Re: Recommendations for laptop for travelling

I would caution you against *too* small. I had a Sony Vaio 505 for
several years, and discovered that the 90%-size keys were a truly
royal pain. Go for really small, but insist on a full-size keyboard.

My current laptop is an Averatec 3270, which is a really good
compromise between small (weighs 4.5 pounds) and useable. Also, that
CD-ROM (actually, DVD) drive is more useful than you might expect --
while I work hard when I'm travelling, it's not 24/7, and being able
to watch with a DVD is a Really Nice Feature.

My family, at this point, has four Averatecs -- both children and I
have the 3270, my wife has the 64 bit desktop-replacement whose number
I don't remember. I'm the only one of the four who has had any
hardware trouble (the backlight inverter went flaky on me and had to
be replaced), though my wife's machine has device driver issues (needs
binary blobs to run the wireless).

I notice they now have some smaller, lighter machines than mine, but I
don't know anything about them.

In general: check the weight (in my experience travelling, weight
counts for more than dimensions. If it's small enough to stick in one
of the pockets of a briefcase, it's small enough. But lugging through
the airport is still lugging), check the keyboard size, check the
driver availability.

One last note is that you shouldn't depend on being able to run remote
X. Never mind that it's likely to be painfully slow whenever the 'net
has a high spam day, I've found an unbelievable collection of
completely random port restrictions in hotels and conferences. Have a
good plan for syncing your local environment to your home environment,
sync up before you go, pray you've got email, and sync again when you
get home.
.