Rich's Random Thoughts

At the last conference I attended, at least 20% of the people with laptops were using NetBooks this year.  The reason why I took notice, is because at the same conference the previous year there was not a single NetBook in sight.  So what is a NetBook? How do Netbooks coompare to Laptop comptuers?

1. NetBooks typically have a small screen than a laptop: typically 10″ diagonally rather than 13″ or 15″.
2. Netbooks also usually have slightly smaller keyboards, although the Dell Netbook I have been using has a keyboard almost the same size as my MacBook Air keyboard.
3. Netbooks typically have slower processors and less memory than laptops (Photo Shop and video editing won’t work well on them).
4. On the plus side, Netbooks usualy weigh less than laptops, and in some cases (as is with my Dell NetBook) have a longer battery life than most Laptops.
5. Netbooks also cost a lot less than light weight laptops, but are close in price to lower end bulky laptops. My Dell Mini 10 cost $329 CDN.

Admittedly the CALI conference attracts a pretty geeky crowd of law school technical staff, law librarians and law professors, even so, going from 0% to 20% in one year is impressive.

So what do I think?  I agree with Michael Dell’s assessment that for most people a NetBook makes an excellent companion to a desktop computer.  If you need to travel, or take a laptop to a meeting, a Netbook will do an excellent job.  After a couple days of use, I started to get claustrophobic in the very small screen space that the NetBook provides (in my case 1024 x 600 as opposed to 1200 x 800 on my laptop, and 1920 x 1200 on my desktop computer).

My recommendation for students, staff and faculty would be to get a full size desktop computer for your home or office, and then use a NetBook for classes, travelling and meetings.  If you use Google Documents, or DropBox for synchronizing files, you’ll have everything you need to work on no matter which machine you are using.

Ever wondered how much it costs to run your computer? That depends on how energy efficient your computer is, and how much electricity costs in your city. I can at least tell you how much it cost me to run my Dell Dimension 4600 in Victoria, BC, Canada.

To start with, I had to get something that would allow me to measure the amount of electricity that my PC was using. The best gadget I found for the job (maybe I should say the least expensive gadget I found) was the kill-a-watt. It is a great little tool that you plug into an electrical outlet, then plug in the appliance that you want to measure, and within a couple of minutes, you’re done… you know how much electricity the appliance, or in our case computer, uses.

So how much does it cost to run our home computer all day and all night? The total cost is $60 per year. Electricity in Victoria, BC costs $0.0633 Canadian per Kilowatt Hour (kWh). In California the average cost is about $0.12 US per kWh. So to run my computer in California would cost $114 per year, or $9.50 per month. If we only ran the computer during the day for 12 hours a day, we could cut the cost of running it in half to $57 per year (in California).

This made me think about where I work, and how much we could save if we turned off our computers at night. In my building at the University of Victoria, Faculty of Law, we have about 120 computers in the building. Most run 24×7 so that they can get windows updates at night. The total cost of running those computers per year is about $7,200. That’s a lot of money!

If we were able to only run the computers during business hours (say 10 hours a day) we save $4,200 per year! Something I’ll look into. I just need to get the computer updates happening during the day… I wonder if my boss will split the savings with me?