I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
Back in 2000, I got my first micro notebook. The Toshiba Portege. These were a big deal back then as they were so small, but still had a great keyboard. You got plane points by having a Portege.
A couple of years later I brought a 2nd hand Portege (3440CT) for my wife. She loved it, but last week the hard disk fried. I needed a replacement and would have simply got another one.
I found a Portege R100 on TradeMe. These look to be the last of the really small ones before Portege’s seemed to bloat up. It just arrived today.
Coincidentally we had a senior manager from Australia in the office today who also had an older Portege. He loved the size and just hadn’t seen anything better to replace it with.
It struck me that, here is a family of machines, the older ones 6 years old, which are ‘good enough’ to do what 90% of most users do. Email, a bit of Excel + Word, and surf the web. A great hardware design has made these machines still desirable. They are a bargain. You can buy them at great prices on auction sites as they get cycled out of corporates for being a few years old.
But I’m shocked that these old machines are still effective. It shows how long we have been working with the same level of operating system and applications. Sure XP was an upgrade but the OS hasn’t significantly been upgraded for many years. So hardware has actually been revving much more than mainstream software. What is with that?!?
On one hand this kind of justifies Vista being a huge leap in base requirements. 2GB+ of memory and big video cards. On the other hand it rams home the barrier to entry of the upcoming OS when it won’t run on a significant percentage of current machines.
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