ultra-laptop

[candid]

This fall I am going to India for 3 weeks. It is looking less and less likely that my magnum opus "Making Out With You Killed My Dog" (not actual title) (current status: 22k words) is going to be finished by then, which means that I will need some way to work on it while I am traveling

Comments

[etesla]

I just picked up a Sylvania g Netbook for $299, and it's worth the $299 once you rip out the OS it comes with (gOS) and replace it with stock Ubuntu. (gOS, uh, managed to screw up *terminal*.)

If I had $500 to drop and could go back in time, I'd choose the eeePC. I've seen the operating systems for the various UMPCs, and the Acer's is absolute balls, IMO. OTOH, I'd probably get the cheaper of the two. Battery life is much less important to me on this machine, as I'm usually ok with tethering while I work.

On the other hand, for intensive writing stuff? I wound up replacing my Macbook LCD (which I cracked, which was the reason I got the SgN in the first place) because I realized there isn't a good alternative to Scrivener (Mac) on Linux. If I was buying a notebook for that sort of thing, I'd get a Mac, 100%, because there simply is no beating that program for workflow.

None of this is to say that I'm unhappy with the SgN. Check at J&R Music and see if they're still on sale. They're so cheap, I don't feel nervous about doing... basically *anything* with it.

Cheers!

[candid]

SgN is now $329 at Amazon, which is the same price as Acer.

I have very minimal software requirements for writing. If I can run Abiword, that's good enough for me.