Tech Refresh

After reading a new year's resolutions update from my fellow blogger Michelle at Tea At Dusk, I decided to revisit mine. The running one (average 2 mi/day) lacks momentum right now. I could blame it on the colder-than-usual winter or reports of a cougar roaming the area. But instead I'll point to the easily predicted drop in motivation I always have after achieving a goal race. But there's always the spring season of events to rejuvenate activity.

My second resolution -- spending more money on myself -- has been much easier to fulfill, as I gave myself permission to update more of my personal tech:First I snagged one of the screamin' cheap post-Christmas eMachines EM250 netbooks at Wal-Mart. Powered by Intel's Atom and barely a couple of pounds, it displaces my five-year-old Pentium M "Centrino" portable with the broken hinge. (I think I was ahead of my time: I bought that four-pound Averatec notebook at a time when eight-pound portables with huge screens for watching movies were in vogue -- and ridiculously weighing down students' backpacks.) So far I'm loving the EM250 for what it does, but there's no way I'd want this to be my sole PC with its cramped keyboard and the limitations of Windows 7 Starter.

January is a popular time to put our minds on organization, and my other tech splurge for the month was an HP Mediasmart EX490. Running Windows Home Server, this nifty box took over the workload of a slow NAS with a small drive crammed with files. I can also stop my old practice of running Norton Ghost once a month, as WHS also does set-and-forget backups of my computers over my home network.

(Of course, this still only provides "in-house" backup and leaves things vulnerable to natural disaster or break-ins by thieves. Readers, do you include offsite backups in your routines? If so, what do you use? Online services like Carbonite, Norton, or Mozy? Or do you distrust "the cloud" and combine a set of USB flash drives with periodic visits to a safe deposit box?)

Coming up: I think I'm ready to take the plunge with a new desktop PC. There are some digital media homework assignments that I'd like to have done, and the ol' P4 isn't going to make the grade at those. Right now I'm weighing the pros and cons of vendor-built versus Vince-built and neither side seems to have won the argument in my mind.