The OS Quest Trail Log #41: MacBook Meets Coffee Edition

As expected, the month of May left little time available for the quest. But it got even worse and took a step backwards. My two year old MacBook attracted a spilled cup of coffee. While it got a good splash I was hoping that since it was only one corner and I cut power and pulled the battery as fast as possible that things would be OK once things dried out. After all, it was black coffee, no cream and sugar to muck things up. But no such luck, 5 days later I plugged it in and tried to power it up. No such luck. I didn’t purchase AppleCare which ended up being a good decision since this self-inflicted wound wouldn’t have been covered.

I figure a repair wouldn’t have been worth the money. I bought the low-end model at the time and other than a memory upgrade it hasn’t changed much. The current low end model equals my defunct MacBook in memory and exceeds it in all other specs. Still, it a thousand dollars at retail which isn’t cheap. Considering what I use it for I don’t really want to dish out that much money, yet I do use the laptop daily.

After some consideration I decided to switch to a windows netbook rather than a MacBook. So I ordered a ASUS Eee PC 1000HE as a relacement. Not, I’m not claiming the netbook is equal to or better than the MacBook, just that it’s a netter choice for what I want. I mainly used the MacBook for surfing, email, text editing, simple spreadsheets, blog posts and some simple photo editing related to those blog posts.

I just got the ASUS Eee PC so it’s too early for any conclusions. The keyboard will take some getting used to, even though I picked this one due to good reviews about the keyboard. The screen real estate is a little small. But neither the keyboard or screen were surprises. The bigger annoyance I have is with the trackpad. Every so often I either zoom the screen in or out while using the trackpad. I’m still using the default settings to give myself time to get used to it.

I still need to rework my application mix a bit so I can share data between Windows and PC. Most of my text editing is plain old text so almost anything will read the files. I’ll probably switch to OpenOffice.org for spreadsheets and those rare occasions when I need real word processing.

Because my data was stored on DropBox or synced with Windows Live Sync I didn’t even have to restore any files from backups when the MacBook died, which was nice. I hadn’t quit realized how much of my personal computing had moved to the web. Email was already there with Google and I had recently been storing password in a web app (PassPack) so I already had most of what I used my laptop for at my fingertips.

More about the Eee PC when time allows me to work with it and write about it.