Laptop on tour

[Ergle]

I'm not sure of the exact configuration, but there may be a smart phone with bluetooth GPS, wifi, flexi keyboard to give the functionality you need.

I love my laptop and waste far too much time on it, but when I tour I leave it behind and write letters home to my wife. She appreciates receiving them, and I enjoy the writing of them - I try to write every evening and include the minutea of the day's ride. I find it relaxing to put thoughts down on paper - the lack of a backspace key seems to make it all flow. She typed up the letters from my last trip for the diary on CGOAB

 

[psmiffy]

The Doctor – Merci Beucoup –decided to get a 901 – try it out on tour – if its failure then I will still have an extremely portable machine with good battery life for day to day use - the very small hard drive is a drawback but I only need a few low memory applications – it would be nice to have a few of my bells and whistles mapping programmes but I can live without them – I am going to experiment with running programmes from portable drives - a quick play with a USB flash drive on my desktop computer would seem to indicate that it is feasible
Ergle- I would love to be able to coherently write on paper but my hand writing is rubbish at the best of times – after 7hrs on the bike I can hardly write my name on the campsite check in

 

[bonj2]

can you not get laptops with (easily) removable batteries?

 

[rich p]

I'm a bit of a numpty about this stuff but is there an issue with a solid hard drive on some machines?

 

[chris667]

I am typing this on an NC10. Brilliant machine, long battery life, but I'd never take it touring.
In fact, I wouldn't take anything with mechanical parts on a tour (apart from a bike! ). On computers, mechanical parts consume more power, and suck dust into the case. They fail, and then your computer does. They're only there because manufacturers have been racing to make faster and faster computers.
The year before last, I tried to start a company that sold energy efficient, fanless PCs for use off-grid. Of course, all of these netbooks came out and flattened anything I could build at a reasonable price, but I have done a lot of work on this. So I'd choose this:

http://www.norhtec.com/products/gecko/index.html

Not as powerful as a netbook, but plenty enough for everything you'd want to do. Puppy Linux would run like lightning on this, or you could use Windows XP.

4hrs charge on 8 AA batteries, when they go flat add more.

 

[psmiffy]

chris667 - that is exactly what i am looking for - however it will come too late - the off will be quite soon - but i am awarw that these things are fragile to the point of being disposable - at the sort of price they are they are cheaper than a decent front wheel and i am sure that i will be using something different by the end of the year

 

[chris667]

In that case, the cheapest ASUS EEEPC with Linux should do everything you want.
Despite what the website says, it might be worth emailing Norhtec and seeing what they have now. Fanless is definitely the way to go. Give me a PM if you get stuck.

 

[psmiffy]

chris667 - I bought this 901 - arrived yesterday - seems to be OK for what I want - so far its living (nearly) up to its claims for battery life - but it would be better if I could just throw a handfull of AAs into it - (which of course you could charge with a hub dynamo)

keyboard is just about big enough and really makes me appreciate how good the keyboard was on my psion 5 - the trackpad is a bit close to the keyboard for my liking but i will get used to it

Star office is just about good enough - no replacement for office - email programme is exactly what it says it is

net surfing from my wireless broadband was easy to set up and is the main strength of the thing

works prety well online with my 3 dongle

the small hard storage is making me think hard about what programmes I want to take with me - file storage is no problem as I am very aware of the fragility of these things - i never keep my working files on a laptop - flash drive or portable drive - probably the latter so that I can copy my photos from the SD cards - people I know who use quite expensive rugged laptops outdoors for construction activities always seem to have the latest version of the thing due to "mishaps"

so far so good - however I am not confident enough that I will be discarding my paper notebook - time will tell

 

[chris667]

Online storage is the way to go for you, IMO.
Have you tried Google Docs yet?

 

[psmiffy]

Chris667 - no - there seems to be lots of options - I will probably end up with a belt and braces solution - back up online when I can and day to day copy to drive - never had any problems with SD cards but they are so small that chances are that I would lose one somewhere