Today’s laptops remind me of those “bass players” you see with 5, 6 and 7-string basses… Give me a fucking break. If you’re secretly harboring a guitar fetish, learn to play guitar and STFU.

Today, “Netbooks” are all the rage. I’d actually call them “laptops,” since that’s what they seem to be — laptops that know their place. Small, thin, light, powerful enough, wifi… All you need, really, in a laptop.  So when the Asus eee pc came out, I indulged. Nutshell: Fun to look at, maybe play with, but useless for touch typing in any serious way.

Last week I bought a ThinkPad X41. It’s awesome (I happen to love trackpoint navigation, and IBM’s idea of how a keyboard should feel). It’s very thin, very light, with an old-school 1024×768, 12″ LCD… Which I like, ’cause I think the whole “cinema screen” craze is misguided as hell. I don’t use my laptop to watch movies; I use it to write. On vertical, letter-sized pages. WTF. Anyway, netbook schmetbook; it’s a smart laptop that acts like one.

Downside: Can’t run OSX (unless you’re seriously committed)… But I’ve found that with RocketDock, “Cleartype” (is that really the best you could do, M$??) and a nice, minimalist theme installed (and taskbar hidden), I have a superb “netbook” that is also a killer writing machine. Might go for the OSX crack one of these days, we’ll see. In the meantime, I have a wafer-thin happy lappy that weighs less than 3 pounds, has xlnt built-in wifi and is solid as a rock (1.5Ghz CPU/1.5GB RAM/40GBHD).

Total cost? $250. That’s right. I scored extra discount points with the one I bought, as it had wonky keys, so the owner knew he had to go down… $200 out the door, found a new keyboard on eBay for $40+shipping. It even has a fingerprint reader (!?)… So there!