Netbook Personal Productivity – A Year Later

About a year ago I write a post entitled – Increase Your Personal Productivity With A NetBook.  As a year has now gone by, I thought I’d write an update to the post and share with you my experiences with my netbook.

I purchased the Acer 8.9″ netbook.  It came with Windows XP, 1gb memory and a 160gb hard drive.  In addition to this, I’ve got several external HDs kicking around so purchased cases for these so that I could use them in addition to the HD that comes with the netbook.

I installed my ancient copy of Microsoft Office along with several other productivity applications, some personal applications like Quicken, some research tools, music and even installed a few graphics applications just to see if the netbook could keep up with the memory requirements and speed.

I also use the netbook to connect to work, and use it most often when I’m in bed with a lapdesk.

Previous to getting the net book, I’d do work on my full-size laptop.  The specs were about the same but it was running a 15.6″ screen.

The other plus with my net book is that there are 3 USB ports – a lot of room for expansion for external CD/DVD.  There are two slots for SDHC cards as well – one which is used for storage so I can plug in my 16gb card and use it like a hard drive and the other slot can also be used for storage but is intended to be used as a SDHC slot to pull off images or other data.

The other thing you’ll find with most net books is that you do get an external monitor port.  From time-to-time if I have a need, I’ll plug an external monitor to the port and use it instead of the smaller screen.

Though there are some disadvantages to the smaller screen – mainly if you’ve got bad eyes or find it difficult to read small print it might be difficult and not all apps run well on the smaller screen.

Contrary to popular belief, I’ve been able to do quite a bit more than surf on the net book.  I used it quite a bit from basic word processing to managing my bank accounts and investments.  I also use it routinely to VPN into work when I’m out and need to provide support, or even when I’m at home.

In fact I find that I use my primary laptop even less now that I have a netbook.

Where the real productivity gains have come in is the ability to use something like Google Docs – I can work in the cloud and access that data anywhere.  Because I’m running an Atom processor with 1gb memory, you don’t want to run CPU intensive applications so not having to start-up Office (Excel or Word) each time is a great boon – I can connect virtually instantly to Google Docs wherever I am that has WiFi – at home or out.  I’ve been tempted to purchase an Internet Stick – but having looked at how I use the net book I found that spending $150.00 on the stick plus anywhere from $30 to $70 per month for fees just wasn’t worth it.

Running apps on the netbook is very smooth – including a few of the graphics applications that I run.  These are Adobe PhotoShop (only for basic graphic file editing) and an old version of Jasc PaintShopPro (now part of the Corel family of products).  These are both memory and CPU intensive programs but I’ve had no problems running them on the Acer.

Besides business applications, I also run several research tools to mine data on the internet.  I’ve had absolutely no problems running these tools – they run just as well as they did (and do) on my full-size laptop.

There is an excellent post at Netbook Ace – Google Gears + Your Netbook = Productivity Powerhouse.  I haven’t installed Google Gears on my net book, I would like to read up on it a bit more but this sounds like something that will help me get the most out of my net book.  I like the fact that I could cache my documents and even run apps locally and have them sync when I connect.

One of my hobbies is writing, so being able to do this anytime would be great – I could write anywhere and not have to use the dreaded Notepad or my next least favourite, Textpad — both are good, Textpad is better but nothing beats a good word processing application.

Overall I am really happy with my netbook, it’s performed very well and continues to perform well.  It’s a true portable computer that I can take anywhere and if combined with 3g service is usable everywhere there is service.

In order to maximize my productivity, I’ve also just registered for Zoho.  You can find them at http://www.zoho.com – they offer a suite of online products that you can use as an individual user for free.  There are fees if they will be used for business.  One of the modules or apps in the Zoho suite is an e-mail program.  I will also try this out as it looks pretty good from the description on their blog… in fact the entire suite of products look pretty good.

Check out their blog, as they offer a lot of information about the various components.

I will report on Zoho in a future post once I get a chance to try it out.

Back to the netbook – would I buy another netbook?  Without even thinking about it!