The Best Laptop Ever - My Acer Aspire

The best laptop you ever own should be the one you own now. If not, you're moving backward. My laptop is an Acer Aspire, which I like because Acer makes durable little workhorses which last until the specs are so out of date that you upgrade for that reason, rarely replacing one for system failure. But I like this laptop not just for the brand, but for what I can do now that I could not before: out of the theory, into the real.

This laptop was an emergency purchase when I needed to get online after my tower died. Since it's a second computer, I get to play with it in the technical sense. It's a testbed for Windows, Linux and Wifi and Bluetooth configurations, etc. In that sense it's a practical comparison tool: Does the battery last longer in one OS or the other (it doesn't), is wifi easier to hook up (it's about the same), is Bluetooth easier to use with one or the other (Ubuntu is more straightforward, and lets you tether easier than Windows)?

As a bonus, my friend's mother does the resale shops as a hobby. Whenever she sees something computer related, she buys it for me, and I have seen some amazing legacy and irrelevant peripherals that way, believe me. For my laptop, she bought a brushed aluminum case which looks like something from a bad Russian mafia movie. But it fits a laptop, power supply and cables like it was made for it; I don't even have to remove the laptop from the case to use it. And I have your million dollars right here, tovarisch.

Another resale shop special was a portable multimedia card reader. I never did get it to open any number of media cards on any computer, but the connector cable itself was worth the price: it charges and tethers my Blackberry to my laptop, and it fits nicely into the Russian mafia computer case.

Last, but not least is the advent of the cloud. I am writing this on the laptop on the porch in Google Docs. Later, I will archive or move or upload the file from my tower. With the cloud, a laptop does not need to have advanced configuration or components, it just has to be online. Where you take it from there is increasingly in the cloud and limited only by your own creativity.