I <a href="http://www.davidhewson.com/2009/11/in-search-of-a-noteworthy-companion/" target="_blank">wrote earlier about my search</a> for the perfect notebook companion while out and about doing research. Well I've found the best so far. To recap. I'm a Mac user and wouldn't use anything else for serious writing. But the MacBook Air is too big for lugging around cities constantly, and the battery life is way too short at little more than two hours most of the time (whatever Apple claim to the contrary).

I want something with a ten inch screen and a long battery life. Apple don't make such a thing -- yet. So, after faffing around with phones and PDAs for years, I went out and bought a ten inch Asus 1005HA netbook for £270 for Amazon. And it proved fantastic while legging it around Seville, though not in the way I'd expected.

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The Asus comes with Windows 7 and some kind of special Asus software designed to give it a very long battery life - eight hours or more even with wifi turned on. I'm not a fan of Windows so I also installed a Linux distro, <a href="http://www.jolicloud.com/" target="_blank">Jolicloud</a>, alongside Windows to see how that performed. Jolicloud is neat and easy to install, and has lots of applications that be added through a simple panel. I thought it was very well done and, given that this is only an alpha release, very stable and promising. But it's not for me just yet for these reasons...<a href="http://davidhewson.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/P_500.jpg"><img style="float:right;" src="http://davidhewson.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/P_500-tm.jpg" alt="P_500.jpg" width="200" height="200" /></a>
<ul>
	<li>It lacks the special Asus software for extending battery life. So while I got eight hours plus on Windows I was struggling to get five on Jolicloud.</li>
	<li>I use Evernote a lot, more than anything. There's no Evernote client release for Linux. You can make the 3.1 version of the Windows client work easily enough on Jolicloud but not the current 3.5 one. Unfortunately the 3.1 client is pretty horrible all round so I found it unusable.</li>
	<li>I wanted to use Google Chrome to set up my Gmail account so it stored mail directly on the netbook, giving me offline access. But Chrome on Linux, as far as I could see, doesn't do this. Yes, you can do it through Thunderbird. But it was all getting horribly complicated.</li>
</ul>
In practice I soon gave up using Jolicloud as I wandered round Seville. My working method was simple. I ran Windows and simply closed the lid when I stopped working. The netbook suspended and stayed that way for a very long period of time. Open the lid and I'm back working away as soon as I type in a password. Even when I was out all day and opening and closing the thing regularly in parks and cafes the battery never got close to half full most of the time. I just kept Evernote open, typed in material, uploaded photos through the built in card reader and, when I happened on a café that had free wifi, synced it all back to the web for safe keeping.

Windows always got to me somewhat with its updates and nags about virus software. But, after a lot of initial updates, it didn't seem too bad on this front -- no worse than Jolicloud and perhaps even better. And Microsoft's own anti virus package, <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/resources.aspx" target="_blank">Security Essentials</a>, was free and unobtrusive. All I really run on this machine is Evernote and a web browser. For that the machine is absolutely fine, and since Asus have tailored it to Windows 7 it boots quickly and seems very reliable.

So I now have a working Windows computer and one I really rather like. This came as quite a surprise to me I must admit. Jolicloud complicates the boot process and runs automatically when you turn the computer on. Since I'm not using it the OS is coming off as I write and I'm going back to devoting the whole machine to Windows 7 in its original condition. I can see this being incredibly useful for short trips, to London for meetings for example. I wouldn't want to do serious writing on it. But as a note-taker it's the best solution I've found to date.

Of course if Scrivener for Windows does come out I'll be buying it. I wonder how <a href="http://www.literatureandlatte.com/about.html" target="_blank">that poll about it went</a>. I'll buy it Keith if it happens! Which goes to show, I guess, that my loyalty lies in the three fundamental applications I use -- Scrivener, MacJournal and Evernote. Not to Apple. In fact I feel absolutely zero loyalty to Apple whatsoever, even though, or perhaps because, I have spent a fortune buying their products over the years. If someone comes up with something better for me -- be it Windows, Chrome OS or anything else -- I am gone.

To be fair this doesn't look like happening soon. But the quality of this little netbook has cost Apple the sale of the 13-inch MacBook Pro I was considering buying to my replace my very sluggish first generation MacBook Air.