I've decided to go get into the netbook craze. I've been very excited about them ever since the Eee PC came out. Unfortunately the super-small SSD drives have been a deterrent as have the micro-small screens on the first generation. It's got to be a touch balancing act to create a small notebook that isn't too small to be useful. The second and third generation netbooks are getting better with this, though some have just gone crazy with price point and features. I'm getting an Acer One with 1.5GB RAM and 120GB hard drive. I don't need that big of a hard drive, yet a 12GB SSD seemed too small. I guess 40GB would have been fine – and 40GB SSD even better. Those SSD prices really need to drop -- it's a bit ridiculous. I'm tired of lugging around a full-size notebook or tablet for web browsing and text editing. Of course, once you have something with you, you want photo management, gaming, Visual Studio (well I do anyway!), and maybe even Virtual PC…. It's too easy to drift between the two extremes. On most trips that I take, the netbook will be just the right size. My laptop now is basically a desktop replacement. It's perfect for my day-to-day work, but overkill for simple tasks. I hope to install Visual Studio onto the One at least for simple demo purposes. It's got a VGA connection so I should be able to use it to drive my presentations too. All in all, it should be a very nice unit. As portable as I could want, and as capable too.
posted @ Friday, October 31, 2008 11:04 AM