Reviewing netbooks- I’m more in the cloud than I thought
I have been trying to embrace the cloud since Kevin had his web-mostly experiment recently. I couldn’t jump up in the cloud though due to reluctance to give up control over my stuff. That’s what I thought anyway until the Lenovo S10 showed up at my door.
I review a lot of hardware, notebooks and phones and other mobile goodness and it can certainly be a challenge. I have followed a certain routine for years when a new notebook crosses my path for a review and that routine is a good one. Here’s how it works: a new laptop comes in the door. I boot it up to get past the Windows "first boot" scenario. Then I run Windows Update to make sure the review system is ready to roll with the latest version of the OS. The next thing I do is install Microsoft Office and run Microsoft Update to make sure that is all current. Once all of the updating quiets down I copy all of my stuff over from one of my working systems to the review unit. This moves about 13 GB of data, music and photos to the review system.
Once all of this is done, which takes about five hours, the review system is ready for me to use and evaluate. I have always done it this way because I figure what readers are interested in is how the given system will handle real-world work. I have been doing this convoluted routine for years and always felt it was the best way, until recently.
Last night we recorded the weekly MobileTechRoundup episode and after the session Matt Miller asked me if I was going to install all of my stuff on the Lenovo S10 when it arrived today. I thought about that long and hard and decided to try something different. Due to that conversation when the Lenovo showed up this morning I tried something totally new, and it convinced me I am more in the cloud than I thought.
First up I booted the S10 to get past the first Windows XP boot. Once the netbook was running normally I downloaded and installed Firefox, my browser of choice. As soon as Firefox was running properly, just a few minutes, I added the Foxmarks extension to it. This brought in all of my bookmarks from the cloud and in 10 seconds the new netbook looked and behaved just like my other systems. I like to run Google Chrome on Windows so I then installed it. Chrome automatically brings in all my Firefox settings and bookmarks so in seconds Chrome was also running just like my main systems. All of this just took a few minutes and I was up and running.
I can use both Firefox and Chrome to access my GMail so I was instantly productive. I can even access my Exchange Server via OWA in Firefox, once I added the IE Tab extension. That lets me access my Outlook information even though I haven’t installed Office, which saved me a very long time. I also installed SnagIt and the Verizon Access Manager so I can use my EV-DO AirCard with the Lenovo. I was up and fully productive in just 30 minutes which is incredible. This is only possible because my information was more in the cloud than I realized. I’m beginning to see more benefits to this cloud stuff than I used to.
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great writeup; can you give us your top 3 netbooks right now, id like to get my first netbook
great writeup; can you give us your top 3 netbooks right now, id like to get my first netbook
What about your data? How are you accessing your MS Office docs?
You can upload Office docs to Google Docs or the various other cloud office solutions and then work with them there, though in my (very limited) experience Google Docs doesn’t like large Excel files with formulas outside the basics.
And my issue with the cloud has and always will be that you lose access to it as soon as you lose web access, whether because of a service/power outage or you just being someplace where there isn’t coverage. Most of the companies I visit during the week are in buildings that greatly hinder cellphone reception, and one is in a town that I can never get any signal in.
I think the Goldilocks moment for me will be when someone has it setup for a continuous background backup to the cloud, and then it dissiminates to your other devices when they are connected. Like an Exchange server with offline access setup for all files, I guess.
I haven’t needed to access my Office docs much yet but will go the Google Docs route when I do. For the one-off file I can always just shoot it up and work it that way for now, until I get a full system in place to deal with them.
I think you are going about this the right way. Put as little on your netbook at first and add to it only as needed. You’ll be amazed at how little of what you think you need you actually use. Another suggestion: keep your music collection on another machine. Use Pandora or some other streaming music service (I use Rhapsody) for when you want music on the go. What I love about Rhapsody is that I can access pretty much any album or artist I want without having to carry it around. Third suggestion: Set up your office machine with Logmein Free and you can access those apps and files you didn’t put on your netbook when you need to.
James — aren’t you worried about Google Docs security? I’d hate to have my documents show up in someone else’s account.
http://blog.isc2.org/isc2_blog/2008/09/serious-securit.html
Know what, I downloaded Firefox on my new computer only to sync the bookmarks and passwords (through Weave) and then imported all to Chrome. I downloaded Firefox only to transfer the settings to Chrome. Now Google , you had build the Google Browser Sync for Firefox. Cant you build it for Chrome.