I'm thinking of a Dell Mini 9 with XP - here's why
I'm quite keen on a CD-less solid state hard drive notebook PC.
I'm not an anti-Linux fiend (in the past I've used Linux on a Mac) but had bad experiences of the Xandros version of Linux which is used in Asus eee pcs. I installed Xandros on an Acer laptop of mine which worked. But anything extra seemed to not work - in particular while there was some cool Linux GPS software (can't remember the name now) I couldn't get it to work with Xandros. Nor could I get the Linux version of Picasa to work.
I'd hope to use my PC on a bicycle to -
- transfer photos from digital camera to PC
- label and edit photos
- transfer tracks from GPS unit to PC
- geotag photos with GPS info (this basically means inserting GPS coordinate information into the EXIF data in your digital photos)
- when in wifi area, upload geotagged photos to Flickr where they are automatically placed on a map
- keep a diary
- read and write emails/blog posts while offline
- when in wifi area send/receive emails
- transfer video from camcorder to PC
- edit video on PC
I can hear you crying out that a lot of this can't be done on the Dell mini 9.
- default 16GB solid state hard drive is too small to store large numbers of photos - true. But upgrade SSD to
64GB see video on how to do it.
- but that's still not enough hard drive space - I was thinking of either
this 32GB or
this 64GB usb flash drive on which to store photos. In fact I was thinking of getting 2 of these just in case one got destroyed or corrupted you'd still have the other. The other option would be to get a "drop proof" external USB hard drive like
this 500GB option from La Cie. Google for reviews - there's one claiming to have dropped it off a table 3 times with no ill effect. But I think I still prefer the flash drives.
- video might not be possible. Sony Vegas Pro editing suite needs 1GHz processor - so maybe the atom 1.6GHz CPU would be able to do basic editing. However the large amounts of disk space required might necessitate the external hard drive option.
That's my 2 cents anyway