This past X-Mas Santa brought me a netbook for being such a “good'” boy (developer). After much deliberation both Santa and I settled on the Dell Mini 9. No one netbook was perfect in my opinion, but the Mini was the choice I went with.
The Good: The device is SMALL, it is truly a toss around laptop (I have had it on the beach, the yard, planes, and to the chagrin of my wife the bed). I immediately upgraded my mini to 2GB RAM and installed XP PRO. The device is plenty snappy; even when running multiple applications. The screen is sharp, with the built in memory card reader it’s a great travel companion when you want to watch moves on the plane. It’s even come in handy while onsite with clients allowing me to RDP into servers and run SQL statements from remote locations with in the building.
The Bad: Do not plan on writing war and peace with this device, you will not be happy. The keyboard is small and the layout leaves a good deal to be desired. The device could have been build a little more solid, after playing with a friends HP Mini, I certainly consider the Dell mini the cheaper feeling product.
The mini is not, in my opinion, a good choice for your primary laptop, it just can’t deliver from a typing perspective and the screen is a little too small once you’ve been spoiled with larger resolution displays. It is great as a second laptop; however, this does come with a dilemma “How do you keep your data synchronized between primary and secondary machine”. I use a couple different programs to keep my data synchronized: MS One Note and Groove. Now let me first state that I don’t keep everything synchronized, since I’m using this device as a “secondary” laptop, it doesn’t need to have everything. I just want my latest docs and my most recent notes. Groove and OneNote suffice for synchronizing this sort of information.
Already the new netbooks seem to have better keyboards, more power and slightly larger displays. With pending release Windows 7 this area of the market should be extremely interesting to watch. I’m sure in the next 6 months there will be several more machines for us all to covet.
It’s not every day I get to combine two of my interests (technology and fitness); although more and more options present themselves every day. Back in November I purchased the Polar FT80 for my wife and I to help us maintain our fitness levels during the up coming holiday season. I will not say the watch is glitch free, just go to the forums and you’ll see that does have it’s share of issues, but as far as I’m concerned the watch’s benefits far out weigh it’s negative attributes. The FT80 allows you to upload it’s data to a special polar training site where you can review your workouts graphically and numerically; you can also track your progress towards various goals. Both the watch and the website can develop plans for you based on your goals and fitness level, the watch will track your weekly progress towards these goals and award you visually if you attain a certain percentage of the goals requirements (a little cheesy, but fun none the less). The watch can run various tests on your heart including rest tests and own index tests with the results of these tests it will further hone your program. The own index calculation is Polar’s estimate of your VO2 max, and like other data points it will be stored each time you run the test so that you can track improvements. The FT80 also comes standard with the Polar WearLink transmitter belt, which is much more comfortable than the standard hard plastic chest straps their older models used to come with. All in all this is a solid watch and training companion.
Let me start this post by acknowledging the fact that I drank the MS cool aid years ago. My job depends on MS and my home runs on MS, other than the obligatory iPod and Blackberry my life revolves around MS operating systems. That being said, this week I embraced a relatively new MS OS/product, the Windows Home Server (WHS). I chose HP's implementation of the Home Server, the EX475 (MediaSmart Server). I am very impressed with this product, so far it appears to deliver upon it's claims of being a very simple home backup/data repository solution. I was compelled to move to the WHS after the birth of my daughter, and the realization that we had 1000s of pictures that I couldn't stand to lose. We limped along for over a year with scripts on several servers copying data from one machine to the next to ensure I had very basic redundancy. The rub was the dependability of the scripts. I wanted a solution that just worked and provided inherent redundancy. So far I have all 4 of my computers backing up nightly to the WHS, I also have all our data stored on the shares which are set to duplicate the data across the WHS drives. I am looking forward to the Power Pack update, which should correct and enhance the WHS system.