why a netbook?

I made a deliberate choice in shifting my personal computing to a Dell Mini 9 Netbook PC. To be completely honest, the first reason was the ‘toy’ factor. I like digital toys, and netbooks are the new cool toy. But there’s other reasons for the mini.

First we’ve been blue skying the idea of low powered pcs and cloud apps for most of the employees of Duke Energy for a while as a cost management option. We haven’t done anything with it yet, but I figured I’d play around with one for a while and see if I could work with it. If I can, than most of my colleagues who do general office type documents, email, and web surfing can, and we can save millions of dollars on hardware and software. So much for the “I have a serious reason for doing this” bullshit – I want to have fun with it!

But the main reasons are these: The mini runs a low powered Atom processor (1.6 GHz), has relatively little memory (1GB RAM) and little internal storage (it shipped with a 8 GB solid state hard drive and arrived with about 3.5 GB free). So I can’t load a bunch of bloatware like Office, Photoshop, sound editing apps, etc plus store my music and photographs. I have 15GB of music alone, plus another 8 GB of photos. So the mini forces me to rethink how I do my computing.

I need thin versions of all the software I use, so I look to the cloud. I need separate storage and my options are to buy more storage media or use online storage. Online storage is free, so let’s start there. And the machine isn’t powerful enough to do anything more than display multimedia files – it will play mp3s and videos, but you can’t edit them. Look at all those requirements and the cloud is worth spending some time exploring. There’s a lot of options, and what you choose depends on how you prefer to work, store, and share your information, but we’ll look at a couple of different approaches, mix, match, combine and separate to get to what works best for what you want to do.

Finally, back to the ‘toy’ factor. It’s a lot of fun to take the mini to Starbucks or the library and see how many people stare before they come over to see just what this tiny thing is.

netbooks and the cloud – some rules

For me, working in the cloud is something of a social experiment. I already run software that does everything I intend to move to the cloud and then some. But the idea here is to minimize the time and money spent on computing while maximizing the flexibility. So I have to set some rules for myself and this blog. Followup posts will dive a little deeper into the how and why of individual rules.
1. No device (computer, phone, multimedia device) I use for any computing can cost more than $300. A seeming arbitrary number, but more on that later.

2. The computers I use for all cloud computing will be a Dell Mini 9 Netbook. More to come here as well.

3. Any device used must be mobile, or not owned by me but guest accessible at no cost.

4. All applications used must be free. They may offer premium, fee based services, but there must be a cost free entry point.

4. All software used must be “open” i.e. not requiring any provider specific supporting components that are not considered open standards by the geeks who run the web. There is ONE exception, I’ll talk about that too.

6. I can’t use anything provided by my employer, that would be cheating.

That’s probably all the rules we need. Remember, one of my main goals is to save us money and time. Because of that there will be tradeoffs in almost everything we try to do. Most of the time it’s trading advanced features and performance for cost. Then again, who really needs all those bells and whistles anyway? Well, professionals and serious hobbyists probably do, but even they don’t need them for everything they do so I think we’ll find there’s something for everybody here. At least I hope so.