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.

Comments

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

Panasonic

[Aeron65432]

The industry standard for what it seems you're looking for is the Panasonic Toughbook. 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!"

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

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 "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:....