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A little Netbook Experiment
by Joey deVilla on January 15, 2010
“The Horror! The Horror!”

“d00d,” started the capitalization- and punctuation-free e-mail I received on Sunday, “coding horror atwood is totaly [sic] waling on ur azz”. Curious to view exactly how Jeff was “waling on my azz”, I pointed my browser at his website, Coding Horror, a single of the “800-pound gorillas” of the tech blog site scene and located his most recent report, titled A Democracy of Netbooks.
In A Democracy of Netbooks, Jeff rebuts an article of mine from late final May possibly, Quick Foods Apple Pies and Why Netbooks Suck. The thesis of my report was that netbooks occupied an unsatisfied Office 2010 License, “worst of each worlds” center ground in between smartphones and notebook pcs: somewhat also large to fit with your pocket, somewhat also tiny to do plenty of function on, and sadly underpowered. As I summed it up, “netbooks are like laptops, but lamer”.
Jeff argues that netbooks are the reverse. He says that by virtue of their reduced expense, they are a democratizing force that give computing and communicative energy to all. Unlike smartphones, you’re not with the mercy of a cellphone company’s month-to-month service fees or contracts (and remember, I’m in Canada Microsoft Office Professional Plus, the sole country from the globe in which 3-year cellular contracts exist). “Netbooks aren’t an alternative to notebook pcs,” he writes, they are the new pcs.”
Unfortunately, Jeff missed my follow-up to Fast Meals Apple Pies and Why Netbooks Suck, in which I explained the motivation behind the article:
I feel that there’s somewhat as well 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, 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 little 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 in which the real potential in mobile computing is: the smartphone. It’s an area where Microsoft had an early lead and dropped the ball. It’s an area wherever I feel that Microsoft is showing a lack of vision, from Steve Ballmer’s ill-considered dismissal in the iPhone (“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”) to Windows Mobile 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 discovered my post worth writing about and happy to view that it’s started some discussion.
Ooh! Free Netbook Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007!
As the hardware sponsor in the Canadian version of Techdays – Microsoft’s cross-country, seven-city tools and technology training conference – Dell provided us with a number of pcs, 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 each the presentation theatres as well as inside the hallways.
Here’s what they look like when artfully posed by a photographer for the marketing material:
By the bye Office Standard 2007, those bodies are rubberized and have a cross-hatched pattern.
Here’s one particular with 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 a single. 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 one particular with the Kermit-the-Frog-green ones.
The Experiment

Thus far, my netbook has been relegated to ebook-reading duty and minor else, but in light of Jeff’s post, 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 function 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 inside a number of places:
At my home office At HacklabTO, the Toronto “hackerspace” 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 Computer software Engineering Conference) as a sponsor representative and host of DemoCamp. This should be a good test in the netbook under the conditions where it’s supposed to shine.
By the way, does anyone know what the Canadian domestic flight carry-on restrictions are from the wake in 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 from 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 seven.9):
Processor: 2.1 Memory: 4.5 Graphics: 2.0 Gaming graphics: three.0 Primary hard disk: 5.three
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 software selection above is probably the sort of thing that most office workers (and students, 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 from 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 a single never knows).
I have only a single question: Jeff Microsoft Office 2007 Standard, do you want to try the same thing?
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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