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Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Day 8 of My Book In A Month

I challenged myself to write 50K this month to finish off Forsaken. I've written 8,452 words so far this month. By daily goals I'm behind 4,884 words, but I can pull off some 3000-5000 word days to recover. The story is going well. I need to start redirecting it to the next turning point. It's nice to concentrate on one thing and get it done. Unfortunately I allow myself to become distracted by bright shiny things like researching netbooks, which became a more intensified search when I realized my current battery on my laptop only holds about a half hour of charge now.

Right now I'm just eyeballing them and waiting for the next innovation on them. I typically go for Thinkpad noteboods, but Lenovo's offering has a strangely placed right shift key. That leaves Dell, HP, ASUS and MSI Wind. Some of the ASUS also have the shift key in the weird spot, but they've got a newer version with a 9.2 hour battery. I tend to be a power consumer, meaning I like having the screen super bright and run iTunes and a few internet windows open while working in Word and having my Excel spreadsheet to flip back to to update my word count. So a netbook might not be for me, but I love the idea of having something that will fit in my purse that I can pop out while the kids do gymnastics or while waiting at the doctor's office. Until I can go and feel a keyboard I'm not keen on dropping a couple of hundred dollars to get a secondary laptop, especially since I just bought this one in Dec 2007. I did compromise on this one. I was completely in love with the 12.1" tablet PC offered by Lenovo and almost bought it, but I ended up getting the 15" T61 instead with more processing power and better graphics for less money. *Sigh* Maybe I should skip the netbook and get my tablet, but then it won't fit in my purse. Arguing myself in a circle. Not very effective for a blog post.

If you've been eyeballing netbooks, tell me which one you think is the best and why. Note I'm a heavy keyboard user. If the keyboard is crap, I don't want it. :-)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I just read a review of the Acer, forget which model, over at Julie Kenner's blog (juliekenner.com). I've seen the Acer's at Target, couldn't really play since they were in a display case.

Amanda said...

They have the Acer out at Best Buy so you can play with it. I don't feel it would be comfortable to type with for a sustained period of time.