Have Notebook Will Travel

On my way home from work on Friday I stopped and bought a notebook PC.  It wasn’t truely as spur-of-the-moment as I just wrote it, but it wasn’t far off.

I have to do some travelling this month and next month.  While the economy was doing so badly I wasn’t travelling and so I’ve not had my tiny notebook up and running for at least 18 months.  When I turn it on last week I was quickly reminded of how old, slow and small (memory and hard drive) it was.  I couldn’t get it to download Microsoft updates and when I remembered how much trouble it was to reimage the last time, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to throw a small Linux install onto it to let it do something useful.

My old, tiny notebook is only slightly larger than today’s netbooks, so I was considering getting a netbook to replace it.  No, a tablet wasn’t going to work, I need a real keyboard and some applications a bit more robust than what Android offers.  iPad?  Yeah, why don’t I just buy an expensive notebook instead.  I figured that I could get a decent netbook for $250, and I almost did.

There aren’t many netbooks available anymore, tablets have done them in.  In fact, there really aren’t many notebooks with screen sizes smaller than 15".  I was pretty sure I was going to get the $257 Acer notebook when I spotted the Acer with the 11" screen.  A few things bothered me about the Acer Aspire One (that was the 11" notebook); the processor is a bit dinky, it cost $325 instead of $250 and the spec sheet said that the 2GB RAM could not be expanded.

The One has a pretty low powered AMD C-series processor. Dual core 1.0GHz, although it has a turbo function that bumps it up to 1.33GHz.  I figured that I could live with this, I know that I’m not going to be doing nuclear simulations, so dinky should still work for my needs.

The increase in price made me pause, and then I reminded myself that it was still a whole notebook for less than $330.  What was I really expecting to pay?

The 2GB RAM was probably the biggest hurdle to my purchase, but I used the same reasoning I used for the dinky processor.  What did I need more than 2GB of RAM for?  Email, small documents and/or spreadsheets and possibly, possibly some small VB6 app programming.  And not all at the same time.  2GB, I decided, would work for at least a year or two.

So I bought it.  It’s a nice machine and didn’t have too much bloatware that I had to remove.  No optical drive, but how often do I use an optical drive when I’m not using my desktop?

But, I couldn’t figure out the little status light marked with the small lightbulb.  So I went to the interwebs to search out what the heck the little blue light was indicating.  And I discovered that lots of people that bought this notebook immediately upgraded to 4GB or even 8GB or RAM.  It can take more than 2GB of RAM and a 4GB SO-DIMM only cost $29.  I could have bought it more cheaply online but then I would have waited until at least today to get it.  Wait?  Me?

My little blue light is still on and I think it might be a "on, and not hibernated" indicator.  I still haven’t found a notated picture of this notebook to tell me it really is, but I’ve got 4GB of RAM.

I’m still slowly loading up my other apps onto this machine, but it will be a great replacement for my 12-year old (I just looked it up, my goodness I was depending on a 12-year old machine as a travel machine?) tiny notebook and this one is nearly as tiny.

Ender is out.