I Love Cynics!

My laptop died. Just out of warranty, too. Damn it. I think it’s just the hard drive. It boots up, but the moment you try to do anything useful, it locks up and the hard drive makes a rhythmic thunking noise. It’s got a good beat, but you can’t dance to it. I’ll figure it out on Friday, when I’ll get a new hard drive for it. If it wasn’t all new-fangled SATA, I’d have already replaced it with the hard drive of my last dead laptop. Apparently, I leave a trail of corpses whenever I go portable.

So, I’ve found myself relying on my Palm Tungsten E2, which, as one might imagine, is considerably slower than typing on a laptop. I need to find a keyboard for this thing. Back in the day (that is to say, maybe five years ago…) I had a Handspring Visor and a funky little fold-out keyboard. That thing rocked. But I can’t find any keyboards for my Tungsten. A few are offered on Amazon.com, but the reviews are absolutely abysmal.

I do have to give kudos to the makers of Word To Go, though. It’s a really easy, Microsoft Word compatible, word processor for the Palm. It came with the Tungsten on the software CD. The free version doesn’t have spell check, but once you bring your document back over to your main computer, you can do the spell checking there.

Ultimately, though, it’s a royal pain in the ass to create documents on a keyboardless Palm device. Which has led to my interest in either the Neo or Dana. The Neo is a nifty, somewhat inexpensive, alternative to the Palm, if your only goal is to write. The Dana actually runs the Palm OS, and also includes an expansion slot for an SD card, which is what I currently use in my Tungsten. It’s also wireless, so I could walk over to my favorite coffee shop, and browse the web when my writing is feeling less than inspired.

If I could find a decent keyboard for my Tungsten, though, I’ll probably go that route. All this is moot, of course, if I can rescue my laptop. If not, I’ll have a hard time convincing myself to get another, when the Neo/Dana options are available, since my single excuse for buying a laptop is for writing.