I wanted a more portable device on which to work on my stories, when I am away from my desk. Previously I had used a Palm. There was no keyboard, so I had to “type” using a stylus. I got quite proficient with it, but the screen of the device became marked where the tip of the stylus had been striking it. Another problem arose when I had it taken from my home last September.

I did have a laptop, but that was heavy and the battery life was very poor.

In March of 2009 I bought an Acer Aspire One with a 16gb solid state hard drive. This has proved to be a very good little machine. Although I wasn’t too keen on the linux operating system, I was used to working with Open Office Writer which the netbook came with. I liked the fact that it’s keyboard was of the right proportions, enabling me to type comfortably. The battery life is pretty good too. Working on word processing it can last up to 3 hours, which is adequate for me.

The main drawback with it I found was the Linux operating system. If you are not familiar with it, it can be a big problem trying to install any new program you may want.

A friend of mine also has the same model and decided to put XP on it. He formatted it with the NTFS file system and it worked so abysmally slow, that he re-installed linux. He told me he has since learned that this model prefers Fat 32 as the file system for it to work with XP.