My ASUS’ motherboard was recently blown, so I ended up getting a netbook to use until I get a more powerful laptop. Since I mostly use my laptop for development and web browsing, I don’t have a very pressing need for a hugely powerful comptuer anyway. I got an Acer ASPIREOne, which was one of the cheapest ones I could find on short notice.
I really should have learned this by now, but you should regularly back up all your files. I had most of my documents in SVN and Dropbox, but losing my current changes to my repositories is pretty annoying. I’m currently copying over files, since my hard drive is OK, but I htink I’m going to move as much as possible onto Dropbox.
Dropbox is a program that is used for backing up and synchronizing files across computers. It acts as just a regular folder on your computer, and when changes are made they are propogated up to Dropbox’s servers. It works offline and can be used with pretty much any OS. The first 2GB you use are free; if you need any more, they charge you.
The one problem I have so far with the netbook so far is the keyboard. It’s understandable that it’s small, but some of the keys are in strange position, makign it more annoying than it should be. For example, there are two ‘\’ keys, neither of which are in the correct position and both in spaces better used by ther keys. The placement of them makes the left shift key to be very small, and the ‘Enter’ button to not be as wide as I’m used to. I’m not sure that this was at all necessary.
Other than that, everything’s working pretty well. The screen is much smaller than I’m used to, which was expected, but is still somewhat disconcrting at first. If you have no reason to have a powerful laptop, I’d recommend just getting a cheap netbook and not spending a huge amount for a really good laptop.
Tags: acer