The $3.00 Laptop for Writers
Last year, when I wrote about the $14.99 Laptop for Writers, I don’t think anyone was surprised that I was talking about using a USB drive to store your work and applications.
However, since then, prices have come down (Of course) and features have improved (Of Course).
The advantages of using your own USB drive over internet apps are obvious. first, you get to choose what applications to use and can basically use the same ones that you use at home or work. Second, you own the work. That is, it’s right there on your drive, not on someone else’s halfway across the globe.
Portable apps suite is still the best available. The full featured version has open office, CLAMWin Anti-Virus to keep your host clean, Firefox, Gaim, Soduko and more. There’s a Lite Version that replaces OpenOffice with ABIWord for less that 40M total space, and a BASE version that lets you pick and choose what supported apps you want. Among the apps you can add are GIMP image processing, GNuCash Finance, NVU Web editor and more.
If most of those sound familiar, they should. A lot of these are open source Windows ports of Linux applications. So the question is, why not just put Linux on your USB and carry around your operating system, too? Except that your average Librarian will completely freak out when you reboot her computer, nothing really. There’s lots of small Linux’s around designed to run off hardly any resources at all. Try Puppy Linux, which has just released version 4.0 with two, count ‘em, two different kernels and a slew of apps for under 100M, giving you lots of room on even the cheapest Drive for your works in progress.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment