Leafing through sale magazines online
When I was a whole lot younger, one of the things that I used to do was to leaf through a fantastic magazine called Exchange & Mart which listed just about every possible thing that you could buy at the time from the sensible to the just plain weird.
Of course, these days such magazines have long since been replaced by online sales places which come with weekly sale and even daily sales pages which are just as fascinating to browse. The big plus point is that, these days, the listings come with colour photos and lengthy descriptions and, of course, the ubiquitous “buy now” button. That’s not forgetting that were you to print out the entire “magazine” it would be a whole lot larger than the printed version ever was.
One of my fav buys of late has been a little netbook computer. If you’ve not looked closely at these babies you might think that they’re just for browsing the Internet and that certainly was the original intention when they were first introduced. However, as well as the weedy 4GB disk (yes, disk, not memory) of those early versions you can also get those with 120GB and more space which is more than enough space for most people I suspect. Not only that but you get the option of Linux software on most of them and that makes quite a radical difference in the useability of them: buy a $329 model with Windows and you could easily double that price to load up enough software to make it a fully useable computer; buy the exact same computer but with Linux and it’s $279 and comes with software that’s fully compatible with and just as useable as the MS Office equivalent. That’s not trial software either: it’s the full package.
In practical terms that “netbook” computer that I bought is, for me, just a smaller version of the rather more substantial computer that I’d normally write on. The keyboard is smaller for sure but just as useable and the only real drawback is that you need to scroll the screen a little more. In fact, were the disk just a little larger I’d be quite tempted to use it as my only computer. For those with bigger fingers and worse eyesight don’t forget that you can easily plug in a full-size keyboard and screen and still end up paying less overall than you would for a full-size computer but with that priceless added advantage that you can take the computer with you.
The current 1GB, 160GB provides more than enough space for most people. You might think that the processor is a little underpowered but it’s more than fast enough to play DVDs (you need to buy a DVD player separately) and generally flies through everything that I’ve thrown at it (some folk even use it for CAD work!).
Copyright © 2004-2010 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.Popularity: 3% [?]
Related posts:
Copyright (c) 2004-2010 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.
