Viewing the web

Cool dampish start to the day here.
This week I've finished putting my Japan albums on Micro SD card in lossless to listen to om my portable Fiio X1 player, a best buy in the sounds great for the money stakes.
Getting to the meat of this entry, my Dell Netbook is a bit slow browsing the web hindered by it's sluggish Intel Atom processor although I like it's small size for writing blog entries and the like on.
I run Pale Moon for Atom on it as that's a fairly light weight variant of Firefox which is usually what I use but was looking at alternatives not least to Chrome which is noticeably slower on it.
Actually I found a version of it that I'm I'm currently testing with a view to replacing Chrome by ultimately.
Called slimJet, it's a very light browser that is based on Chrome in its Open Source form (Chromium) but rather than using a lot of plugins that tend to be slow and buggy, many of these features are intergrated directly in the browser which works better.
It's also easier to customize, something Chrome just isn't designed to do preferring to give you it's own minimalist design and doesn't send information (your data) to Google's advertising world although you can use Chrome extensions and plug-ins if you wish from the Chrome web store without issue.
Slimjet
I think over the years I've used most of the main browsers such as Internet Explorer 6,7,8,10 and 11, Firefox from version 2.0.1 onward and Chrome just seeing them get bloated or stuck down one development alley that didn't sit well with me.
The issues with Flash plugin's and Firefox at times drove me made on social media where post may contain embedded video or animation just crashed.

Computing eras end

Peoples who've know this blog since it's very start way way back in 2006 know that apart from a very brief period at the start, the majority of its posts came from desktop computer obtained around October 2006 mainly because of the ahem 'extra curricular' activities I was having to undertake for more hours than inevitably were really good for me not least having to have means of emailing and working on shared documents.
Time hadn't been kind to said machine and I had gotten a laptop in 2012 for most activities but it has a recurring fault that so far has proved hard to fix leaving me with that old desktop for most things which had gotten so slow at starting like 15 minutes minimum, run on Windows XP Pro and only had 256MB of RAM (with very limited expansion prospects) and to cap it all, a hard drive with a maximum capacity of 18.6GB of which the operating system ate a good portion.
I called it "Treacle" as using it was akin to trying to walking through thick treacle, getting so far and hitting a sticky patch every time something required an update just as you were attempting to do anything. It also was incapable of running Tumblr and Google Plus never mind any sort of online games. 
Hardly an economic candidate for revamping with various upgrades so as a few friends know I was looking for an affordable replacement given I'm not into gaming or video editing placing humongous demands on the processor  and I do really like some portability.

After looking around I spotted something with potential from Microdream in Devon which was a bit out of the box when it came to ideas and this was it, the Dell 2100.
A netbook, that small laptop concept that got a bit lost between Chromebooks and upscale 10 inch tablets but very much the rage a few years back because the one advantage as being a full computer was thanks to its Windows 7 operating system, you can use full programs on, a generous 160GB Hard Drive for storing music and pictures on and obviously being an all in one,  a newer 10.1" screen as my 15 monitor has some burnt on tramlines and needed to replaced at some point although this machine does have a VGA connector for external monitors.
The negatives looked workable, such as not having a  dvd re-writer wasn't an issue as I have an external spare one that just plugs in and the RAM when supplied was a pitiful 1GB could be expanded to a more workable 2 which was the maximum the Atom processor can accept which proved adequate for most things even using the iTunes store.

On the other hand its keyboard was very responsive with plenty of feel while typing, the trackball while being small is accurate, an issue I had with the previous HP Compaq laptop and it had a built in SD card reader too

The small size is a boon for working from anywhere and after a few issues trying to install iTunes (I could write a book on the issues with its interfaces for Windows uses and unhelpful help sections) it is going well.

Perhaps you'd like to join me in pouring some cream on the treacle pudding and celebrating Treacle's permanent replacement!