I Love My New Netbook!!!

I was so pleased to open one of my gifts from Jen, Patrick, and Kaycie. It was a Dell netbook (Inspiron Mini 10v, if you must know). Now, I do have a Toshiba laptop. It stopped working last year (come on, Toshiba, what's up with that?). I really missed the convenience of a laptop but, quite frankly, I didn't miss the weight and size. An iPhone is rather nice, but it wouldn't be as useful in entering the blog posting, for example. So, something perfect would be between a laptop and an iPhone. Enter the netbook.

I'm excited that I have most of the good stuff a laptop provides with a smaller, more easily portable size. This model from Dell came preloaded with Windows XP. OK, so that's an ancient operating system but it's rock solid and perfect for what I need. Mostly, it lets me run some of my music software to help with recordings and stuff like that. And, did I mention the size is perfect?

I'm a big fan of the Linux operating system and I would be tempted to install it, perhaps overwriting XP. But, really, it's not the operating system that's important in this case. It's the applications. And, unfortunately, the music stuff only runs on Windows and Mac. (No way you could install OS X on this baby.)

The other thing I like to find is free software that I could use that's as good as (or good enough) when compared to commercial ($$$) software. For those interested, here's what's running on my netbook:

• Free Commander (a file browser, manager)
• UnxUtils (a command line interface with some Unix goodies behind it)
• Emerald/Crimson Editor (a text editor with nice features)
• Google Chrome Browser (I love everything Google)
• FastStone Image viewer (a browser for photos)
• Paint.NET (a Photoshop-like program)
• Audacity (audio editor)
• Quicktime/iTunes

These are free downloads from various places and I really like this combination. Next, I have to make sure Java is installed (so I can grab some other useful freebies).

Love my netbook!!! Thanks Jen and Patrick and Kaycie!!!