New hardware bought middle of September 2012:

Tablet or Netbook? …..that was the question.

Spending what seems to be ever increasing amounts of time lurking about on railway platforms or lounging leisurely in some second class carriage I decided I urgently need to put my valuable time to better use. The likes of John Grisham, Ken Follett and Robert Goddard all help to keep my journey far from boring, but I still tend to spend far too much time in the evenings hunched over my laptop writing my (very occasional) blog, catching up on mails and updating my homepage. Not to mention the Internet!

I must surely be one of the last people to buy a mobile device, many of my fellow passengers spend their journey fondly stroking their touch screens or hammering the keys on their lap tops – not to mention generally playing with smart phones!

Well... thought I, It's about time I jumped on the bandwagon and treated myself to one of these toys.

But what should I buy? The I-Pad is, in my opinion, simply beautiful, other pads seem to be very popular too, the good old fashioned Netbook (little laptop) is surely obsolete.... or so everyone keeps telling me.

I must have invested hours evaluating, comparing, seeking advice and weighing up all the pros and cons.... so what conclusion did I arrive at?

I still think the I-Pad is still beautiful, but doesn't have an SD slot for my photo cards (unless of course I remember to slip some sort of adapter in my pocket). Neither does it contain my favourite blog writing office type stuff or things to enable me to tamper with my photos... the list is endless. Other pads, or tablets, offer detachable keyboards and stuff but at the end of the day I still wouldn't have all the nice things I'm used to, and would have to get used to all sorts of new programmes or apps as they all seem to be called.

Well, to cut a long story short, I was warming to the idea of getting myself a Netbook. Some may say this was a somewhat conservative, elderly and unadventurous decision! Some my even be right. But when I saw this little Asus Eee PC R11CX, Atom N2600, Netbook with Ubuntu already installed I just couldn't resist it.

So here I am, sitting in my train merrily typing away to my hearts content.... and saving loads of evening time!

One small remark: I've just noticed that perhaps a Pad might, despite its funny virtual keyboard, be easier to write with after all..... particularly when the portly gentleman in the adjoining seat is determined to read his over sized newspaper.

That's the new Netbook on the left ;-)

Zotac ZBOX AD02 (purchased mid November 2011)

The Fujitsu-Siemens Scaleo 600 was old, very old. With its old processor and 1GB Ram it was beginning to struggle with the latest Ubuntu distribution. It had indeed served me very well, but there comes a time when even the most faithful of machines has to be replaced. Time for some fresh computing experience!

I'd been eyeing several goodies and weighing up the pros and cons of all sorts of lovely hardware. At the end of the day I settled for something different. The ZBOX AD02 from Zotac is delivered with an AMD E-350 processor and an AMD Radeon 6310 graphic cardbut no RAM or harddisk. Those little goodies are left to the owner's individual tastes and requirements.

I settled for 2x 4GB RAM ( DDR-1066, CL7, SODIMM) and a Seagate Momentus XT, 7200rpm, 32MB, 2.5” 500GM disk which has the interesting feature of having a 4GB SLC NAND semiconductor flash memory. It basically means that certain things that are in regular use (such as web browser, or whatever) are stored to the 4GB flash memory and thus are accessed much quicker.

I have absolutely no idea whether the 'Hybrid' disk works, and am too busy playing about with other things to try and prove scientifically whether I'm saving a millisecond or two when opening my office programme. However, the little box with the round light on the top does seem plenty quick enough to me and I'm very pleased with it!.