OStatic

On Christmas Eve, I saw my 18-year old cousin, who has just started college. Knowing that he was going to see me, he had brought along an old Dell Latitude notebook computer, circa late 1999 or so, and running Windows 98--a dinosaur. The notebook had once been used by his father for work, but was unneeded by him and unwanted anymore by his company. My cousin couldn't get it to boot past the Windows logo. My cousin's idea was that it could be fixed up and upgraded so that it might be like a netbook that he could use at school, with a few extras such as a nice large screen and full-size keyboard. This overhaul, it turned out--including getting the notebook to speak Wi-Fi--was my job.

From my perspective, one of the best developments in technology during 2008 was the proliferation of new portability options for useful software applications. This was driven by the push toward cloud computing, netbooks (which typically don't store a lot of local resources but do a good job of reaching out to online applications), the availability of low-cost, high-capacity USB thumb drives, and more. We've written about the new version 3.0 of the open source OpenOffice suite of productivity applications, which has been available for a while. If you'd like to be able to use these applications without necessarily having them loaded on your portable computer wherever you are, here are two good options.