A couple of weeks ago my trusty old desktop PC finally went to the scrapyard in the sky (but only after I removed the hard drive). I fear my laptop isn’t far behind so this has meant I’ve had to had a look at various replacement options.
I’m not really someone who will buy the latest piece of technology the day its released as its an expensive game you can never win.
I take a lot of pictures so I need a large disc drive that is also backed up. The backup isn’t an issue as I use a rather good program called Carbonite which allows me to back up as much data as I want remotely for a few dollars a year.
However, I’m also away from home regularly and so I need some sort of mobile computer. Until recently, that meant using a laptop but in the last year or so, the tablet computer has arrived on the market. Apple lead the way with the iPad and more recently the iPad 2. However, I’m not a fan of Apple to say the least. I believe its last years technology and next years prices but thats another discussion.
In recent months, the Android operating system has been adopted by a range of companies who will produce rivals to the iPad. Samsung brought out the Galaxy Tab (Picture: Public Domain Photos) but it still wasn’t something I was impressed enough with to part with my hard earned cash.
However, soon Android 3.0 will be released and that is designed specifically for tablets and no doubt, more devices will soon be on the market. That said, they won’t have the processing power of laptops so the jigsaw still won’t be complete. The good news is that I believe I have found the answer in Citrix.
Citrix will allow me to use my home computer from my tablet computer (or anywhere with an internet connection). For a very small fee, I can connect run all my software from my big, powerful PC which is back home. This gives me a nice portable computer with all the power, software and storage I need. Bandwidth use is minimal as all the processing is done by the PC at home. The only time there would be higher amounts of data being transmitted would be when copying files between the Tablet computer and my home PC.
It all sounds very promising so next I’m going to be looking at various options. When I’ve got it all up and running, I’ll let you know.
