I have a friend who has won a Fullbright Research Fellowship. She is going to be traveling to India. She has decided she needs a tablet, mainly for reading purposes - maybe a Kindle Fire, or a good Ipad or a good Droil. Maybe some light web browsing and email reading, but the big purpose will be to store and read e-books. These will be books for her research, and she wants to get e-book verision of most of her library. So she will be looking at this screen a lot and odes not have great eyes.

She also wants a work computer to write on MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint, email, research web browsing. I suggested these it might be possible to combine the two especially since she is used to windows and somewhat resistant to a Mac. But she might consider a Mac for the work computer and an ipad for the reading computer. Oh and she has to buy quickly. No time for mail order or getting stuff built. So she needs something she can get from the Apple Store (if Apple) or from Best Buy or Office Depot or Target or places like that for Kindle/Android/Windows. She also open to Kindle Fire for her reading tablet. Again,she wants a separate laptop and tablet. She wants the screen on her laptop to be at least 13 inches and decebt res,

So need rec for both the tablet and the laptop. Again, she does not want to combine.

I'm a fan of the Toshibas. Something like this, perhaps? [link]

I recommend avoiding Windows 8 unless you have a touchscreen.

For the tablet, I've heard good things about the Kindle Paperwhite, but I haven't tried one myself.

I LOVE my Paperwhite, and it's got a much better battery life than the Kindle Fire. The down side is that the PW isn't a tablet, it's just a kindle. But if she's getting a laptop, she can use that for browsing and movies or whatever.

The reason she is thinking tablet not pure e-reader is many of the books she needs are not available on Amazon. She not only needs to ability to read a variety of formats (which the paperwhite does fine) she needs to browse to websites to download the books. Otherwise It hink she would love a paperhite, but she needs to do light browsing to get the books. I guess she can download all the non-kindle books via her laptop and then transfer them via USB.

I love my Samsung Galaxy Tablet - the display is, frankly, gorgeous, and can be made very bright. The battery life is pretty good, as well.

I need suggestions for some kind of image management software. I'm not sure exactly what I'm looking for. It's for keeping genealogy stuff organized. Basically, I want something so that I can take a bunch of image files, and type up notes about each one. I also need to be able to search the notes. I'm sure this is something simple, but I can't think of what it would be called to be able to google it.

For costume design/costume shop purposes, I have used excel for this (putting the picture in a cell, and then using the columns to the right for specifics (character, price, etc). It was pretty clunky, but it did work.

I think database software like MS Access would be better for stuff like that than a spreadsheet.

Wait, doesn't Picasa let you tag images and search by tag? I haven't done anything with Picasa in several years, so I may be mis-remembering.

Is there a character limit for the tags? The images I'm talking about are scans of handwritten documents, and I want to be able to attach a transcription to each one.