LeeMobile

So I’ve caved and bought a laptop just like everyone else.  I’ve never really liked laptops.  I’ve always found them to be really underpowered, pricey, and not as comfortable as a desktop PC.  I enjoy the awesome luxury of my dual 24 inch screens too much to be cramped up by a small 17 incher.  That is so 2001!

I guess it’s out of pure utility that I am finally getting one.  The long bus rides to get to work are starting to wear me down.  It’s good reading time, but on some days I want to do something “productive” while commuting.

Back when I worked at Waypoint, the commute was only 8 minutes each way.  That left me with enough energy and time to squeeze in an hour or so of extra-curricular programming once I got home.  However, now that I spend almost 90 minutes everyday on the bus that’s no longer there.

So, my requirements for this laptop are pretty low.  I just need it to be small and light.  I’d like the battery to be decent enough.  And other than the standard stuff like ethernet/USB/sound ports, there’s not a whole lot more I need.  I don’t even need a DVD drive for this thing.  I just need to be able to pull it out while on the bus for a quick job (that sentence sounds so dirty!!).

Luckily for me, this year has been the year of the ultra-portable sub-compact notebooks.  The Asus EEE-PC, MSI Wind, and Acer Aspire One are just a few models that have come out.  They’re all small, light, and cheap! Especially since I’ll be loading them up with Xubuntu, the hardware should be more than powerful enough for my needs.  Cause really, all I need it to do is to load up my favorite text editor and I’ll be emacs’ing away.

So anyways, I ended up picking the Acer Aspire One in the end.  From a cost/feature perspective it seemed to be right in the sweet spot.  The Asus EEE-PC has too small of a keyboard to be usable, whereas the MSI Wind and Aspire One both have larger screen sizes and keyboards.

The Aspire One model I ordered has a 160 Gig hard drive, 1 Gig ram, 1.6 Ghz processor, and a 6 cell battery.  I got it for about $400 from my favorite online PC store NCIX.  The MSI model has a larger screen by an inch, but with identical specs would’ve cost me $600 instead.  A 50% premium seems a tad too high.  They both come with a copy of Windows XP, but as I mentioned before I’ll be loading up Linux to keep the performance overhead down.  And really, unless you’re playing games (which sucks on a laptop anyways) there’s no real good reason to be running Windows!

So now I eagerly am await my new laptop!  I’ll probably post a little review of this little gem as soon as I get it.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 20th, 2008 at 6:30 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.