Just thinking through a debate on another list about what to recommend for retiring staff that wish to buy a replacement laptop. My elderly parents and students are not smaller versions of office
secretaries or corporate CEOs. It is worth carefully
thinking through the real needs of each user. Each to his own. <br>
<br>
Other teachers choose the Apple Macintosh for their laptop, hardware
support and configuration isn't an issue with these robust units.
Recently we have had a surge of interest from English teachers about
purchasing the eeePC or for personal use, weight and bulk is less of
an an issue (although colour was). Apart from the standard issue,some
IT teachers in Victoria switched
the base operating system on their department laptops to a linux
distribution such as Ubuntu and run Windows in a partition or dual
boot. Software support isn't an issue, they manage it themselves.<br>
<br>
I mention real needs. Most users are not drawn to things that "just
work" but to those that "just work" and also are pleasant to
use. Buying an device with redundant capacity is not only wasteful, it
ignores that things have changed with power applications and features
working online using just a standards compliant and upgradeable web
browser.<br><br>In some ways, this reminds me of the Australian
military purchase of a fleet of M1A1 Abrams tanks, fully functioned combat
brutes that that too heavy to take anywhere but mainland Australia.<br>