We used to be a one desktop household and that was just fine. One place to check email, do taxes, manage music and play games. It was an idyllic time.
Michelle lead our house into “laptop in front of the tv” lifestyle and I’ve been jealously playing catchup ever since. I tried to squeeze a last bit of life out of an older Macbook, “Lappy“, but I couldn’t get the OS current enough to run current browsers. I bought a Chromebook, and it’s pretty cool, but it’s too light for me to use on my lap. It keep teetering and sliding around. The iPad isn’t comfortable to me for emailing or blogging and my iPhone is just too small.
I’m currently settled on a repurposed Lenovo ThinkPad SL500 with Ubuntu 13.04 installed in it. Thanks to my tendency to slacking, this is now the most up-to-date OS in our home. It runs reasonably well on this 5-year-old hardware. Startup and shut down are crazy fast. Like, Macbook Air fast. The 15″ screen is plenty big for anything I’d want to do. The bottom half of the machine is nice and heavy so it doesn’t move at all on my lap. The keyboard is comfortable to type on and must be close to full-sized because the keys seem to mostly be where I’m expecting them to be. I like it.
I replaced the battery with an extended cell version so I can get close to 4 hours of life. That’s pretty good. I’d like to spend some more time with Ubuntu and learn about Linux in general but what I want out of this machine is the convenience of modern browsers and a comfortable place to browse. I’m there now and that’s enough for me.