mfball

@venusofwillendork, you can find some places with reasonable parking, but it's pretty rarely what anyone would describe as consistent most places. A lot of neighborhoods have resident-only street parking, which helps limit crowding a liiiittle bit, but can still be tough depending on where you are in/around the city. There are almost always more cars than there are spaces, especially considering that a lot of the more affordable neighborhoods have multi-family houses filled with roommates, so you might have 3-6 cars per house on a street with barely room for half that many. There are also a somewhat shocking number of apartment buildings with no parking at all. The resident permit is free if you live in Boston proper, specific to your neighborhood, but it does require some paperwork and I think you might have to re-register your car at your Boston address, though I'm not certain on that. (Also worth noting that a lot of neighborhoods way outside of downtown are still technically within the City of Boston, including Allston-Brighton, which is a big student area.) The further you get from downtown, the more likely you are to find some unrestricted streets, but of course not requiring a resident permit also means it's a free-for-all so it can be just as congested, especially since the further out you get, the more people need cars because there's less public transit access. If you can swing a little extra money, it's SO worth it to live somewhere with a parking space included in the rent, or even renting a space nearby if it's not available right where you live. Boston winters can be brutal and it sucks trying to squeeze into street parking among 8 foot snow drifts, especially because you'll often spend an hour shoveling out a space in the morning only to find it's taken when you get home at night. The best advice is probably not to plan on commuting by car if you can help it at all. That way at least you won't have to move your car as much, so the search for parking won't be a daily thing. I've lived in Boston (in Allston) for three years now, and I keep my car mostly to get out of the city or do things that are extremely inconvenient/impossible by public transit (like Costco runs). I did drive to work in non-COVID times, but it was west of the city rather than into the city, my office had free parking, and I also rent a parking spot at my apartment to avoid the miserable end-of-the-day circling block after block for an open space.

You're better off just getting a small laptop with whichever operating system you prefer. One of my friends has a Chromebook and she constantly complains about how it can't do anything -- you can pretty much only use web-based applications with it, so it's pretty useless without internet (and she has had issues with connectivity in places where there was definitely strong unrestricted wifi, so it doesn't seem to work well even when internet is available). I have an Asus netbook that I really like if you're looking for portability with the processing power and storage space of a real computer. I don't think they market them as netbooks anymore, but a quick search on Newegg for laptops with screens around 11" should probably give you some useful results.