New Toy Arrives

Well, our new toy has arrived and is currently undergoing “shakedown testing”.

The new toy is a Toshiba NB205 netbook …

Sable Brown, 1.66GHz Atom, 160GB hard drive, 1GB RAM, Windows XP Home and 6 cell battery giving a claimed 9 hours battery life.

We bought it from the US via B&H Photo. $US399 plus $US62 delivery resulted in an all up price of $AU580. Current retail in Australia is around $AU799.

First things first … update with all patches. Took forever… thanks Microsoft.

Then uninstall some software installed by default that we will never use on the netbook :
Norton Internet Security [10 day trial, basically a waste of time], Google Toolbar [I hate Toolbars, and on a netbook they waste too much screen real-estate], various Windows software such as Fax Services, Microsoft Compatability Pack for Office 2007, Microsoft Powerpoint Viewer, and Skype.

Then install some useful software :
Firefox 3.5, Java 6 Runtime Environment, Comodo Firewall, Lotus Symphony, Symantec EndPoint Protection, Adobe Acrobat Reader 9, Filezilla, Secunia PSI and Freemind. All except Symantec are free products.

Next step is to determine what of the myriad of Toshiba utilities installed by default are useful, and what we can uninstall.

The netbook will be our gateway into the internet while on our travels, as well as a place to store the thousands of photos that we will invariably take. We also intend to get a small slimline portable harddrive as well, so that we can keep copies of our files in multiple places. More on that later.

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