Ah.. I have not been prolific of late. The cause? My notebook completely died a fantastic death from an unidentified motherboard problem rendering my hard drive completely unrecoverable. Damn!
Believe it or not – in my early, early career (1991), I worked at Toshiba as advanced technical support for five months. I actually provided hardware support to retailers like futureshop, computerland, etc – often taking apart notebooks and giving advise on problems retailer support couldn’t solve. It was a career that was dangerously heading down the wrong path – I’m not an IT person per se but a marketer who loves technology. Long way of saying that I used to be able to diagnose the problems with my hardware but that was sooo long ago. So I double checked the notebook death with a fix it type in Perth, Ontario.
Interestingly, went Mr Fixit called with the bad news of my notebook death, I was able to get the notebook trucked to Smith Falls where it went into an environmentally responsible grave. And my hard drive? Mr Fixit just took a hammer to it since reformatting is impossible.
This did happen two days before a two week holiday and so I’ve been completely unplugged from twitter, blogs, facebook (well.. mostly) and it felt terrific. Of course, I feel totally out of touch with my net friends – whom I follow with great interest.
So now I’m investigating buying a netbook – the Asus eee pc 1000. What is interesting is the 3lbs weight, near full size keyboard 92% and battery life 4 -5 hours (look for six cell battery) all with wifi connectivity. I wonder how my software will perform on it but will continue to read the user forums.
Netbooks are quickly gaining share in the laptop market as they are cheap, and trade power for portability. The price range is about $350 – 800 bucks (though some say a netbook over $600 is not really a netbook). I found a great article by James McGuire on the top netbooks for 2009 as well as a useful asus user forum for product reviews.
Posted by Laurie Dillon Schalk 
Down time – its the Victoria day weekend and I took Lucy to
