Adobe Reader Windows Live Essentials

Global Nerdy

Tech Evangelist Joey deVilla on Windows Cellphone 7 Windows 7 Starter, software program development, tech news and also other nerdy stuff
A little Netbook Experiment
by Joey deVilla on January 15, 2010
“The Horror! The Horror!”

“d00d,” commenced the capitalization- and punctuation-free email I acquired on Sunday, “coding horror atwood is totaly [sic] waling on ur azz”. Curious to see just how Jeff was “waling on my azz”, I pointed my browser at his blog, Coding Horror, a single from the “800-pound gorillas” of the tech weblog scene and discovered his most recent report, titled A Democracy of Netbooks.
In A Democracy of Netbooks Office 2010 Home And Student, Jeff rebuts an report of mine from late last May well, Fast Foods Apple Pies and Why Netbooks Suck. The thesis of my report was that netbooks occupied an sad, “worst of the two worlds” middle ground among smartphones and notebook personal computers: a little too massive to fit within your pocket, somewhat also small to accomplish lots of perform on, and sadly underpowered. As I summed it up, “netbooks are like laptops, but lamer”.
Jeff argues that netbooks will be the opposite. He says that by virtue of their very low expense, they’re a democratizing power that supply computing and communicative electrical power to all. In contrast to smartphones, you are not at the mercy of the telephone company’s month to month charges or contracts (and remember, I’m in Canada, the one nation from the planet in which 3-year cellular contracts exist). “Netbooks aren’t an alternative to notebook computer systems Office Professional Plus 2007,” he writes, they would be the new computers.”
Unfortunately, Jeff missed my follow-up to Quickly Meals Apple Pies and Why Netbooks Suck, in which I explained the motivation behind the write-up:
I feel that there’s a little too much excitement about netbooks at Microsoft. I think that part of it stems from the old company mantra, “a computer on every desktop and in every home”. The PC is the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg, and the closer that a device is to the PC, the more Microsoft “gets” it. I feel that Microsoft sees the netbook as an exciting new space, exactly where I see them as smaller, less powerful laptops. I think that eventually, as technology catches up Windows 7 Home Premium Product Key, netbooks will simply be considered “computers” – just on the tiny end from the PC size spectrum, and that Microsoft should treat them as such.
The write-up is also an open letter to Microsoft stating my concern that netbooks are a dangerous red herring distracting us from exactly where the real potential in cellular computing is: the smartphone. It’s an area wherever Microsoft had an early lead and dropped the ball. It’s an area in which I feel that Microsoft is showing a lack of vision, from Steve Ballmer’s ill-considered dismissal with the iPhone (“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”) to Windows Cellular 6, which feels as though it was half-assedly slapped together by PDA designers frozen in an iceberg in 2000.

Still, I’m glad that Jeff found my article worth writing about and happy to see that it’s started some discussion.
Ooh! No cost Netbook!
As the hardware sponsor in the Canadian version of Techdays – Microsoft’s cross-country, seven-city tools and technology training conference – Dell provided us with a number of computers, including about a dozen of Latitude 2100 netbooks. They performed yeoman service as hosts for a rotating slide deck that we’d display in between conference sessions, in the two the presentation theatres as well as inside the hallways.
Here’s what they look like when artfully posed by a photographer for the marketing material:
By the bye, those bodies are rubberized and have a cross-hatched pattern.
Here’s one particular in the netbooks in action, quietly working as Dylan Smith makes his presentation at TechDays Winnipeg:

…and here are IT Pro Evangelist Rick Claus, me and IT Pro Evangelist Rodney Buike striking a “Charlie’s Angels” pose with the three colours of netbooks we were provided:

On December 16th, 2009 at 4:00 p.m., the very moment that TechDays Winnipeg ended, the netbooks were retired from conference service and all the evangelists team got to pick one particular. Although I’d rather have been assigned the “Dellasaurus” – a 17” monster with quad-core chip and 16 gigs of RAM — I’m not the type to turn up his nose at being assigned another computer. I chose one in the Kermit-the-Frog-green ones.
The Experiment

Thus far, my netbook has been relegated to ebook-reading duty and minor else, but in light of Jeff’s report, I figured that this might be an opportunity to put it to the test. What if I were to set aside a week to use the netbook as my a single and only machine in my day-to-day work and life? Would I be pleasantly surprised, driven mad, or neither?
Starting on Sunday and continuing through to next Saturday, I will use the Dell Latitude 2100 exclusively. This should be an interesting test, as I will be working in a very number of places:
At my home office At HacklabTO, the Toronto “hackerspace” exactly where I’m a member and which I often use as a coworking space At a meeting with a client On the road: I’ll be flying to Montreal to attend CUSEC (Canadian University Application Engineering Conference) as a sponsor representative and host of DemoCamp. This should be a good test of the netbook under the conditions where it’s supposed to shine.
By the way, does anyone know what the Canadian domestic flight carry-on restrictions are in the wake in the Underwear Bomber?
Here are its specs:
Processor: Intel Atom N270 running at 1.6GHz with 512K L2 cache and 533MHz bus Chipset: Intel 945 PM/GS Express Graphics: Intel Integrated GMA 950 Display: 10.1” WSVGA 1024 by 600 LED display Other Goodies: Integrated webcam Single-touch screen RAM: 2GB (1GB on-board plus 1GB in the memory slot) Hard Drive: 160GB, 5400 RPM Wifi: Intel WiFi Link 5100 802.11 a/g/n mini card Battery: 3-cell (there’s a 6-cell available)
When benchmarked using the Windows Experience Index, it yielded a base score of 2.0. Here are its Windows Experience Index subscores (the index rates components on a scale of 1.0 to 7.9):
Processor: 2.1 Memory: 4.5 Graphics: 2.0 Gaming graphics: three.0 Primary hard disk: 5.three
Since the netbooks were being used as secondary PowerPoint machines for TechDays, they already had the following installed on them:
Windows 7 Enterprise, which includes Internet Explorer 8 Office 2007 (it’s a rare day when I don’t use Outlook or OneNote) Adobe Reader Windows Live Essentials (which includes my workhorse, Writer, a handy and under-appreciated blog site editor)
The software selection above is probably the sort of thing that most office workers (and students, the market at whom the Latitude 2100 is aimed) would use from day to day. In addition to these apps, I installed some from the tools with the developer evangelist trade:
Visual C# Express 2008 Visual C# Express 2010 Beta 2 Visual Web Developer 2008 Visual Web Developer 2010 Express Beta 2 SQL Server Express 2008 SQL Server Management Studio Express Browsers: Chrome Firefox Opera Safari Adobe Fireworks CS3 (my primary graphics tool) PHP 5.2.12 Ruby 1.9.1 Notepad++
I’ll report on my experiences using the netbook as my primary machine regularly and tell you about the good, the bad and the ugly (or beautiful, because a single never knows).
I have only a single question: Jeff, do you want to try the same thing?
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Tagged as: Coding Horror, experiments, Jeff Atwood, cellular, netbooks Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus, road warrior, The Netbook Experiment