iPad for RVers

I had a one hour meeting today with about 12 iPad users, here in the park.  I held the meeting to determine if we need to have iPad Classes and if so, what are people interested in learning.  I had a great response and lots of suggestions. 

Among the suggestions:  iTunes for transferring Music, Videos and Books.  Applications such as Allstays, iBooks, Kindle etc.  Getting data items from a laptop to the iPad via "the Cloud".   Many wanted to edit photos and Email them to family and friends.  There were many more.  The problem now is when to do each one.

The first class will be using iTunes.  We should have both Windows and MAC laptops in the room.

Disk Space on Windows 8

Since it was announced, I have planned to purchase a Microsoft Surface Pro.  I was intrigued by the concept of having a tablet that will run all the programs I had on my Windows 7 Laptop. Although I haven't yet seen an announcement from Microsoft, I expect that it will be available for purchase by the end of January.  Could I use the Surface Tablet as my main computer?

My Windows 7 laptop had a 500GB hard drive and it was pretty close to being full.  The most expensive model of the surface was $999  and only had 128GB SSD.  That was a big downgrade from my working environment.  Was it even possible to replace my Lenovo Windows 7 laptop with the Surface?

Windows 8 Pro was available on October 26, 2012 and, on that day, I downloaded it from the Microsoft Store on my journey to find out if it was even possible to get to 128GB from 500GB.  I started by purchasing a 256GB Crucial SSD, installed it in my Lenovo.  I calculated how much disk space I actually needed.   Now less than 60GB - Wow!

Libraries	Current Space (GBs) Windows 7	Required (GBs) Windows 8
Contacts	< 1.0	<1.0
Documents	13.1	1.0
Downloads	8.6	2.0
eBook Libraries	28.1	4.8
Favorites	<1.0	<1.0
Music	108.0	14.1
Pictures	21.0	3.0
Presentations	<1.0	<1.0
Videos	110.0	30.0
Tablet Files	19.6	0
Total Disk Space	311.4	57.9

I then installed all my Windows 7 programs including Microsoft Office, Quicken, Turbo Tax, Microsoft Streets and Trips etc. and copied my 57.9GBs of data.

I have been using Windows 8 Pro for 3 months now and it looks as if a replacing my Windows 7 laptop might actually be possible; from a disk space perspective at least.  I am only using 106GB for everything.