As I mentioned preciously, my precious netbook developed a sudden and total allergy to Windows sometime in October. (Seriously - all attempts to reinstall XP resulted in blue screens of death.) Rather than discard the perfectly serviceable hardware, I loaded it up with Ubuntu Linux.
Many of my writing programs worked on it - with a little massaging. Dropbox installed without any major issues. yWriter5 took a bit more work and learning some sudo commands, but after an hour or two it was running, although with critical bugs. As I changed from scene to scene, the "scene description" window would shrink to the point where it was unreadable.
But the final nail in the coffin was the discovery that Happy Koala Elf Timesink Fantasy would not play on the machine, because the emulators require more robust hardware. Horrors!
After much painful deliberation, I opted to give it to my husband's 10 year old niece for Christmas. She was thrilled, as she had been nagging her parents for a netbook just like mine for years. Hopefully she won't break it in the first month. (I left Linux running on it for two weeks straight to be sure that it wasn't going to go belly up the day after she received it.)
This means I'm on the prowl for a new laptop. I want something with a significantly larger screen this time, and Windows 7. The netbook is nice because I could chuck it in my purse, but I'm getting spoiled by the 19" monitor at home.
Speaking of monitors, I plan on picking up a second one from a friend. My video card can handle two at a time, and having a second monitor means I can leave my writing stuff up all the time while still doing other things on the first one. I plan to use it as a motivational tool.
New year's resolution: Finish Book #2. Start sending out hard copy query letters. Channel the output I wasted on Christmas fanfiction (22K short story in a month, hitting 4K words one day) into novel writing.
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