Unbilled Time

Perhaps one day your children and your children’s children will whisper stories of me around late-night campfires, or under sheets on weekend slumber parties, flashlight held under the chin. “His screen was deeper than it was wide! His mouse was almost the size of his hand, and he dragged it ape-like across the surface of a desk! And his computer was a Lovecraftian horror he hid under that desk — a giant box with writhing, twisting tentacles flailing from the back, and so hungry it could only live plugged right into the wall!“

Like Robert Neville in the classic story, I may be the last of my kind — the last desktop/tower-using human in a world overrun by battery powered vampires.

I am legend.

*

OK, that was a slight exaggeration. My way of recanting the heresy of Towerism and embracing the one true Church of Mobility. In short, I’ve accepted the trend of the past several years, and declared my notebook PC to be my primary computer.

To be fair, some of you reading this may not have been born when I began using home computers. Back then, a “portable” computer was a 25-pound suitcase that still needed an AC receptacle to run itself and its built-in 5-inch monochrome screen. It cost several thousand dollars more than the several thousand dollar desktop models, and only the truly wealthy indulged in the luxury of a second built-in floppy drive.

It was then my prejudice was formed, that only desktop computers were adequate for a power user. That bias persisted through the “laptop” years and well into the “notebook” era. I assembled my own tower PC’s according to my own ever-changing specifications — a new video card here, a new audio card next month, a whole new motherboard in the spring — all the while sneering at the $2,500+ laptops with their feeble components, neutered for the sake of battery life. Don’t get me wrong, I bought and used laptops the whole time. But these were often flea-market remainders or the cheapest closeout models I could find. They were my glorified PDA’s, or network terminals connected to my real computer while I watched TV in the living room. Some of them could run WordPerfect or even OS/2, but I would never think of doing serious work with my cyber-environment’s cyber-stepchildren!

Years later, the computer marketplace changed while I didn’t. Today’s notebooks, like the one I’m using now, are priced only slightly higher than equivalent desktops. Their screens, keyboards and built-in components are competitive with most desktop equipment, and more than adequate to handle things unimagined in portables a decade ago.

When I left the Information Technology field (two years ago this August 1, in fact), I retired, donated and gave away some of my excess equipment. As part of my pending relocation to a new house, I’ve been looking for ways to reduce the excess even more, and the answer is clear. This HP notebook, built to handle the specifications of the elephantine behemoth Vista, has more than enough power to run my bantamweight Slackware Linux environment, and I no longer need to be tethered to a tower to do real work. The tower has replaced several of my old home entertainment center components as a rudimentary media center PC, and can still act as a file and backup server. From now on, I’m mobile!