I've been building my own computers since the late 1980s – the advent of the IBM PC architectures and the ability for 3rd parties to use the architectures made it everything fairly straightforward. As the years blew by, things became more complicated – but it was all manageable. Simple. Straightforward.

The Decades of Change

The floppy drive – the original 5 1/4” of the PCs (but not the original floppy by any stretch) died. It gave birth to the not-so-floppy plastic encased 'floppy'. And all was pretty much the same. Hard drive sizes went from 10 megabyte to 10 gigabyte in fairly short order. The fact that the ASUS eeePC on which I'm writing this is probably more powerful and more physically diminutive than any system during my first 20 years of computing is not lost on me.

The fact that I'm using it now is because the desktop's Gigabyte motherboard has, after 2 years, died. I was actually quite close to simply throwing the system out the second floor window, since I've been keeping it alive with hard drive changes, RAM upgrades and so forth. All of that stuff used to be fun, but now I want to focus on using the computer – not fixing it. I don't even fix computers for money anymore; it's simply not worth it to me. It's... boring. Repetitive. Annoying.

Don't get me wrong. I think anyone who is in IT/ICT should be able to build their own system from the ground up. I also think that they should do this because it forces them to stay in touch with the realities of technology change and gives more experience than most corporate certification programs can ever give. But I don't really 'do' IT/ICT professionally anymore. I read. I write. I manage stuff. I fix other things. I plant trees. And when I feel like sitting down to write, I want the bloody thing to work.

I have a USB stick that has 16 gigabytes of memory. More than a DVD. Smaller than a pen, about the size of a well worn pencil. That amount of memory is more than I had available in all of the PCs I had during the 1980s and 1990s.

CRT monitors, still better for 3D gaming, are pretty much dead. It's all flat screens now. And what, pray tell, is the difference between a flat screen and a laptop screen? Not much, really, except replacing the screen is more of a problem with a laptop. To date, I've never had a laptop monitor die. Knock on wood.

Footprint

I also want to see my desk. I like my desk. Decades ago, I thought that Apple's hypertext technology – as it was originally called – would be the death of paper. The fact that I read it in a magazine didn't seem to mean that much back then. The sad fact of the matter is that the world around me still revolves around paper – and that, too, is OK, but it means that a desk has to accommodate a computer and what one is working on. With me, that could be at least 3 different sets of paper/books/magazines at the same time. And that requires space.
Desktop machines occupy more space than laptops. Granted, Apple has some cool stuff that hasn't hit pragmatic pricing range yet (always a problem with Apple), but at the end of the day a desktop makes a reasonable desk a slut to silicon. If the desktop isn't ON the desk, it's near it somewhere – occupying space, accumulating dust, with all sorts of cords tethering it to your desk. The monitor, keyboard and mouse are the anchors holding the PC in place, and even with wireless mice and keyboards there is the issue of range.

You'd think that they would have learned to make this all neater. They did. They're laptops. Sure, I'm writing this on my regular 'portable' machine... but as soon as I moved the desktop paraphernalia out of the way I've been shocked with:

• The amount of dust that's been lurking behind things.
• The amount of space I actually have.

I can wave my hands freely across my desk. Amazing. I'm untethered.

So the laptop wins. The question becomes which laptop.

Truth be told, I've always had great luck with Gateway laptops. But the Toshiba laptops are also looking like good.

What doesn't fit anymore, though, is the desktop. It is no longer something I need... partly because of the fact that I've changed over the years (or better, my needs and habits have), and partly because technology has evolved the laptop into a more versatile desktop.