Little Computer People

I have finally got what I should have had all along. I purchased a laptop the other night. Not a laptop really, but a netbook. This purchase is something I'm still mulling over and might reconsider. There are some positives, quite a few negatives, and some other stuff in general to consider. I'll give it a few days and decide if I should just holdout for a bigger, faster laptop.

As a wannabee writer I feel this is an essential tool to add to my arsenal. It's the most important tool in any hopeful modern writer's resources. I know to some people it seems that the most important tool is creativity, ambition or the doggedness to just put your head down and write. I'd argue that those are just intuitive and can't be learned or picked up later on. You may force yourself to be ambitious, but you can't force creativity. It's there or it's not. A laptop, however, is something that must be purchased. I can tell you that a desktop computer was too much of a distraction to actually get any real work done. Again that's probably a personal problem, but even though I've had this laptop less than a day I've found myself writing quite a bit. It's portable which is great and means that I can bring my writing with me instead of being stuck in (for now) a corner of the room.

When it came time to make the purchase I went with a netbook. I had been considering it for a while and really thought that a netbook would be the right way for me to go. These are even more portable than a regular laptop. The problem with this is that you make a lot of trade offs. I had to decide on one within a $400 range, which is pretty limiting. Towards $500 there were some much better models. This one was a fair price, but that small price came with a small screen and lack of power. The meager 1gb of RAM is pretty bad. My old desktop only has 1gb and I was getting quite sick of how little it could really do.

This computer seems to be handicapped in that way from the start. It is upgradable to 2gb which might be a necessity should I keep this model. The other major, major problem is the screen resolution. It is dwarfed to 1024 x 600, which is an atrocity. Many programs that I regularly enjoy need 1024 x 768 as a bare minimum, which should just be the standard on any little computer. I really wish I'd seen this before I made the purchase. This screen seems so crowded. Expectations weren't particularly high coming in, even after using a 1440 x 900 HD monitor for two years and Ashes' gigantor LED Macbook. Even so I was hoping that it would provide a bit more in the way of screen size. It's pretty disappointing.

Nonetheless all this will do is make sure that I only use this computer for the bare essentials that I should be using it for anyway, writing and browsing the internet. Especially if I end up going overseas to South Korea, which is growing less likely by the day, I would only be able to be productive and not waste my time on games. If I had to do any heavy duty stuff like video editing, I would just do it on Ashes' Macbook. Final Cut is better than anything I could get on a PC anyway.

I'll give this a few more days as a trial, but if the limitations become too much for me to handle I'll return it without regret.