geneven: The "can't write a novel" argument is based on the alleged impossibility of touch-typing on a small keyboard, and the assumption that touch-typing is essential to novel-writing, not (AFAIK) on performance issues. I don't really consider either of these valid, but I can't touch-type or write a novel (with or without a netbook), so how would I know....


Ensuring that your computer is inside the house, and is cooled by circulating room air through it, rather than, say, ducted to a wall, is sufficient to heat your house with it. Using a heat engine to recover some of it as useful work is a little harder.

In general, all wasted energy from electrical equipment contributes to heating. This also means, in cold enough climates, there's greatly reduced benefit to more efficient lighting, power supplies, or anything else. But for those of us where it gets warm in the summer, inefficiency can be doubly bad -- we use extra power, and then use more power dumping the heat through the A/C. While the payoff period is probably in the decades, waste-heat power generation from desktop computers could actually make sense for us.