This is my first blog from my new netbook whilst sat in the pub! I could definitely get used to this!
I will post a full review of the machine after I have used it for a little while, although first impressions are pretty good. The keyboard is going to take some getting used to though, as it is only about 70% of a normal laptop keyboard, but generally it is an awesome piece of kit. Just need to get myself down to Starbucks now to sit in the window with my tall skinny latte and pretend to write my novel.
I wish I could claim to have come to the pub just to write this post, but it is actually A-Soc’s second social of the Winter break and is once again pretty well attended – as of this post there are seven of us! The hardcore few!
I have just ordered my first ever laptop 
I decided that with the huge increase in travelling and commuting I am going to have to do with the AHS in the new year that I needed a way of ensuring that I wasn’t wasting the 5 hour round trip train journey from Leeds to King’s Cross (and then back of course).
I went for an ultra-mobile netbook as I felt the power/mobility compromise was the best available. I don’t need a full-specced laptop for emails, document editing and generally staying up to date online so the long battery life and portability of these little machines made sense. I settled on an EeePC 901 after spending a lot of time reading up on the subject. Its 8 hour battery life on light/moderate use is one of the longest on the market (even on moderate/heavy use it holds out for over 5 hours and will easily last for the length of a director’s edition of one of the LOTR DVDs). It also got rave reviews on everything except the keyboard (which wouldn’t matter to me as I don’t touch type at the best of times). I decided on sacrificing the larger hard drive and opted for the Windows XP version as I felt it gave me the most flexibility. I considered getting the linux version (with its 20GB drive) and putting XP on it anyway, but decided that now I have a public image to attend to that using a fully licensed version would be prudent 
I recently purchased a Seagate external hard drive as I was looking to extend my storage capacity but allowing me to maintain a degree of mobility and hopefully allow shared storage when I get round to buying a laptop. I went for the 320GB version as it was on offer at eBuyer and also they have a good reputation and a decent warranty. The customer reviews were also pretty useful.
Having now used it for a week I can agree. It is virtually silent for all but the most strenuous search tasks and even then it’s not exactly a rock concert! The search time is pretty quick too, not found any difference between it and my internal hard drives. It looks pretty smart too, is small enough to hide away on my desk without cluttering it up.
I have yet to test the mobility and ease of use on other machines, but that will come soon enough I think. My only real bone is the location of the cables. From the design there really wasn’t much choice, but it basically means that the cables are on show. Fine if you are not like me and have a certain amount of OCD about stuff like that, I guess.
I would recommend one, especially at the offer price of around fifty quid including postage and VAT. I got an extra bargain as Google Checkout were offering a further £10 off if I used thier checkout service! So £40 cannot be sniffed at!
Seeing as I am getting four brand new housemates from the 1st July and I am moving rooms I now have the perfect excuse for thinking up some new toys, gadgets, space savers etc for next academic year.
We have big plans for a home network, 3.5 of us will be computing students next year, so I am acquiring a new computer so that I can a) have a linux machine that I can practice on and b) there is going to be some spare space for extra hard drives and other network paraphenalia. To this end I need to put together a list of stuff for my new computer – I have a case, PSU, fan, motherboard and a hodge podge of hard drives, optical drives and other bits and bats. The computer I have acquired was originally an AMD 688Mhz, with 20Gb hard drive, 128MB RAM, I seem to remember my brother putting a 64MB nVidia graphics card in there and on board sound. There is a prob a network card in it. I was planning on putting one or two new, larger hard drives in there, but apart from that I don’t know where to start to get it up to some sort of spec. I basically need it for running linux and as a storage system. Any ideas or suggestions welcome.
There is also a new stereo system, a new television, possibly Sky TV and i am definitely looking at some kind of back-up storage system. I don’t know whether a couple of large external hard drives are the way forward, or just use DVD’s – again advice would be useful.
I am also seriously looking into a new laptop, as portable as possible but with adequate specs so that I can use it for a variety of things like media, uni work and the odd bit of WoW/mobile blogging.
I am currently sat in DEC10, one of the computing laboratories, in the School of Computing. Michelle, Sarann and Matt are supposed to be working and I am supposed to be researching linux so that I can install it on my new desktop – which should be in Leeds on Tuesday! Instead, we are messing on Facebook and generally bitching about members of RockSoc.
It is cool being able to blog remotely, ie from somewhere other than my bedroom, I might have to buy a laptop just so I can do “field-blogging”.