ThoughtFactory.CreateThought() A random collection of thoughts from an easily bored developer

Hold Me Closer, Tiny Laptop

After moving jobs at the beginning of February this year I found myself in an interesting situation. For the first time in several years I was without a laptop. What was I to do? I had an old 14 Inch 1Ghz iBook G4 sitting at home that would need some serious TLC. It would need more memory, a new battery and some other fixes, some major, some minor. It would take too much time and effort to nurse the machine back to health, so I soon scratched that off the list.

I also had the option of borrowing my partner's Toshiba Satellite, but that was only viable during the University holidays, after which she'd need it for her post-grad degree. The semester was fast approaching, and while it did help out in the short term, it certainly wasn't a long term solution.

After giving it a bit of thought, I decided that a new laptop was in order. I started looking at several cool laptops, all in a 13.3 inch wide screen form factor and all around the AUD1500-AUD2000 mark. Bear in mind that I wasn't looking at a desktop replacement, especially considering my home setup (4 monitors, a quad core tower with 4 GB running Ubuntu 7.10 x64 and a dual core tower with 2 GB running Vista Ultimate x86) is more than adequate for my "sit in one place for hours on end" computing needs. I just needed something that would act as a big brother for my N95's internet connection (Oh how I love thee, X-Series), fit in my bag, be comfortable enough to use on a bus and let me code on the go, preferably without feeling like I'm carrying around a brick. After a few days I still hadn't made up my mind, and I was all but ready to give up on the idea.

Then I had a moment of weakness.

I came across a discussion on light weight laptops, during which the Eee PC was mentioned. Having apparently spent the latter half of 2007 under a rock, I couldn't remember much about the initial press from around the time of the device's launch, but a quick wander down Google lane fixed that problem. Over the course of the next few hours I scoured the prominent Eee PC wikis, consulted Wikipedia and read a few articles and reviews. After discovering how low the price point was (AUD500 at the time, although Austin are now selling them for ~AUD450) I simply had to have one.

The next day I walked into Myer in Perth, handed over my credit card and walked out of there with a black Eee PC with a 4 GB solid state drive and 512 MB of memory.

I have since upgraded the memory to 1GB (I actually bought a 2 GB stick, but ended up swapping it for a 1 GB stick from the Satellite after realising that I simply don't have the time to rebuild the kernel) and shoved an old 1 GB SD card (salvaged from when I bought a Mini SD card for my 6288, which has been sitting in a drawer since I bought my N95) full of eBooks in it.

I'm still running the default Xandros, but I did take the liberty of enabling "full desktop" mode. I've also installed the usual dev tools (vim, emacs, eclipse) so that I can get a coding fix on the run, but for the most part I'm running the base image. I even managed to hook it up to my N95, using the phone as a 3G/HSDPA modem, meaning that I can get on the 'net anywhere that has three coverage.

So now that I have a tiny, 7 inch laptop that can get on the 'net from nearly anywhere in the Perth metro area, has all the dev tools I need to be fairly productive and a full office suite, what do I actually use it for? Reading eBooks.

That's right.

Reading eBooks.

If you see a guy walking around the Perth CBD or waiting at a bus stop with an Eee PC in his hand, staring at the screen while remaining oblivious to his surroundings then there's a good chance that it's me. I've gotten through about twice as many technical books as I usually manage since buying the Eee PC, and that's just from reading while waiting around for or traveling on public transport. I honestly feel like I've gained 2 hours of productive time each day, which more than offsets the (already relatively paltry) amount that I paid for the laptop.