Live Mesh: The Killer App for Netbooks

  • Article

 meshbook

This weekend I was reading7 Tools To Make Your WinXP Netbook Shine on GigaOm and commented there that they missed a trick IMHO by not including Live Mesh. Okay so Live Mesh as a service is still in beta but in my experience it’s rock solid and is a (perhaps THE) killer app for Netbooks. Here’s my thinking based on my experience of running a Samsung NC10 for a few weeks

(note that you can now to peer to peer sync with Mesh that removes the 5gb limit we have on the cloud store – making both of these scenarios possible)

 

Scenario 1:
I’ll use myself as an example which may not be a-typical but should prove the point. I have 4 PC’s I regularly use. 1 Media Centre, 1 desktop machine at home with two monitors in my office, 1 laptop which use on the road and 1 Netbook which is potentially replacing the laptop.

I have Live Mesh running on all of them which basically means I can grab the Netbook at any time, dash out of the house and know that I’ll always have my data with me as a sync all the folders I need. This includes my music archive from the Media Centre and my key work documents and folders from the desktop machine. Even if I didn’t get everything synced in time or forgot a folder or two, I can remotely access my machines at home through firewalls and across the Internet without any real fiddling.

In a nutshell, Live Mesh allows my Netbook to be the ultimate companion machine as it’s grab and go with all of my data synched.

 

Scenario 2:
My current laptop may end up being relegated to acting as a backup device to the Netbook in which case I can simply sync the entire machine to the Netbook both to access all of my old data but backup anything new. The downside is this means the old laptop has to be permanently on of course until we get Wake On LAN type functionality in Live Mesh.

 

Okay so granted I may not be a typical case but for many people I know who are buying Netbooks they are a second machine that is small, has great battery life and is cheap. For these folks, Live Mesh is perfect.

 

Trust me, if you have a Netbook and another PC or Mac somewhere else you use get Live Mesh installed and I think you’ll love the result.