Tweaking Win 7 Starter's desktop

This morning I tried to change the desktop background of Windows 7 Starter Edition on my new netbook, and discovered it's not a feature of that stripped-down version of the operating system.

That is more a mild annoyance than a deal-breaker, but this amateur photographer likes seeing his work appear on bootup. So I asked my friend Lew Golan, who is a Windows whiz, if there was a workaround.

There certainly is.

I tried it, and it worked, and now a custom desktop background greets me every morning on bootup. There's a slideshow feature, too.

Highly recommended for new netbook users.

My new netbook: first impressions

I've had my new Toshiba NB305 netbook for a whole day now, and am liking it mightily.

The good:

1. It weighs just 2.6 pounds, or 3.1 pounds with the power block and cable. (I ordered a $1.88 12-inch "figure 8" power cable from Cyberguys to replace the long cable that goes from outlet to block. That'll save some weight as well as snarls.)

2. The keyboard suits me. It's a "chiclet" keyboard like that on the Macs, which I'm used to. The key travel is fairly deep, with a satisfying click. Yes, the keyboard's not as big as normal ones, but it's big enough, and I have small hands.

3. It has more than adequate power. The Atom N405 processor runs at 1.67 megahertz, about what a fast laptop did in 2001-2002. That's fine for word processing, surfing the Net, looking at photos and the like. I wouldn't try using powerful photo processing software such as Lightroom or Photoshop on it, but the free basic photo programs such as FastStone or Irfanview work fine.

4. The 250 gigabyte hard drive makes the laptop an excellent traveling storage device for photographs, and FastStone lets me look at the photos, too. (I'll process the photos with Lightroom on my Macbook and Mac mini.)

5. The small screen is far sharper and brighter than I had expected. It's wide enough for most Web sites, although a bit shallow.

6. This is just a subjective opinion, but the Toshiba looks and feels substantial, not flimsy and plasticky.

The bad:

1. The $399 price for this computer isn't all you're going to spend. You'll need an external DVD burner for system backups and loading software that can't be downloaded; that's $50 more right there. Also, while 1 gig of RAM is adequate for most tasks, the computer will run faster with 2 gig. A 2 gig chip costs another $50. Add a protective neoprene netbook sleeve for $20, and suddenly you've got a $520 computer. (But this is true of all netbooks, not just the Toshiba.)

2. The Toshiba, like most computers, comes with an annoying lot of pre-loaded crapware -- trial versions of software such as Microsoft Office and Norton Antivirus that expire after 60 days. I spent two hours yesterday zapping the crapware and replacing it with my preferred programs -- all of them free.

Conclusion:

Absolutely no buyer's remorse.

iPad or netbook?

Having absorbed all the super-hype about the "Magical and Revolutionary" Apple iPad, I made a decision yesterday.

The iPad is a splendid little device, indeed. Wouldn't it be great to read newspapers and illustrated books in full color on it -- and play with my favorite iPod Touch apps on its big screen?

And it's an Apple! I'm a big fan of Mac computers, having owned seven of them, including two laptops. Their design and ease of use has been second to none, and the the Mac OS X operating system has no peer.

Still, the 5.2-pound Macbook that has been my road companion for more than three years is getting heavier as I age. I've been yearning for something half that weight, and the iPad weighs just 1.5 pounds by itself.

Some features of the iPad are not for me. I don't listen to music and am not a lover of downloadable movies or video (almost none are captioned for the deaf and won't be any time soon) and I refuse to inflict photographs of my family or my travels on other people.

Most important, the iPad looks as if it will be an unsuitable writing machine, even with the dockable keyboard that will bring the weight to 2 1/2 pounds, the same as the average netbook. The iPad doesn't have real text editing software, and moving files to a laptop or desktop will be clumsy and involved, for there are no USB ports.

Even with an iPad, there'd still be the need for a laptop on the road. An iPad would just be piling on the weight.

And so yesterday I ordered a PC netbook.

It will do everything I need -- except display Amazon.com e-books (and, presumably, Apple e-books as well). For that I'll keep my trusty iPod Touch, on which I've read 15 books so far. Its handiness makes up for its tiny screen.

A netbook is much less expensive than the iPad, $250 to $400 rather than the iPad's $500 to $800.

Netbooks have grown up in the last year. They're powered by faster processors and boast 160-to-250-gigabyte hard drives. They have perfectly usable 10-inch screens, slightly larger than the iPad's. Their larger, redesigned keyboards are 92 to 95 percent the size of the norm.

I spent much of the day yesterday playing with and comparing Acer, Asus, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Samsung and Toshiba netbooks at Best Buy and Office Depot, paying particular attention to the feel of the keyboards. The Acer and Toshiba keyboards especially suit my smallish hands.

While none of the machines is as powerful as a modern laptop, all are fast enough for emailing, Internet surfing (including video watching, if that's your bag) and brawny enough to run Word (or OpenOffice, my word processor of choice). I am assured that simple photo editing software such as Google's free Picasa will run well on the new netbooks.

A netbook's not going to replace the Macbook for car trips and the like. Heavy editing and formatting will be much easier on that than on a netbook.

But the 2.6 pound Toshiba NB305-N410W netbook I ordered yesterday from B&H in New York (no tax, free shipping) will be my new road warrior for airplane and train trips.

For $399, it offers a 10.1 inch LCD screen, the latest 1.66 gHz Atom N450 processor, 1 gig of RAM upgradable to 2 gigs, a 250 gig hard drive, three USB ports, 802b/g/n hi-fi, webcam and mike, a 6-cell battery for a claimed 11 hours of computing time that is actually closer to 8, Windows 7 Starter Edition, and a host of software including Internet Explorer 8 and Microsoft Works. Five years ago that'd have made a powerful laptop.

On all my Macs, by the way, Apple's auto-correcting TextEdit software changes "netbook" to "netback" or "notebooks" every single time. What's a netback? A certain way to calculate the price of crude oil. Huh.

It's almost as if Steve Jobs knew his new iPad won't suit everyone, but wasn't going to help them buy netbooks either.


The Toshiba NB305-N410W I ordered from B&H in New York yesterday.

FEB. 10: Hitler responds to the iPad.

Three cheers for OpenOffice.org 3.0

Years ago, when I still worked on PCs, I used keen software called OpenOffice (versions 1 and 2) to write two books. It was (and is) a Microsoft Office semi-clone, but much sleeker and less bloated than Bill Gates' memory-hungry moneymaker has become. OpenOffice's word processor, Write, was the perfect tool for writing books, and it could read and save files in Microsoft Word format for sending to the publisher.

Best of all, OpenOffice is an open-source program, which means its program code is available to anyone who wants to tinker with and improve it, and it is free (except perhaps a donation to the OpenOffice people, if the user likes the software enough). Many national governments -- and many corporations -- have converted to OpenOffice rather than pay large sums to Microsoft.

Then I switched to the Apple platform, mainly because I liked the Lady Friend's sleek, stable Macs better than my clunky, crash-prone, virus-collecting PCs. But using OpenOffice with a Mac was clumsy and not very reliable, because that required using an add-on program called X11, a hacker's dream but a duffer's nightmare. So I bit the bullet and put a legal copy of Microsoft Word 2004 on my Macs.

That was all right, but slow to load and clumsy to operate, even on the Macs. I didn't need 99 per cent of its useless, memory-hogging "features" -- useless for a serious text-oriented writer uninterested in eye-candy hells and thistles.

Now OpenOffice Suite 3.0 is available -- and, praise the Lord, for Mac OS X in a native OS X version. No more X11!

I downloaded it onto my Mac Mini last night and immediately loaded an entire book manuscript written in Microsoft Word into OpenOffice Write. The formatting was perfect, except for a couple of letters on one page, which the spell checker immediately caught. And the loading and execution speed of OpenOffice Write was noticeably faster than that of Word.

Version X.0 of anything is never perfect, but OpenOffice enthusiasts are so quick to make fixes that its teething bugs are likely to be squashed swiftly.

I'll be using Calc, OpenOffice's spreadsheet, as well as Write. It also has a Microsoft PowerPoint clone called Impress, but I'm a fan of Apple's own KeyNote.

There are also drawing, database and mathematics programs in OpenOffice for those who need them. They are likewise compatible with the Microsoft Office versions, though there will be some differences and some anomalies.

Give OpenOffice a try. It won't cost you a nickel.