

If you like it particularly and a few more clicks is too much to ask, you could even start the Mobility Center then pin it to Taskbar for future one-hit execution.

The Presentation Settings applet in Mobility Center will allow you to configure how your machine looks and feels whilst you’re presenting – maybe change the background image of your desktop from a leering photo of your dog/child/spouse, to something a little more corporate and dry. Or don’t let the screen go blank, even if you’re running on battery… To set the options up, click on the projector icon within the Mobility Center.

It doesn’t set your Lync status to tell people you’re presenting, and it won’t configure PowerPoint to send things to the right screen, though… more on that in a future tip.

Tip o’ the Week #152 – Zoom, Zoom!

Posted on December 21, 2012 by ewand

If you ever see someone make a presentation or give a demonstration, who says “you can’t see this, but…” or “this is an eye test, but…” then you have to ask, well why are you showing it (or trying to)? Better still, throw things at them and make a jolly good scene.

If you’re presenting, don’t use small fonts and don’t put diagrams on screen that people sitting more than 6 feet away won’t be able to decipher – unless you make the point that you’re only including the slide for future reference when you give the audience the slides: and move on quickly. Oh, and think about your screen resolution too: 1600×900 might look fine on your desktop monitor but it’s not so good when the audience is far away.

When you do demos, take a tip from one of the gods of the big-stage presentation world, who regularly shows very in-depth technology (code, registry, lots of programs with very small fonts and densely packed hexadecimal numbers, etc) that would normally have people bored rigid.

Mark Russinovich (a very technical fellow) regularly presents at TechEd type events in front of thousands of cheering fans, who queue to get to the front of his sessions. And for a the best part of a decade, Mark has been showcasing one of his own tools during his demos – originally, without even saying what he was doing. He got so many people asking him what was that tool that made it so easy to see the tiny tiny text on screen, that he released it and now often mentions it whilst he’s presenting.

ZoomIt

Thanks to David Weeks for highlighting this tool; it’s free, it’s small (and you can “run” it from the website so you might be able to fire it up on any PC you’re using for presentation). Check it out here. The ZoomIt tool allows you to – using shortcut keys – zoom in to wherever the mouse is, to draw/mark on-screen and numerous other capabilities. Mark uses it to great effect – he’s often one of the top-rated speakers at TechEd, even if he’s in-depth and his style is quite, er, dry. Check out Zoomit, especially with the ability to freeze whatever’s happening, zoom in on it, and be able to annotate what’s seen on the screen.

WindowsKey +

Another option is to use the built-in magnify capability in Windows – just press WindowsKey and the plus key. This will fire-up the magnifier utility, and works well with Modern Windows 8 apps too: there’s even a special mode for touch-enabled machines to make it easy to zoom in and out.

Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, ToW Readers. Normal service will be resumed in January…

Tip o’ the Week #151 – dates, leaks, sides

Posted on December 14, 2012 by ewand

First, an update on last week’s ToW. Both Daryl Gywn & Will Thompson pointed out a quicker way of displaying the date & time (past intern-ship in the STU must have developed a keen sense of observation that other roles don’t develop) – simply display the Charms by…

swiping from the right if you’re a touchy sort,
by throwing your mouse into the bottom right corner then moving it up if you’re more 2-dimensional,
pressing WindowsKey+C if you’re such a productivity demon that you can’t even suffer the time to take your hands away from the keyboard. Press the same again to get rid of the Charms so you can get back to cranking out whatever you were doing before you needed to check the time (eg the email 1 minute after the deadline for sending that email).

Now that you’ve tried out each of these, or at least settled on your favourite, you’ll spot that when you display the Charms (regardless of which app you’re in, even if looking at the classic Desktop), you’ll see the day, date & time is displayed in the lower left of the screen, in nice big friendly letters and numbers. Easy!

Another erratum, of sorts – if you installed “The Time” application from last week’s tip, you would be well advised to check for and install any updates, since one or two have been issued for the app (via the Store – see ToW #149 regarding app updates). It turns out the app was originally doing something entirely legitimate (at least the developer says so, and the customer is always right after all) but which was causing the “Runtime Broker” application to leak memory like one of those round things with all the holes in it. If you’re seeing error messages from Windows 8 saying it’s running out of virtual memory, then you’re very likely to be getting hit with this issue/side effect. The Time app is presumably doing its otherwise legitimate things differently now, as it’s all fixed.

To check on the status of memory leaks etc, simply fire up Task Manager (press CTRL+SHIFT+ESC, or else you can do all manner of faffing about with the mouse or 3-fingered salute keys if you must), and click on the Memory column to sort. Don’t be alarmed to see Outlook take the lion’s share of your machine’s resource – it does that. You may find other Office apps and Internet Explorer are shortly behind – worry not, they’re just being efficient by using the memory the system has so they can work better. Honest.

Anyway, if Runtime Broker is running at, oh, about 300 times as much as you might see above, then you have a leak. The cure? You could right-click on it and End Task, or you could do the more considered thing and just reboot. After first making sure you have the latest versions of your Windows Store apps installed… Thanks to Louis Lazarus for pointing out the leak.

This week’s tip, if you’re still reading

Assuming you’ve fought through the prologue, this week’s tip comes from a question posed by the Dynamic Phil Newman: when using multiple monitors, Phil wants to be able to have a spreadsheet open on each, so he can copy/massage/paste the data from one to the other – and he found that Excel insisted on opening multiple workbooks up in the same window.

Now it’s possible to tweak the system to change what happens when you just double-click on a file – open it in the same instance of the application if it’s already running, or fire up a new instance just for your file… but it’s a palaver and one default is only as good as the other. Sometime you want different workbooks to be in the same instance of Excel (historically, you could only move sheets between open workbooks if they were opened within the same instance, but that’s no longer the case).

There are pros and cons to both approaches of “open in a new instance” / “open in the current one”, but the pros in former case would mean you can park different windows in different places, either on your one screen or across your array of screens should you have them.

There’s a quick way of firing up a separate window, though – if you already have Excel running or if you’ve pinned Excel to your task bar in Windows 8, just right-click on the icon and instead of clicking on the sheet you want to open from the most-recently-used list, just click on Excel 2013 (or maybe if you’re still rooted in the past, on Excel 2010 or earlier). This launches a new window of Excel, in which you can open your favourite sheet and run it alongside whatever else you’re working on.

You can, of course, have multiple sheets opened within the same instance of Excel, appear side/side – by using the View -> Arrange All or View Side by Side to show them tiles next to one another, where you can even enable scrolling of the documents at the same time (so as you’re moving down or across through one, the other keeps pace).

As an advert for old Tips o’ the Week, this was also covered a couple of years ago … here.

Tip o’ the Week #122 – The Sky (Drive)’s the Limit!

Posted on June 29, 2012 by ewand

For years now, SkyDrive has offered a chunk of online storage to anyone who wanted to use it, if they had a Windows Live (aka Hotmail, MSN Messenger, .NET Passport & others) user ID. Adding Windows Live Mesh to the mix gave the ability to not just store and share stuff online, but be able to back up files automatically from your PC, “to the cloud…”.

SkyDrive and Mesh have both featured a fair bit in ToWs passim – (#52, #69, #109…) though some of those missives have been superseded by more recent developments.

SkyDrive upgrade

One such change has been the release of a PC client for SkyDrive, so it’s not reliant on the Live Mesh software. It now provides easy access to SkyDrive storage directly from within Windows Explorer, and therefore any other application. Even though there’s a preview SkyDrive Metro app for Windows 8, this is the first time we’ve made it so deeply integrated to Windows through the provision of a PC client.

The differentiator here is that Mesh provided a way of backing up a maximum of 5Gb to “SkyDrive” (somewhat oddly, not taken out of the total 25Gb allocation from the regular SkyDrive), and made visible from the Windows Live Devices page. There was no really easy way to retrieve stuff that had been synced by Mesh into the magic 5Gb bucket, other than viewing the folder within the browser and downloading a file by saving it to your PC then opening it, or by synching the folder onto another PC and downloading it that way.

The fab new SkyDrive app, however, exposes the full online storage facility just like it’s any other folder that happens to be on the network – so you can move files around, double-click on them to open in native applications, right-click for properties etc. If you use SkyDrive on multiple PCs, it could be used to synchronise your content with each PC and with the online SkyDrive service, meaning you’ve always got the ability to get to your files from any browser. Live Mesh could still be useful to synch content between PCs only (eg copy all your music between two PCs at home).

Other clients are available too – Windows Phone, iPad, iPhone, Mac …

Get your 22Gb free, quickly!

It’s worth noting that the previous 25Gb storage limit on SkyDrive has been reduced, so now you “only” get 7Gb. It turns out that less than 1% of SkyDrive’s existing user base had more than 7Gb of storage in use, so the gratis amount has been reduced somewhat. Never fear, though – existing users can request a free upgrade to retain your 25Gb of space, though don’t delay… it’s a time-limited offer (see here and here). It’s also now possible to buy additional storage if you want – £32 per year will get you 100Gb, for example, surely a price worth paying to ensure all your photos and home docs are backed up and accessible from anywhere…?

· For more info on the new SkyDrive features, see here.

· For some commentary on the new SkyDrive service, see here, and for info about how much better this is than the vaguely comparable DropBox, Apple iCloud or Google Drive services, see here.
(DropBox, for example, gives you 2Gb free, and charges $20 per month for 100Gb, as a comparison).

Tip o’ the Week #121 – Networking with Lync

Posted on June 15, 2012 by ewand

This week, we have a semi-rehash of earlier tips (#51 and #67), based on some investigation work that’s been done inside Microsoft’s own IT group.

If you’re going to join a Lync call (especially if you’re using video or app sharing, using a Roundtable/Polycom CX5000 device etc), then best practice is to use a wired network connection. If you’ve a laptop which is on WiFi, then you need think about your connection if you want the call quality to be at its best.

Networking preference

Windows 7 and Windows 8 prefer wireless networks, on the basis that if you’re connected to a WiFi network, then there’s a reasonable chance you’re on a laptop and therefore you’re likely to move around.

Lync really wants a nice, fast, low-latency network connection. In a typical Microsoft office environment, most users have laptops and most will be connected to wireless, meaning the WiFi is going to be pretty congested, compared to a wired network at least. And congested, slow(er) networks don’t make for great call quality (as is sometimes evidenced by the network connectivity icon).

The Lync client is network-aware, though, and will default to using the highest-performing network it can. So, if you’ve a laptop that’s on WiFi and plugged into Ethernet, then Lync will use the wired network in preference. There’s one important consideration though – Lync can’t switch an in-progress call between WiFi and wired!

So if you establish a call on Wireless, then see the dreaded red bars that tell you all is not well with your network, simply plugging in a network cable won’t do you any good. You’d have to drop the call and re-establish it to make a difference.

To be sure which network you’re using for the call, fire up Task Manager – right-click on the Taskbar and choose Task Manager, or just press CTRL-SHIFT-ESC.

In Windows 7, select the Networking tab, and if you’re using Windows 8 Consumer Preview, look under Performance and you’ll see little graphs of how your networks are doing. This will help you see which network is being used to carry all that data.

A simple way of checking the behaviour is to use the Lync client’s test call facility and see which one spikes…

If the WiFi is taking the brunt, then make sure the wired network is connected OK, then disconnect the call and re-establish it, and you should see the wired network usage jump up.

No real need to disable WiFi, but if you have a switch on your laptop to do that, and you’re a suspicious sort (or untrusting type), then doing so may hurry the process along.

Tip o’ the Week #120 – The colour of time

Posted on June 8, 2012 by ewand

This week’s tip is a lovely little Windows app, recommended by Ceri Morris.

It’s a little like the sunrise alarm clocks which start your day by gently lighting the room, or the sleep alarms which gradually fade out the radio instead of a sudden silence in place of music.

This free application, called f.lux, changes the colour temperature of your Windows PC’s display, based on what the time is. Once the sun goes down, it starts to change the bright white of your Windows backgrounds to a nice soft glow, with the intent that your eyes will adjust to the softer lighting system when you’re looking at the screen in the evening.

Ditto, early in the day, the less harsh, less bright white screen will be more soothing on the peepers first thing, and that will be altogether better. It’s possible to over-ride temporarily, if you’re doing work that is colour-sensitive (like photo editing etc), and you can preview the effect so when you install the software, you’ll be able to see what it looks like throughout the course of night and day.

Thousands of comments on the f.lux website list people saying they’re sleeping better since their evening PC use with f.lux helps their eyes relax before settling down for the night. If work/life balance is a problem for you, then maybe you should stop using your work PC in the evening… but if you do need/want to use a computer after the sun goes down, give this tool a try and see how you get on with it.

Check out the site to install F.lux – http://stereopsis.com/flux/ – It’s really rather good.
Now, go to bed!

Tip o’ the Week #104 – Windows 7’s clock & date

Posted on March 16, 2012 by ewand

One of the neat little design touches of Windows 7 that changed as a result of usage analysis was the calendar that is shown when you click the clock on your system tray. User feedback taught product designers that in previous versions of Windows, users would often go into the “Date & Time Properties” dialog box, not to set the date but just to see the calendar – eg what date is it 3 weeks from now?, or what day is Christmas Day .?

Of course, in earlier Windows versions, if you changed the date by clicking on another month/year, and hit the OK button, it would actually change the system date. not necessarily a good thing. In Windows 7, the default behaviour is to just show you the calendar, and easily allow you to jump between months, years, even decades.

Of course, you could just use Outlook, but a) not everyone uses Outlook all the time (the poor non-productive fools!) and b) it’s usually just quick & easy to click on the taskbar to check a date. If you are in Outlook, did you know that you can type in expressions into any date field – eg the Start date of a meeting. “3 weeks on Tuesday” , “next Friday”, “in 60 days”, “7d”, “Christmas 2013” . there are loads of variants to try.

Ticking away, the moments that make up the time of day

If you’re a habitual jet-setter, are planning a holiday in foreign climes or just want to know the time in another part of the world, you can also add multiple clocks in Windows 7. Click on the Date/Time part of the system tray, click on Change date and time settings. and then the Additional Clocks tab.

Sure beats those £2,000 “executive wall clocks” that feature in the back pages of in-flight magazines.

Tip o’ the Week #101 – Finding files for dialogs

Posted on March 2, 2012 by ewand

How many times a month do you have a file (a picture, maybe, or a document) that you want to upload to some website, or attach to an email. and you know where the file is, but then have to navigate through a dialog box to locate it from within the application? I can sometimes think of 2 or 3 such scenarios in a given day.

There are lots of alternatives, of course – if you want to attach a document that’s on your desktop to an email, then you can just drag & drop it. But many dialog boxes don’t give you that flexibility – some apps will make you point to a file, by navigating to the file’s folder and selecting it from there.

This can be complicated if you have lots of documents in the folder, especially ones whose names don’t mean a lot – think about a folder with 100s of pictures, all called P0001234.jpg or similar. When you’re previewing the picture in Explorer, it might be easy to see which one you want to share, but if you’re uploading it through a dialog box that doesn’t give you a preview of the pics, then you’ll need to remember its location & name, so you can point to the file.

One approach would be to just click on the address bar within the Explorer window, and copy that to the Clipboard – CTRL-C – then you can typically paste that into the upload dialog box, and at least you will be pointed at the folder where the files exist. If you start typing the name of the file at the end of the path in the Address bar, then it may let you select the full name (using the up & down arrow keys to select) and copy that to the clipboard (CTRL-C again) too. All very well for the keyboard jockey but there is an easier way.

Copy as path

If you’ve selected a file in an Explorer window, hold down the SHIFT key and right-click, and you’ll see a new option shows up – Copy as path. This somewhat cryptic command copies the name of the file and it’s full path into the clipboard – so you can pick exactly the photo or document, and can easily paste that full path and file name into any dialog box.

Here’s an example of a SharePoint 2010 Upload Document dialog; just right-click in the “File name” box, paste the full name and hit Open.

On the face of it, this might not seem like a revolutionary function – but start using it and you’ll be amazed at how much time and aggravation it saves you. ZDNet’s Ed Bott said, “I use this shortcut constantly. It’s amazing how many times it comes in handy. It will save you many, many clicks.”

Tip o’ the Week #99 – Is your hard disk just “on”?

Posted on February 24, 2012 by ewand

One frustrating aspect of a modern PC is when it seems to slow down inexplicably, even when it’s not obviously busy. Sometimes that could be evidenced by the hard disk light flickering a lot of the time, or in extreme cases, solidly lit up. There are a number of reasons why this could be the case – here are some tips on finding out why and maybe what to do about it.

Your PC is just not good enough

A common reason why your disk is really busy (sometimes known as thrashing) is simply that the machine doesn’t have enough oomph to do what it’s being told to. It could be you just don’t have enough of some critical resources, such as memory. If there isn’t enough physical memory (RAM) in the machine, then when an application wants to hold information in memory, something else which is currently in memory needs to be “paged out” – written to disk, temporarily.

That’s all very well, until the application that was using the data that’s just been paged out needs it back -then, something else is paged out, and the previous data is read back in. If you get to the point where you’re really short of RAM, the PC will be thrashing to the point of exclusion to practically everything else. The whole process is a lot like the juggling you might need to do when you’re trying to work with more than two things but are limited to having only two hands.

The only solution to not having enough RAM is to add some more (not always straightforward), or make the machine do less. Look in Resource Monitor (press Windowskey-R then enter “resmon“) under the memory tab, and you’ll see how much of your physical memory is being used. You can also look and see which applications are using up all the memory and maybe think about shutting them down, or making room for them by closing other applications.

Modern day whack-a-mole

Curing performance problems can be like pushing a blockage from one place to another, or like the whack-a-mole fairground game where you hit one issue and another one just pops up elsewhere. If your PC isn’t running out of memory, maybe the processor (CPU) is the bottleneck, or perhaps it’s the disk itself.

If the CPU is slow, then everything else will feel pretty slow – the whole machine will just feel like it’s overworked. If the disk is slow, then the machine will bog down every time it needs to do something disk-intensive. Combine a possibly slow disk with running out of memory, and you’ve got the perfect storm – a PC that is constantly shuttling stuff to-and-fro between memory and disk, and burdening the CPU with all the additional overhead to do so.

There are some things you can do to mitigate the “disk light on” issue, however.

It’s probably Outlook

ToW #96 covered an issue where Outlook might use up a large amount of disk space, and maintaining that kind of volume will put something of a strain on the PC. Outlook is probably the heaviest desktop application most of us use, and if it isn’t hammering your memory or processor, then it will probably be nailing your hard disk.

Defragment

It’s still worth making sure your hard disk isn’t badly fragmented, a situation where files end up scattered across the surface of the disk in lots of pieces or fragments. If you have a nice clean disk that’s largely empty, then Windows would write a new file out in one big splurge of “contiguous” fragments or clusters.

When files are deleted, all that happens is those clusters that are currently used, get marked as free so they can be over-written in future. If the disk gets increasingly full up, though, it may be that the only free space exists in small chunks all over the place – meaning Windows has to do more work to read and write files.

You can run Disk Defragmentation by going to Start and typing in Disk Defrag, then you’ll be able to run the Defrag process interactively, or schedule it to happen in the background – ensuring that you pick a time that you won’t be really busy on your PC, otherwise it will be the Disk Defrag that’s making the light glow.

To allow fragmentation a better shot of cleaning up the disk, it may be a good idea to close applications that are likely to be using big files (like Outlook, whose OST file is probably the biggest file on your hard disk), and if you have a high degree of fragmentation, then it would be worth getting rid of the hidden Hibernate File on your hard disk – that’s where Windows writes the contents of memory if the battery on your laptop runs out, so it’s gigabytes in size.

To delete your Hibernate File, you need to fire up a command prompt in Administrator mode – go to Start menu and start typing command then right-click and choose Run as administrator.

A quick alternative is to go to Start, then type cmd and press CTRL-SHIFT-ENTER, which tells Windows to run whatever you’ve typed in as an administrator. Try it: you too can run notepad as an admin.

Once you have your admin Command Prompt (denoted by the window title of Administrator C:\Windows\etc), then type powercfg -h off to switch the Hibernate functionality off, and in so doing, ditch the hiberfil.sys file. Once you’ve finished defragmenting, you can switch hibernate back on by repeating with powercfg -h on.

Is your disk just too slow? How would you know?

Finally for this week, there’s a possibility that your disk is just basically slow and there’s not a lot you can do about that short of replacing it. If you look in Device Manager (Start -> then type Device Manager), and expand out the Disk Drives section, you will see what kind of hard disk you have – try Binging the cryptic model number and you might find the specifications of the disk – does it spin at 5,400rpm or 7,200rpm, or is I solid state? Does it have any cache? Maybe reviewers on Amazon et al will pan that model’s performance, or even suggest that a simple firmware upgrade of the disk itself will solve performance issues. [Here Be Dragons – be very careful if you go down this route].

You can see if your disk is the bottleneck to PC performance by looking at the Disk tab in Resource Monitor, expanding out the Storage section. You’ll see Disk Queue Length as one of the columns on there – that’s a measure of how much stuff Windows is waiting for to be read from or written to the disk. If the machine is busy and doing a lot of disk work, this might be legitimately quite high (maybe double figures) but if it’s sustained then it could be illustrating that the disk is struggling to keep up with the requests the PC is making of it.

That could be a symptom that it’s just not quick enough, but it could be a forebear of the disk being faulty – maybe the reason it’s taking ages is because it’s physically about to fail. Best get it checked out.

And don’t forget ReadyBoost

After sending this original tip above within Microsoft, a reader (Rob Orwin) responded to remind me about ReadyBoost – so I added the following in a subsequent tip. In Rob’s own words.

Whenever my computer is being a bit sluggish, I stuff two memory sticks, which I always carry around in my laptop bag, in the USB ports and as if by magic everything starts running as if it’s on steroids. It’s instantaneous as you only need to dedicate a device to ReadyBoost once, and then every time you put it in the USB drive it gets automatically used as pseudo-RAM. Another option is to get a ReadyBoost compatible SD card and stick it in the laptop’s SD card slot – which pretty much no one ever uses. [and 4Gb SD cards can be picked up for a few £s]

Yes, it’s not quite as fast as actually adding RAM but it’s a lot easier and a great deal faster than having to use the HDD for virtual memory. I learnt this from a friend who’s a graphic designer. She uses ReadyBoost whenever she needs to do huge batch operations in PhotoShop. The ReadyBoost feature was apparently the main reason why she got her company to buy her a PC instead of a Mac. When a Mac is out of RAM, it’s out of RAM.

I even use ReadyBoost at home to run Windows 7 on a laptop that is 12 years old and has 256Mb RAM.