Kindly Póg Mo Thóin

So I just bought myself a netbook.  And I reaaaaallly didn’t want to, but it worked out.

I kinda like the thing.

I bought it because I’m now working on a project at work that’s online, so I can do weekend work from home rather than having to schlep in to Manhattan and waste a lot of my weekend in transit.  But the problem is, the project requires Internet Explorer, which Microsoft no longer supports for the Mac.  And then, I need to be able to open links to native documents, which are all in Windows format.  While I have Open Office,  I can’t even see the links because the program I have to use won’t work on anything but a Microsoft platform.

I thought I’d maybe use the computer lab at school, since I did pay an access fee and all, but the site doesn’t work there, either, possibly because it’s disabled on shared computers.  So off I went to J&R and got myself a cheap little netbook.  It’s really not bad; I don’t have any trouble seeing the screen, it’s got a trial version of Office so I can access everything but PowerPoints (which just won’t load for some reason, but I just skip those for the time being), it’s plenty fast, the keyboard is reasonably comfortable, it’s very light and fits in my purse.  The only drawback is the 3-hour battery (the version that’s $80 more has a 6-hour battery) but since I will primarily be using this at home or at a coffee shop with outlets, it doesn’t really matter.  Oh, and the fact that you can’t view the entire window in your browser, but I’ve already gotten the scroll-click-scroll thing down.

I may use this for my travel computer, since it weighs nothing and it’s cheap enough that I can easily replace it if it gets lost, stolen or dropped.  It’s also cheap enough that it’ll pay for itself in no time since it will allow me to bill a little extra time evenings and weekends.