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What's your travel laptop?

by Grant Martin on Nov 21st 2007 at 12:30PM

With my professional and personal careers both on the move, I have recently discovered the virtues of traveling with a laptop. I hate burning three hours in a random airport terminal with nothing to do when I could be blogging, writing grants or at the very least playing old-school video games. That's why I've invested in a decent, small notebook, capable of running on batteries for 3-4 hours at a time and fulfilling my basic internet/office/DOS needs.

If you're thinking of investing this year, check out Laptop Magazine's Top 10 Notebooks of 2007, where the best units in a variety of categories are detailed. While the uber-media-ultra-expensive hepta-core Dell XPS blasto-station might not be up your alley, a variety of budget and portable laptops caught my eye and should be great for the savvy traveler.

My weapon of choice? The Thinkpad X31 running Ubuntu 7.04. Small, secure, fairly powerful, integrated wireless and none of the corporate chaff that slows down Windows computers. It's kind of like the 1984 Mercedes Benz 380D that you converted to bio-diesel of computers, but I'll tell ya, it's a workhorse, doesn't lock up and is chronically virus free.

Filed under: Gear

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Moody75 Nov 21st 2007 3:28PM

Thinkpad. Enough said.

Jamar Nov 22nd 2007 8:20AM

Mine is the Panasonic Let's Note T5 + Mac OS X (hey, the EULA only says Apple-*labeled*; that's what the stickers are for, right?). The tough, light body and lengthy (6+hours) battery life expected of a Panasonic and the ease of use and speed of Mac (seriously, Mac OS boots twice as fast as XP on my laptop) come together to make a great experience on the road.

Daryl Nov 22nd 2007 11:06AM

Hey Grant,

Kudos on the Ubuntu! That's my desktop of choice. On the road, I'm a 13" Macbook fan. Small form-factor, currently virus-free, and it looks sexy.

Tyler Nov 24th 2007 5:05AM

Perhaps the One Laptop Per Child, running until Dec 31, is a great travel laptop.

http://laptop.org/

bruce Nov 28th 2007 2:57PM

I use a relatively old Sony Vaio TR3A. It's light, has built-in optical drive, wi-fi, and webcam, great battery life, and good screen and keyboard. It's gone everywhere, taken a few bumps, and it's still ticking. The only thing I don't like about it is that it has a Memory Stick reader instead of a more useful SD-card reader (of course, I could always use the empty PCMCIA slot if I really cared that much).

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