I’m among the always travel with a laptop crowd. I know this flies smack in the face of some travel purists, where a laptop only holds you back from getting out and enjoying the place that you went all that way to go see.
Well, the fact of the matter is that you have downtime no matter where you are. After beating the streets and seeing the sites; sometimes it’s the best thing in the world to come back to your place and pop online for a few hours. I get plenty of travel experiences in on our journeys, and find having a laptop invaluable, and would never leave home without one. Ok, I’ll qualify the above statement, that I’d only consider traveling with a tiny laptop. There is nothing worse than lugging a 15 or 17” brick around with you; where a sub or ultra portable can disappear into your luggage.
The fun and flexibility that a laptop affords is totally worth the extra weight in your pack, and if it’s old enough, hardly worth worrying about.
My current rig is an old Dell Latitude x300. It does most things that I want, at a price tag that I can afford to lose… it’s a loaner. Plus it has a built in SD card reader, which is what my camera uses.
This little laptop serves lets me do the following:
Apartment/Hotel reservations – I use craigslist.org to contact apartment owners directly as I travel. Contacting owners usually saves me money on commission / booking fees, so I get better places for less money in better neighborhoods.
Internet Phone – Skype is so handy while traveling. Not only do I usually pay 2 cents a minute to anywhere in the world, it makes dialing international phones SOOOO much easier than on my cell phone. I also have my cell phone forwared to my Grand Junction account, so I can get my voicemail for free over the Internet.
Photo Management – Taking photos is an essential part of traveling for me, and managing them on a computer lets you enjoy the photos on a larger screen, but plenty of free tools like Google Picassa and Paint.NET let you play with your photos immediately.
iTunes / Music Management – I have my entire music collection on a small huge 250GB Portable Hard Drive. I only have a 4gb iPod nano.
. I only have a 4gb iPod nano.Diary / Blogging – I’m using BlogJet as an offline blogging tool to keep in touch with friends and family. No need for an internet connection to do my damage.
TV / Movie Theater – My afore mentioned portable hard drive also has tons of movies and episodes, (that I bought over iTunes, of course!) VLC Media player is the best that I’ve found.
Email – Email is a no brainer, and Outlook has a great offline mode especially useful for traveling when you are only occasionally connected. Nothing like being off line to actually read some of those ‘I’ll get to it later’ messages.
Fortunately, this laptop is not powerful enough to play World of Warcraft.
