Now here is the bone I had to pick with the notion that it is absolutely nessisary to have a wireless contract for these things: the fact of the matter is, if you’re a traveler and want the internet in a public place, then you can actually find wireless network connections either for a small fee or more often for free in places like the airport, cofe shops, donut shops, and even in a McDonalds. If it is that important to have internet(and I guess it is) then you can get it in any of those places, especially if you travel on business.

But I would say that there is one potential exception to this rule, and that would be truck drivers. They are out on the open road, and don’t often have access to the aformentioned establishments, and therefore need some sort of wireless plan.

But to cut to the chase, the point I’m trying to make is, be sure you know what your doing before you lock yourself into a two year deal with a company who’s only goal is to take your money. It’s not that expensive to just go out and buy yourself a nice netbook, and just use if for school, business travel, or if it suits you, as your main PC. These things work great on there own, and come with lots of the same amenities that a normal laptop does, even considering the smaller size.

Some important pieces of info to point out would be that first, these things don’t have disc drives. Nope, no cd, no dvd no nothin’. But you can hook it up to an external dvd drive with one of it’s usb ports. The other thing many may find is that a good chunk of the netbooks on the market have lackluster battery life, though that’s not to say they won’t fix those problems in the future. And finally, the size of the keyboard may just turn a few people off of the netbook category of computer for good. But all things considered, these little things are certainly filling a niche among business travelers, students, and those with a limited budget.

Anyway, I digress. This is something of a landmark for me. I remember when we had 1, 2, and sometimes 10 gig hardrives, and we thought that they were huge, and that nothing could fill them. The whole storage thing come from the fact that our OS’s are getting bigger, the programs we run not only require more space, but even more ram(but that’s a whole different post for another day), and we tend to rely on those things for the storage of very important information more than we used to. Oh, and not to mention your school paper and your thousands and thousands of music, most of which, you might not even listen to.

Information, mostly the info we never even use, gets stored on that whole 1TB of space on that hardrive. This is a generation of digital pack-rats. How nice……..

If you have any questions or constructive input, we here at schoolyard tech would like to hear from you. You can leave you comments in the comments section.

Dan

Anyway, if you want to see a lame scene, wait ’till the end of the credits.

We’ve gone through some changes, added a discussion forum, and are looking for people to help us out. We hope to build this place into something people can rely on to answer questions about technology, and have fun doing it.

–Dan

I plan on simplifying things around the website, and focus mainly on a knowledge base type of posts. I really think there is a market for this type of website. I work as a Network Engineer during the day and spend A LOT of time troubleshooting problems and researching on the internet. Too many times I have had a hard time trying to find what I am looking for. It would be great if there was a website run by regular people posting fixes to problems they’ve had.

We will focus at first on Microsoft and Cisco entries – and branch out from there. We may even have some special projects and LAB’s down the line.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you come back and read again!

-Josh