Netbooks and living in the ‘cloud’

There’s so much hype around ‘cloud computing’ and netbooks that I thought I’d try living this way for a few weeks to see how practical it really is.

I was going to be overseas in Thailand for a week or so and I made the brave decision to get a netbook and leave my Macbook behind – I figured that the weight / space saving, combined with signing up for some online apps and productivity ‘cloudware’ would be a good way to test things out.

The netbook. I originally wanted to try to be a ‘netbook purist’, so spent a while looking for a small footprint (9″ screen), linux based machine with an atom processor chip and preferably an SSD, however, the first thing I realised is that we’re a little underwhelmed with choice in NZ, so ended up with an Acer Aspire One.

Weighing around a kilo, the Aspire One has the atom chip, an 8.9″ screen, but carries a 120GB spinning hard drive – also, it comes with Windows XP installed – hmmmm, so a few compromises had to be made. Sadly, although the netbook itself is compact and light, it’s spoilt by a bulky, cumbersome charging unit. The sales guy tried to sell me Microsoft Office as well, but that really would have been cheating, so I politely declined.