Week or two back I heard there was enough money left over in the 'fitting out' part of the library budget after all the furniture had been bought, to buy a laptop or three for the library staff at my level. That's a treat I'd not expected.

But of course, having got me all excited I then find out it won't be a dinky Sony VAIO it would be easy to lust after as apparently the IT department have a thing about supporting Sony machines. (!) (Macs I could understand). And it probably won't be for a while, so don't get too excited too soon.

But to get it out of my system...

Borrowed a library laptop for the weekend just to see how 'portable' a standard sized one was in my briefcase. Not really. It's movable but not something I'd want to carry every day - besides, where would I put my sack lunch?

Then there's the power supply. Do I carry it as well? Buy a second? [1]

On the other hand, the screen is gorgeous - 'specially when I tried watching a DVD tucked up in bed! And it was great to be able to do computery stuff while the kids/wife did school work of one sort or another. Not sure I want to give it back now while I wait for university bureacracy to slowy grind through the acquisiton procedure I'm not even sure our Head has started yet!

The real question is how useful it will be. Be interesting to see and I'm sure I will enjoy the experiment.


[1] In fact that was the solution I took with my Palm and its battery lasts much longer than the laptop's.