I was reading the latest catalog from Dell, which showed an image of the company’s color cover laptops. You’ll have to excuse my shock and awe, because I didn’t know Dell notebooks came in any colors other than silver and black.

So I meandered over to the Dell site to track down these machines — which the photo shows as being available in shades of lemon, lime, cherry and a kind of strawberry daiquiri. I plugged every tracking number from that page in the catalog into the address line of my browser and couldn’t come up with anything.

Eventually, persistence and the keywords, “color cover,” got me what I needed, links to “QuickSnap Color Kits.” No sign of those warmer colors I’d prefer, but the “Mediterranean Blue” isn’t unattractive.

And there’s a cool sounding “Charcoal Leather QuickSnap,” which, according to one Dell customer “feels and looks like leather.”

But the choices are still rather business-like (read: staid) compared to what’s possible for decorating your machine. If you plug “laptop skins” into your search engine of choice, you’ll be led to companies such as laptopskins, Schtickers and Skinit. These operations sell skins of your favorite sports teams, psychodelic designs, works of art and even pictures of the family dog.

The skins from these companies stick on like giant decals (except without the water). You clean your device first, and then carefully position the decal. You don’t want to do it wrong, because they don’t tend to stick as well the second time around. And if you’re headed back to work with that notebook after a wild weekend with the Black Hats in Vegas, your temporary skin will peel off with nary a crumb. Just like that, it’s back to black (or gray or silver).

Posted on April 4th, 2008 by dian