Office 2007 A Little Netbook Experiment — Global

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Just a little Netbook Experiment
by Joey deVilla on January 15, 2010
“The Horror! The Horror Office Pro 2007!”

“d00d,” commenced the capitalization- and punctuation-free e-mail I received on Sunday, “coding horror atwood is totaly [sic] waling on ur azz”. Curious to determine just how Jeff was “waling on my azz”, I pointed my browser at his weblog, Coding Horror Office 2010, 1 in the “800-pound gorillas” from the tech blog site scene and located his latest post, titled A Democracy of Netbooks.
In A Democracy of Netbooks, Jeff rebuts an write-up of mine from late previous May possibly, Quickly Foods Apple Pies and Why Netbooks Suck. The thesis of my write-up was that netbooks occupied an unsatisfied, “worst of each worlds” middle ground between smartphones and notebook computers: a tad too huge to in shape in your pocket, a bit also tiny to complete a great deal of function on, and sadly underpowered. As I summed it up, “netbooks are like laptops, but lamer”.
Jeff argues that netbooks would be the reverse. He says that by virtue of their lower price, they are a democratizing power that supply computing and communicative strength to all. As opposed to smartphones, you are not on the mercy of a cellphone company’s monthly costs or contracts (and don't forget, I’m in Canada, the sole nation within the planet wherever 3-year mobile contracts exist). “Netbooks aren’t an alternative to notebook pcs,” he writes, they would be the new computers.”
Unfortunately, Jeff missed my follow-up to Quickly Food Apple Pies and Why Netbooks Suck, in which I explained the motivation behind the post:
I feel that there’s a little too much excitement about netbooks at Microsoft. I think that part of it stems from the old company mantra, “a computer on every desktop and in every home”. The PC is the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg, and the closer that a device is to the PC, the more Microsoft “gets” it. I feel that Microsoft sees the netbook as an exciting new space, exactly where I see them as smaller, less powerful laptops. I think that eventually, as technology catches up, netbooks will simply be considered “computers” – just on the modest end in the PC size spectrum, and that Microsoft should treat them as such.
The article is also an open letter to Microsoft stating my concern that netbooks are a dangerous red herring distracting us from where the real potential in cellular computing is: the smartphone. It’s an area in which Microsoft had an early lead and dropped the ball. It’s an area in which I feel that Microsoft is showing a lack of vision, from Steve Ballmer’s ill-considered dismissal of the iPhone (“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”) to Windows Cellular 6, which feels as though it was half-assedly slapped together by PDA designers frozen in an iceberg in 2000.

Still, I’m glad that Jeff identified my article worth writing about and happy to find out that it’s started some discussion.
Ooh! Totally free Netbook!
As the hardware sponsor of the Canadian version of Techdays – Microsoft’s cross-country Office Home And Business 2010, seven-city tools and technology training conference – Dell provided us with a number of personal computers, including about a dozen of Latitude 2100 netbooks. They performed yeoman service as hosts for a rotating slide deck that we’d display in between conference sessions, in the two the presentation theatres as well as within the hallways.
Here’s what they look like when artfully posed by a photographer for the marketing material:
By the bye, those bodies are rubberized and have a cross-hatched pattern.
Here’s one from the netbooks in action, quietly working as Dylan Smith makes his presentation at TechDays Winnipeg:

…and here are IT Pro Evangelist Rick Claus, me and IT Pro Evangelist Rodney Buike striking a “Charlie’s Angels” pose with the three colours of netbooks we were provided:

On December 16th, 2009 at 4:00 p.m., the very moment that TechDays Winnipeg ended, the netbooks were retired from conference service and all the evangelists team got to pick one particular. Although I’d rather have been assigned the “Dellasaurus” – a 17” monster with quad-core chip and 16 gigs of RAM — I’m not the type to turn up his nose at being assigned another computer. I chose a single with the Kermit-the-Frog-green ones.
The Experiment

Thus far, my netbook has been relegated to ebook-reading duty and little else, but in light of Jeff’s write-up, I figured that this might be an opportunity to put it to the test. What if I were to set aside a week to use the netbook as my one particular and only machine in my day-to-day perform and life? Would I be pleasantly surprised, driven mad, or neither?
Starting on Sunday and continuing through to next Saturday, I will use the Dell Latitude 2100 exclusively. This should be an interesting test, as I will be working in a number of places:
At my home office At HacklabTO, the Toronto “hackerspace” exactly where I’m a member and which I often use as a coworking space At a meeting with a client On the road: I’ll be flying to Montreal to attend CUSEC (Canadian University Application Engineering Conference) as a sponsor representative and host of DemoCamp. This should be a good test from the netbook under the conditions wherever it’s supposed to shine.
By the way, does anyone know what the Canadian domestic flight carry-on restrictions are in the wake from the Underwear Bomber?
Here are its specs:
Processor: Intel Atom N270 running at 1.6GHz with 512K L2 cache and 533MHz bus Chipset: Intel 945 PM/GS Express Graphics: Intel Integrated GMA 950 Display: 10.1” WSVGA 1024 by 600 LED display Other Goodies: Integrated webcam Single-touch screen RAM: 2GB (1GB on-board plus 1GB inside the memory slot) Hard Drive: 160GB, 5400 RPM Wifi: Intel WiFi Link 5100 802.11 a/g/n mini card Battery: 3-cell (there’s a 6-cell available)
When benchmarked using the Windows Experience Index, it yielded a base score of 2.0. Here are its Windows Experience Index subscores (the index rates components on a scale of 1.0 to 7.9):
Processor: 2.1 Memory: 4.5 Graphics: 2.0 Gaming graphics: three.0 Primary hard disk: 5.3
Since the netbooks were being used as secondary PowerPoint machines for TechDays, they already had the following installed on them:
Windows seven Enterprise, which includes Internet Explorer 8 Office 2007 (it’s a rare day when I don’t use Outlook or OneNote) Adobe Reader Windows Live Essentials (which includes my workhorse, Writer, a handy and under-appreciated website editor)
The application selection above is probably the sort of thing that most office workers (and students Office Enterprise 2007, the market at whom the Latitude 2100 is aimed) would use from day to day. In addition to these apps, I installed some of the tools with the developer evangelist trade:
Visual C# Express 2008 Visual C# Express 2010 Beta 2 Visual Web Developer 2008 Visual Web Developer 2010 Express Beta 2 SQL Server Express 2008 SQL Server Management Studio Express Browsers: Chrome Firefox Opera Safari Adobe Fireworks CS3 (my primary graphics tool) PHP 5.2.12 Ruby 1.9.1 Notepad++
I’ll report on my experiences using the netbook as my primary machine regularly and tell you about the good, the bad and the ugly (or beautiful, because one never knows).
I have only one question: Jeff, do you want to try the same thing?
This report also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Tagged as: Coding Horror, experiments, Jeff Atwood, cellular, netbooks, road warrior, The Netbook Experiment