08 Jul 2013
Is your Netbook Gathering Dust?
Notebooks were first launched onto the technology scene back in late 2007. They were created to fill a perceived gap in the market for a smaller, more lightweight and less expensive alternative to a laptop. For your money you got some of the features of a more traditional laptop but in a smaller package as notebooks have smaller screens – typically around 10″ but there have been versions with anything from five inches up to 12 inches.
Within a couple of years there had been a proliferation of smallest laptop-like devices including notebooks and tablets. Tablets continued to rise in popularity mainly due to the formidable iPad and at the other end of the market laptops became ultra-light but with all the benefits of full computing capability.
Squeezed in the middle thenetbook has been losing sales as people are seduced by the simplicity and fabulous display of the new iPad or look to the new super slim ultra-books tomeet all their computing needs.
If you are one of those people with a notebook now languishing unused and gathering mounds of dust you could either look to sell your notebook or dust it off and get it back into action. Here are three suggestions of how you can put that perfectly good little device back to use.
Install a new OS
Is one of the reasons you stopped using your notebook that it was struggling to cope with running Windows? Look at taking the weight off your little notebook and installing a lightweight, free operating system, there are a few out there to choose from including Google Chrome OS or Jolicloud. These web based systems will take up only a fraction of your notebook space and are easy to install. Suddenly the speed of your device will be super quick making it a more approachable option once more.
Create your own portable news ticker
Having two screens to work from has been proved to vastly increase productivity so why not dust off the notebook and make it into your very own second screen. Fancy a dedicated screen to keep up-to-date with all the latest news from Twitter? Well take a look at Tweetdeck or you could perhaps feed all your RSS news to it – meaning you could be working on your main screen and occasionally glancing at the notebook as and when you need to.
Create your own home server
Renowned for being pretty quiet as well having long lasting battery life, why not hook your little old notebook up as a home server? Get it a hard drive and equip it with a file server and it is the perfect place to store all your photos, media, songs and anything else you can think of. For those a little more technically minded you could go one step further and use Plex Media Server to configure it to be used in conjunction with other devices including your Smartphone, PS3 or Xbox 360.
(Visited 112 times, 1 visits today)
