Loving the Netbook!

I felt compelled to part with some money. About $350 worth. I'm not sure why, but I felt like I needed to sink that much into an electronic gadget. I had narrowed it down to a choice between Amazon's Kindle 2 and a netbook. Since I felt that I would get more overall usage out of a netbook, that's the one I went with, and I'm glad I did. At first glance, I wondered how I would use the thing, since I already had a perfectly good laptop. But it's not a tiny laptop. It has a 17" screen and while it can be moved around without too much difficulty, it can get rather bulky.

I had set $350 as my limit, and I did some research, but ultimately decided to support my company and buy an Acer Aspire One at the Shack. Now they are carrying them in red, which would be totally cool, but sapphire blue isn't too shabby either. It has a 10" screen and weighs about 3 pounds with the battery attached. Netbooks are not designed as performance powerhouses. Most of them use a slower Intel Atom processor that is tuned more for longer battery life than number- and graphic-crunching blazing performance. It came with 1 GB of RAM and a 160 GB hard drive, and it had Windows XP preinstalled. I had forgotten how well Windows XP actually worked, since I've been working on a Vista notebook for almost a year now. Netbooks really can't run Vista too well, since Vista is really a memory hog. Windows XP runs just fine on 1 - 1.5 GB of RAM, and you can make up the difference by using a flash drive and using the Windows ReadyBoost feature. And the power-saving processor doesn't disappoint on the netbook; I've been getting about 6-7 hours on a full charge, while my laptop could probably give me about three hours.

So, I'm using the netbook as my email/quick web browsing/IM chatting device while I do the heavier stuff on the laptop. Thus far, the netbook seems to be working well. The keyboard isn't all that small, and the screen quality is terrific. It's quick to power up and easy to carry around with me. I can lie in bed with the netbook propped up against my legs, and I can clearly make out what's on screen. I had plans of taking it to meetings with me at work, but it's difficult to get on the wireless network at work, so I've given up trying. If I travel again at some point and want to take a computer with me, I'll drop this little beauty in my bag. The only thing that is a slight inconvenience is that it has no optical drive, and I haven't felt strongly enough about it to justify spending another $100 on an external DVD/CD drive. It has 3 USB ports and a memory card reader, and I can connect it to a larger monitor if I wish.

I don't know how comfortable I would be using a netbook as my sole computer, but it's certainly a good supplement if you have a desktop or a larger laptop that you don't want to carry around with you. I reach for the netbook first, generally, since I can power it up more quickly and check my work email & schedule before I make the drive to Fort Worth. I can also take it with me to Starbucks, Border's, and other places with Wi-Fi hotspots.

But if you're looking for a second computer and you don't want to spend $500+ on one, I'd recommend one of these little babies. It really is such a growing niche in computers right now and there is such a wide variety of them out there. You can get one for about $79 (smaller netbook with 8.9" screen) if you sign up for an AT&T data plan, but those plans can quickly become expensive, especially if you go over the 5 GB per month data limit.

On a similar note, I'd recommend checking out FotoFlexer as an online photo editor. It doesn't have all of the bells and whistles of something like Photoshop, but most of us don't need all of those bells and whistles. We just need to be able to crop, resize, sharpen, or remove red-eye. FotoFlexer does all this and also has some neat special effects. I used it to add the border around the photo at the bottom of this post. By the way, that's a photo of my desk with the netbook and the laptop side by side.