For the last decade, my friend, colleague, and fellow columnist David Berlind of ZDNet has been using a laptop as his only computer. For almost as long, I've been trying to do the same thing--only I have given up on too many occasions to count.
Having a single, portable computer--and all my stuff always with me--seems so attractive. No need to synch multiple calendars and phone books or wonder where an important file has gone. I can picture myself wielding one of those really tiny notebooks that everyone seems to coo over (but nobody seems to buy).
David's (the other one) notebook experiences, which he described at length in a recent column, make for provocative reading. He thinks desktops have had it, and especially if you are a corporate buyer, there is no way you should spend money on anything but a laptop.
Berlind is convinced that those of us who've been unsuccessful at living by a laptop alone have faced a variety of system and user-intelligence problems, both of which I'll admit to.
Then again, maybe I just have been asking for too much. What I want is to be able to plug a computer into the network at the office and get the resources I need there. Then I want to come home and do the same thing. But I also want the computer to find the right printer, connect to the correct file servers, and at home, start the VPN so I can log into the CNET servers at work.
And I want all this to just happen--without so much as touching a fingertip to the keyboard.
Oh, and by the way, I want to see only resources for the particular location where I happen to be. I also need a travel profile--actually a couple of them--to support dial-up connections when I'm on the road. Plus, there's the connection at my friend Ernie's house, or the wireless network I set up at a colleague's home. I should be able to plug into their networks as well. You get the idea.
Note to Mr. Berlind: I suspect my needs are more complex than yours are.
Apple solved this problem years ago, with a location manager feature in the Mac OS. It's a set of stored location settings. Click on the one where you happen to be, and the system makes all the necessary changes, including such fine details as time-zone adjustments. Of course, this feature has been both simplified and somewhat denatured. It seems from my initial experimentation that the version in OS X has lost some of the features available in the OS 9.2 version.
Symantec used to market a PC utility that does this location-management thing, but I think it fell into a marketing abyss a couple of years ago. And I suspect our own Killer Downloads king, Preston Gralla, has a utility or two that I could download and use. But why shouldn't the operating system do this all by itself--perhaps using the same location manager strategy that Macintosh did?
Wireless networking makes this much easier; at least, the getting-connected part. With a wireless network (Windows XP has this feature built-in), you can see the networks around you, and pick one to log into. Of course, you also need additional software and a password--if, that is, your IS department is cautious enough to have installed powerful encryption.
I'm a big proponent of the notion that companies set up "open" and "closed" wireless networks on their premises. In this way, visitors can gain Internet access easily, but have no access to corporate data or other computers. This is often as much as I need when I show up in a strange place. Visit my home office and you'll find two networks: one open; the other closed. Visitors like this a lot.
But even after you're connected--thankfully, there's DHCP to handle those pesky TCP/IP settings automatically--there are still issues. Like making sure the servers you see are the servers you can really access at that moment. Or handling the printer connection and time zone change, if required.
I have not played with this Windows XP Pro capability enough to feel really comfortable making a formal declaration about. However, what I've done so far leads me to believe that while XP networking is much improved over the networking available in Win9x and even Win2K, it still has a ways to go.
But technical issues aren't the only reasons I'm not wild about becoming a one-computer kind of guy. My big issue is leaving it at home when I'm commuting to the office. David Berlind assures me that in 10 years, this has never happened to him. I am, however, not that anal-retentive, and would doubtless leave the PC home three days out of five.
Frankly, it's always been my position that a company that really loves me will get me both a desktop and a portable, which, I think, is the only sensible way to compute. Of course, having a bunch of computers creates its own problems, which I will tell you about someday.
Who knows, maybe after my month as a Mac addict is over--which has me pretty much down to a Mac desktop and a Mac portable for all my computing--I'll take the Berlind Challenge and try to get down to just one PC. But which platform would I choose?
I guess I need to start researching what XP Pro can really do for a one-computer kind of guy.
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