Best Laptop for Going Around the World?

mitbeaver writes "I'm planning a round-the-world trip. 6+ months in developing countries, including Everest base camps 1 & 2, the deserts of Namibia and lots of places in between. I want to bring something to write (blogs or the Great American Novel) and burn DVD photo backups to mail home. I don't really need much in the way of power, but I do need it to survive the altitude, dust, moisture of tropical locations, and being hauled around non-stop for the better part of a year. I will be carrying my life in my backpack, so every pound counts. It looks like some 'semi-rugged' ultraportables exist, but the truly 'rugged' are all pretty heavy. These are pricey, and the risk of theft is non trivial. A smaller laptop is easier to keep on my person more often, which is safer (in most countries) than leaving it in the hostel/hotel. Still, the rugged guys are 2x the price — almost worth buying a cheap one and planning an on the road replacement purchase. I know we've talked about gadgets to carry around the world before, but any advice would be greatly appreciated." We also discussed laptop travel cases a little more than a year ago.

Stupid DVD requirement

[calebt3]

If you had not mentioned a need for DVD burning, I would have suggested the XO. Maybe you could get an external burner?

Buy a Cheap One

[daliman]

I travelled for 20 months [ontheroad.net.nz] with an el cheapo Acer in my backpack. It's still going (although not in great condition), but I figured that if it was stolen then the loss wasn't too huge and if it broke, then likewise.

Carry one of those laptop locks, as well as a few other padlocks, and lock everything up any time you go anywhere and you'll be fine.

Oh, and install TOR before you go. Lots of those countries have daft internet filtering, but I didn't come across a country where TOR didn't work for me.

Thinkpad X-series

[rxmd]

In 2006 I bought a Thinkpad X60s when they were new. Last year I spent nine months doing field work in Central Asia with it, going round the various countries, between deserts and mountains, between +45 and -20 degrees Centrigrade, and all the while lugging it around on buses, in shared taxis and in ex-Soviet trains.

Once it fell out of my bag off my back in Tashkent, five feet on solid concrete and landed on a corner. I thought "that was my laptop", opened it and it booted just fine. These are solid little devices. No optical drive, but I found I hardly ever have the need for one of those on the road.

So that would be my recommendation. It's light, yet solid, and not underpowered. I've got the extended battery, which gives me 7 to 9 hours of battery life, and I also bought a worldwide on-site warranty option which would probably be useful in your situation as well.

12" powerbook g4

[mrcdeckard]

took mine with a motu traveler for recording in venice, berlin and kolobzeg. rock solid, even when recording a large rocksteady ska band. the aluminum case helps "ruggedfy" it, and the powersupply autosenses 220v. very small and light, and you should be able to pick one up fairly cheap now.

i still can't understand why apple dropped the 12" laptop form.

mr c

Re:Instead of sending DVDs home

[Dan East]

That's a good idea. The optical drive is the real portability killer. It's large, power-hungry, and the most fragile piece of hardware in the kit. If you could use something else besides DVDs, you could go with a Micro PC (like the Sony Vaio UX380N [mobiletechreview.com]), combined with a bluetooth keyboard if you want to do a lot of typing. If you needed DVD you could still use a machine like the Sony with an external DVD drive.

Those devices probably aren't particularly rugged, but they are so small you could put them in a practically indestructible case and still be smaller and lighter than a laptop.

Dan East

fixing for you...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not consider paper and a film camera?

Fixed that for you. Seriously, though, if you're going to forsake a laptop for paper, you might as well forsake digital camera for film. Film will offer a more robust media (more likely to stand up to the various abuses perpetrated by postal systems of the world), offer much higher quality photos (don't even try to debate this point-- this if not opinion, it is fact. The resolution and dynamic range of 8perf (24x36) 35mm film is unmatched in even $30k medium format digital backs), and can be run through very inexpensive and rugged (metal body!) cameras (e.g. Canonet QL17).

The question is whether he wants ultimate reliability and quality (film, paper & pen), or to offer friends (or the world?!) immediate access to his thoughts and images (blogging via laptop, digital camera, etc).

Sidenote: the captcha for this post is 'archival' ..haha.

Panasonic

[Aeron65432]

The industry standard for what it seems you're looking for is the Panasonic Toughbook. [wikipedia.org] The Toughbook is commonly used by EMTs, police, and the US Military. "The Toughbook was tested on numerous levels, while being compared to a Toshiba of a similar specification, kept in a secure laptop bag. These tests included the laptops being used as tennis rackets, dunked in a water tank and being blown up by "the equivalent to two sticks of dynamite" and "20 litres of fuel". After the latter experiment the Toshiba was destroyed, but the Toughbook, continued to work.

involves the sort of torture that would have lesser laptops admitting to witchcraft. It's trained to withstand 4 inches of rain in an hour pounding down on the keyboard and screen, be frozen at minus 29 degrees centigrade and baked at plus 60. And to gain the name of Toughbook, any design must pass all these tests - twice!" [gadgetshow.five.tv]

Pretty reliable laptop, huh. On a side note, how did you get the money to do this adventure?

I used to travel a lot ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Less is better. Nothing is a good ideal. As Ryszard Kapuscinski pointed out, to have things is to die. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryszard_Kapuscinski [wikipedia.org] Kapuscinski traveled the world as a reporter. He got into places that no other reporter could and got out alive. If you're truly going to rough places, the less you have, the less likely you are to be murdered for your worldly goods.

A cell phone will do most of what you want. If you can, forget the laptop.

casting my vote

[insanechemist]

Macbook (not pro). tough plastic shell - reasonably rugged framework. Ours has survived our 2yr old trying to torque on the screen and mashing the keys for over a year now. As a backup the Lenovo thinkpads - nice construction.

Re:Small, cheap and light: EeePC or XO.

[Lumpy]

Exactly. I have a toughbook, yes it survives water, sand, heat, freezing. but it costs $8000.00
I also have an eee pc. neat toy.

get the cheapest dell or HP they have on sale. it will do what you want and when it get's stolen you wont cry too bad.

also everything important goes on a thumbdrive or uploaded to carbonite or other storage.

Re:hard drives die at high altitude

[ajfrancis35]

You will want to use a solid state disk when you are at Everest base camp.
If you read about computers used there, the hard drives fail very quickly due to low air pressure.
Hard drives are not rated to work at 18,000 feet.

Very True. Dan Reed describes his experience with high altitude and hard drives here: http://hpcdanreed.typepad.com/reeds_ruminations/2007/08/yo-head-crashes.html#more [typepad.com] "In an earlier blog posting, I mentioned that I was on my way to western China, to give a keynote talk at GCC2007 in Urumchi, which is in northwest China.....Needing a digital fix and wondering about network connectivity in Tibet, I turned on my IBM ThinkPad. Windows Vista booted normally, and my applications began loading. Life was good. Then, I saw the dreaded blue screen of death, followed by a message that struck terror in my heart: Disk read error Ctrl-Alt-Del to retry....... ...........The first night in Tibet, I awoke around 3 AM with a massive headache, one of those "Oh, please, bludgeon me into unconsciousness so the pain goes away" migraines from altitude sickness. I was having a second head crash, the biological kind this time., ......... ....I've been reflecting on the irony that my disk crash and altitude sickness were due to the same physics that dominates much of my professional life: the Navier-Stokes equations. Beguilingly simple to derive, yet fiendishly complex to evaluate, these differential equations are an application of Newton's second law to describe fluid flows in a wide range of physical situations:....

Re:Thinkpad

[SuperQ]

Yup, I love my X series. I've been carrying thinkpads everywhere with me since 1996. I started with a Thinkpad 500. Then a T20, and then decided that size was more important and have had several of the X series since then.

As for backups/mailing, I agree with the other posts. SD cards are the way to go, not optical.

One other cool option would be an OLPC if you can get your hands on one.. although the keyboard is sub-optimal for a lot of writing. Same thing with the Eee PC, just not enough quality in the keyboard. The OLPC does have the more waterproof advantage. It also has a daylight readable screen. I wish more laptops had direct-sun readable screens.

I also suggest a good case. Waterfield Designs makes a bunch of really good custom-fit cases for various laptop sizes. A bit pricey, but damn good quality.
http://www.sfbags.com/ [sfbags.com]

Re:Thinkpad X-series

[qw0ntum]

Concurred. I would not travel with anything other than my Thinkpad. The X60's are thin, light, durable, and reliable. Plus, they don't stand out that much like some other laptops (such as a Mac), which is a good thing.

In my experience with my X60 (and my T60 for that matter) I've been able to carry them around without a case.

I'd also second the comments that some have been making about backing up your most important documents onto flash drives. It might be useful even for data you want to share with people back home, since internet connections may not always be available and reliable. To paraphrase the quote, never underestimate the bandwidth of a flash drive on a FedEx plane.

Re:hard drives die at high altitude

[ShakaUVM]

Yeah, mailing home SD Cards is probably less likely to result in a break or cracked disc, like what happened to my friend when he mailed home a DVD with all his photos from China. Well, half his photos. He needed the space and, damn, they're gone forever.

I'd say a SD Card in the little plastic boxes they come in should be good enough protection, maybe with a padded liner too.

Re:You're asking (partially) the wrong question

[Fear the Clam]

I agree with wonkavader, but I suggest using a laptop sleeve. A sleeve offers better padding than a shirt as well as some rudimentary water repellence. I carry my MacBook in an InCase [goincase.com] neoprene sleeve in my old knapsack and nobody knows unlike those folks walking around with laptop bags and obvious computer knapsacks.

Fujitsu Lifebook u810

[Red Storm]

I just returned from Uganda with mine and it was pretty good. The keyboard is a little on the small side and the processor isn't the most powerful but it worked well for me and the touchscreen was quite nice. It had an SD and CF slot which made importing pictures onto it for viewing quite nice. The biggest limitation was the lack of USB ports, it only has one. Overall I was quite impressed with the battery and the size/weight. I purchased the padded case from Fujitsu and it was a life saver, dropped it in a mud puddle, fortunately the puddle wasn't too deep, but the case now has a fresh layer of Ugandan mud. I've also dropped it from about 3' without the padded case onto concrete and it did ok, just a few new character marks. I lost the right arrow key, but I can still press it and it still works. I have no idea now what other two functions are on that key, but they weren't important as I didn't seem to miss them.

The touchscreen was very nice to have. It made going through pictures easier and overall I found the Vista basic that came with it usable if you don't mind working a little slower. I would suggest getting a surge suppressor that works world wide. I found one at the airport that worked quite well and it provided USB power. Had I know about this device I would have brought my Plextor external DVD-RW.

Re:You're asking (partially) the wrong question

[sankyuu]

Seconded about the bag. Having stuff stolen from me before while travelling, I was wise to put my Thinkpad X31 into a cheap dark green plastic A4-size document envelope from Office Warehouse. It was like the MacBook Air envelope ad, but done 5 years ago. It just fit, and the X61 being the same size would be perfect for the same. It kept the rain out, and prying eyes away. It didn't offer impact protection, although I doubt my Thinkpad would have needed that much.

Re:Small, cheap and light: EeePC or XO.

[eonlabs]

How about picking up an OLPC laptop. Aren't they designed to be used in bizarre climates etc. They should also be waterproof and fairly robust.
For $2-400 it might be worth taking a look at. Also, the software on those things isn't too bad. I've had the opportunity to mess around with one, if only for a few minutes.

Moleskines and Internet cafes

[Tom Womack]

I don't think you need a laptop.

There are Internet cafes in the nine corners of the Earth, almost all of whom will burn the contents of your camera's memory cards to DVD, and all of whom will happily let you sit blogging or writing to your heart's content for some princely sum in local currency equivalent to eleven cents the hour. OK, you will be surrounded by local teenagers playing World of Warcraft and smoking like chimneys, but this is not hard to endure.

Bring Moleskine notebooks and a reasonable supply of pens; it's not worth lugging even an Eee up to Everest Base Camp just to take notes that you could take on paper with a pen.

I've done round-the-world, I do copious backpacking in Europe; I've a couple of inches of Moleskines on a shelf, and whilst from time to time I've wished for a flashlight, and occasionally I've had to figure out where to buy a 4GB compact-flash card in Belgrade, I've never felt that what I needed was a laptop.