Expanding Kevin's Hierarchy of Needs theory- netbooks
Netbooks: Expanding the thought of Hierarch of Need
By Gregerator
I like tech stuff, but I’m no guru. I can’t afford the latest and greatest and, frankly, for me personally, I don’t see the need. For example, I carry a BlackBerry 8900. It’s been around for 2 years, it’s not getting BB6, but it does what I need it to do. That’s how my netbook is too.
For you spec’ers out there, my net is an ASUS Eee 1000HA. It runs Windows XP with the Intel ATOM 1.6, I upgraded to 2 GB RAM and snagged a larger battery. At the least, I’m getting 5 hours of battery life. That’s with screen brightness up, running overclocked on the Super Performance setting and keeping WiFi on, etc. On the light side, when I’m just typing and brightness is down, I’m getting almost 9 hours of life. None too shabby.
Our fearless leader, Kevin, had to make-do with a netbook recently on a trip. He then, on a podcast, ranted about his personal dislike for the form factor. Well, I am here to say that, just as with smartphones, people have a hierarchy of needs for their computer work as well.
I don’t run a website. I don’t program. I don’t game. I don’t Skype, although it did come pre-installed on my ASUS. Here’s what I do: I just finished earning my Master’s degree. I have a Master of Arts in Teaching. It was a year long program that, for me, required some pre-requisite classes. So when my former laptop, an HP DV1000, was converted into a desktop due to a dead battery (with a replacement pushing $150), I started looking for something portable and very cost effective.
That was just at the start of the netbook boom. My HP had a CD-R/DVD drive, so I really didn’t need an optical drive. I was going to be doing mostly writing, Facebooking, net surfing, emailing, maybe some movie watching and of course some Berry-backing-upping-restoring-and OS upgrading, so the netbook fit into my hierarchy.
I liked my netbook so much in fact, I bought a second one; sort of. My mom wanted something portable; so she bought my HP leaving me in need of a desktop. So I went online and found the ASUS EeeTop. It’s a touchscreen all-in-one that has the innards of a netbook. I put an external SuperDrive on my Christmas list, along with an external 1.5TB HD and I now have quite a network.
I realize that a netbook won’t fit everyone’s needs, just the way a Berry won’t. But like my 8900, my little Eee netbook does what I need it to do, and that’s what counts.