Friday, January 23, 2009

Staying in Touch in a Small Way

This morning, I ordered three netbooks, one for myself and one for each son. The husband is going to order his own through the university. For those who don't follow the world of computing, a netbook is a very small laptop designed primarily for writing and web work while on the road. The sons want to continue with their writing on the trip, and I want to be able to maintain this blog in addition to do some writing. Also, since we're not taking a cell phone, e-mail will be our principal means of communicating with folks back here.

In the case of the netbooks I ordered, "very small" means that the screen is 8.9 inches measured diagonally, the whole unit measures 6.7 x 9.8 x 1.1 inches, and it weighs a mere 2.2 pounds (1 kilo). The cost is comparably small. The ones I ordered cost $379 each. I could have gotten them cheaper, but we decided to go for 160 gb hard drives for photo storage; some netbooks have solid state drives as small as 4 gb. There are actually more brands of netbook than one might imagine, and it took a while for us to decide which one(s) to get. Acer? ASUS? HP? Samsung? Another brand? In the end, we all went for the Acer Aspire One. Younger son chose a black model, while older son went for sapphire blue so as to be able to tell his netbook from his brother's. Keeping that thought in mind but not wanting a white model, I opted for the (drum roll) pink one shown here. Yeah, it's gonna add to the fun of this trip.

1 comment:

Debi said...

Annie wants one of those in the worst way! You'll have to let us know what you think of the one you got...we're considering getting her one for her birthday.

(Annie, should you read this, notice I did say "considering," not that it was a done deal.)