Acer Aspire One

I bought an Acer Aspire One from Woot today. I’d been thinking about picking up a netbook for a while now. I was in Costco earlier this week, and they had both an HP Mini and the Aspire One for sale. Costco’s price wasn’t bad ($330 or $350, I think), but Woot’s $260 was low enough to convince me to actually go ahead and buy.

Looking around at what’s out now, the standard netbook config seems to be an Atom processor, 1 GB of RAM, a 160 GB hard drive, and a 10 inch screen, all running Windows XP. Most of that is fine, but I really wish I could have gotten one with 2GB of RAM, or found one that’s easily upgradeable to 2 GB. Most of the netbooks either aren’t upgradeable, or they require some serious disassembly to upgrade. The Aspire One seems to fall into the latter category. CrunchGear posted a video how-to on upgrading the Aspire One, and it’s pretty scary. If I’m understanding the situation correctly, the model I’m getting has two 512 MB chips in there, and one of them can be replaced with a 1 GB chip, for a total of 1.5 GB. My main worry with the RAM is that I’d like to be able to run Windows 7 on this thing eventually, and I don’t think 1 GB is going to be enough for that.

This guy has a write-up on how to install the Win 7 RC on an Aspire One. It doesn’t sound too difficult. I may look into partitioning the drive and experimenting with it. Long term, I guess I need to decide if I want to buy the $50 Win 7 Home upgrade for this machine, or just keep it on XP. The $50 thing expires on July 11, I think, so I need to figure that out soon.

[ UPDATE: This post at the Woot forum makes it sound like it’ll actually be pretty easy to upgrade the RAM in this thing. Cool. ]

inbox zero

At work, I got my Lotus Notes inbox to zero today, for the first time since March, I think. And I got all the stray paper off my desk. Everything that’s actionable is in the system. Everything that’s not is in reference folders or the trash.

Over the last week or two, I’ve recommitted myself to cleaning stuff up and getting stuff into my system. I’ve also been experimenting with new tools (as I’ve mentioned in previous blog entries), but part of what I’ve learned from doing that is that I needed to tighten up what was already in my current system.

The basic way I’m working that now is that, if something is a clearly-defined programming project, it goes into Jira. If it’s got some parts that don’t fit there, then I also put it in Notes, and reference the Jira issue #. If it’s not a programming project, or it’s at a stage where it’s got too many moving parts, I just put it in Notes. I try to review all my “in process” projects in Jira every day for next actions. And I try to look at the next actions in my Notes to-do list every day too, though I’m not always so good about that.

Back on the subject of tools, I’m still kind of dissatisfied with using my Notes to-do list as my main GTD system. I previously mentioned experimenting with Chandler. I like Chandler a lot, but I still have a problem with the outgoing e-mail, which I mentioned here. I never got any feedback from the Chandler mailing list on this, and I’ve tried a few oddball things to see if I can work around it, but no luck.

Looking around at other systems, I don’t think any of them could be really useful to me, unless they either work well with Notes, or exist within Notes. The only one that could fit the “work well” definition would be Chandler, due to its interesting IMAP setup. For stuff that’s actually *in* Notes, the best system appears to be eProductivity, which is a bit expensive. I’ve also played around with the GTD for Lotus Notes template from Brett Philp. It’s not bad, and it’s free. And it’s just a plain Notes database, so I can go in there and customize forms and whatnot, if I want to.

Meanwhile, I’ll probably be upgrading our main Domino server from 7.x to 8.5 this weekend. I’ve looked at the new mail template, and, while it’s quite nice, I don’t think it really adds anything that will help with GTD. The to-do list, follow-up flags, and folder system all seem to be pretty much unchanged. (I’m kind of hoping that whatever messes up mail from Chandler in 7.x is fixed in 8.5. I’ll have to test that after the upgrade.)