A tale of two laptops

Posted: Jun 19, 2009 - Modified: Jun 18, 2009| geek

I’m really starting to appreciate the convenience of having two laptops. I can leave one running tests while I work on the other. I can separate memory-hungry applications like Emacs+Firefox (development) and Lotus Notes (work coordination). I can take the smaller laptop with me when I travel, which makes it easier to travel light.

Although the Eee’s screen is only 1024×600 pixels, I prefer it for development because I’ve set it up with my complete Emacs environment. The Windows partition of my work laptop doesn’t have all of my shortcuts set up, and accessing the development server through putty/ssh is slow. So I do my development on the Eee (small screens encourage short functions!), use the work laptop for mail and web conferences, and occasionally look up webpages on the work laptop’s bigger screen.

Worth it. I’m seriously thinking about upgrading the RAM on the Eee to at least 2GB, though, as I regularly use at least 1.2 GB during development.

You can view 1 comment or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

1 comment

Al Perkins

2009-06-22T11:35:58Z

Yep, having two computers is very cool. And all the \you can't multitask\ folk get a ding here, as maybe it's not healthy for people to multitask, but it's like being a short order cook eh? on two computers, as who to say that I'm not allowed to have multiple orders running on the machines, that come due at different times.

I have two laptops now, but one is my customer's laptop. I do like jumping between the two, as it's just like having a big cooking surface, and I can do multiple things. Though I have Linux on my IBM laptop, (back partition), I haven't yet graduated to a virtual machine, where I have the ability to essentially work with two computers, all on the one, but that too seems reasonable to allow one to spread out and use multiple tools.

Anything one can do to increase base speed seems to be reasonable these days. This is why when I have to wait for Windows to boot or reboot, I'm so glad to whip out my IPhone and keep on processing or thinking or just plain searching for my next need.

Thanks Sacha for the cool post.