www.nickhodge.com

This was pub­lished at Tak­ing the high-tech road. Thanks to Wayne Cosshall

Essen­tials

1. Buy a laptop that has inter­na­tional war­ranty, or where the vendor is an inter­na­tional vendor. Find­ing “Fred-in-the-Shed” laptop man­u­fac­tur­ers in India is prob­ably min­imal. I only travel with Dell, and where required for the job, Apple laptops. This gives you a degree of com­fort if the elec­tron­ics (screen, mother­board, cards) fail in the laptop. Obvi­ously, there are other well-known brand names that have ser­vice facil­it­ies in other regions.
2. The next most com­mon prob­lem is a Hard Drive fail­ure. Always take your backup CDs with you. I con­stantly travel with a cur­rent OS install CD (Win­dows XP) and core applic­a­tions install (Office XP, Adobe applic­a­tions) This will mean that if the hard drive fails, I can restore my HD and at least com­mu­nic­ate with the world. As I backup my data to CD (manu­ally), I take the most recent backup of data too. DVD burn­ers are also afford­able, so instead of tak­ing 5–6 CDs, take on DVD con­tain­ing the bare essen­tial installers.
3. Ensure that the power sup­ply you take with you sup­ports a “wide range” of voltages (V) and cur­rent (A). In coun­tries like India, the power sup­ply fluc­tu­ates wildly, and even in 5-star hotels gets cut off at the most incon­vien­ent moments.
4. Always arrive at the air­port with the laptop hav­ing fully recharged bat­ter­ies. In some coun­tries, air­port secur­ity will require you to boot up your laptop to ensure that it is a laptop. Its best to be able to do this without need­ing to plug into power. Secondly, if your flight is delayed you can at least star­tup and do some work. If there is a phone line around, you can check the news, mail and other essen­tial things.
5. As my laptop has an internal CD burner, I carry a few blank CDs (just in case). As it also has a Firewire (IEEE1394) con­nec­tion, I also carry an external 10Gb hard drive for emer­gency backup.
6. NEVER install new soft­ware whilst on the road. NEVER buy pir­ate soft­ware in whatever country.
7. Be care­ful with hard­ware pur­chases in other coun­tries. Incom­pat­ible power sup­plies are usu­ally sup­plied, and sup­port is some­times lim­ited to the coun­try of purchase.
8. Choose an ISP that gives you a local dial-in num­ber in the coun­try you are in. Tak­ing a laptop with you means that you are not rely­ing on Hotmail-style email accounts, and there­fore need to get onto the Inter­net. Again, in the abso­lute worst case, enable data com­mu­nic­a­tions on your mobile phone and use the Infra-red cap­ab­il­it­ies to use your mobile as a 9600 baud modem. My Nokia has IrDA and Bluetooth, as does the laptop. I can use this as a modem to at least get con­nec­ted to the inter­net, get and send mail. Due to the cost of doing this, espe­cially over­seas, use it rarely.
9. Pur­chase a good bag to con­tain your pre­cious cargo. Ensure that it pro­tects the laptop and con­tains the essen­tial ele­ments needed to be work­ing. Assume that your main, checked in lug­gage is going to get lost.
10. Modem com­mu­nic­a­tions was once a black art. Now its just a grey art. You still hit strange prob­lems in some hotels. For instance in New Zea­l­and, some older hotels have digital tele­phone exchanges requir­ing you to use a spe­cial cable to con­nect from your RJ11 on your PCCard/Laptop to their phone sys­tem. I am find­ing a major­ity of hotels have “data port enabled” tele­phones in their rooms that per­mit laptop style con­nec­tions. Some­times I dis­con­nect the cable com­ing from the wall to the tele­phone and use this in my laptop when all else fails. In Thai­l­and recently, I had to use the busi­ness centre’s com­puters as the ISP’s phone lines were down for many hours. Thank­fully, the RJ11 con­nector is reas­on­ably uni­ver­sal in the places I visit. If you travel to RAR Aus­tralia, I sug­gest tak­ing the old PMG style connector.

Pleas­ures

1. I have recently sub­scribed and used Skynet Global. In Qantas Clubs, this gives you extra con­nectiv­ity whilst you wait for your flight. Using wire­less cards, you can con­nect to the Inter­net, get your mail etc.
2. Singa­pore Air­lines (and oth­ers) have in-seat power. With the pur­chase of a ~$250 Tar­gus style power sup­ply, you can use your laptop in-flight without drain­ing bat­ter­ies. The sooner Qantas do this, the better.
3. Hotels with high-speed inter­net access such as Inter­touch (http://www.inter-touch.com/) This is a god­send if you are an inter­net junkie.

Wishes

1. The US would use GSM in the same fre­quency as the rest of the world.
2. Every hotel and pub­lic tele­phone had highspeed/ethernet style access
3. laptops were smal­ler and bat­ter­ies las­ted longer
4. a com­bin­a­tion mobile phone, PDA and digital cam­era — that doesn’t make you look like a nerd.
5. Uni­ver­sal, wide-area 802.11. Wire­less every­where, always on!