Laptop Slavery

As Geek Week on the blog moves forward I offer you another ZDNet article. This one is titled Students beware: Heavy laptop usage leads to bad posture, physical pain. In it Sean Portnoy shares these thoughts:

Feel like a slave to your laptop? That “addiction” can hurt you in ways beyond affecting your social life. According to a new report from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, heavy use of a notebook computer can lead to any number of physical ailments, including headaches, muscle soreness in your neck and back, and — no surprise here — carpal tunnel syndrome.

The researchers suggest that because laptops are built with unified body construction, users are left with few ways to work with them that would reduce the risk of long-term physical pain. Hunching down to see your screen can lead to bad posture, and nerve damage to your wrists can come from awkward placement of your hands while typing on cramped keyboards.

Sean follows up these thoughts with tired old recommendations like:

• using correct posture when you type (i.e. get a good chair and as your mother used to say - "Sit up straight!");
• buying external keyboards/monitors - which negate many benefits of using a laptop;
• taking breaks and drinking a lot of water - both don't seem good ideas for students in a classroom setting.

I do think that Sean got it right when he spoke about being a slave to our laptops. Not that I would know anything about such servitude. I know that I am free of its control.

Are you a slave to your PC or Mac? What do you do to get/keep free of it's hold?