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Apr

16

Laptop or no laptop? That is the question

Filed Under Freedom, Technologies, Travel 

Productivity and freedom-wise, the buying of a laptop computer is probably an excellent choice. Having one allows you to be everywhere and still write, do your accounting, manage your bank accounts, publish to your blogs, work on your photographs. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a train, a mall, a café, staying over at relatives, or in a taxi. It’s also nice to have your complete music collection with you at all times.

However, two things stop a laptop from being as useful as it could really be.

The first one is connectivity. It happens so that there’s almost no applications I use that are actually installed on my computer anymore. Apart from my music and movie collection (at home, my computer is also the media center of the house), there’s almost nothing on my hard drive. My office suite is online. I use Gmail’s web interface instead of a pop or imap client. Every text I write ends up, obviously, online. That means a computer is almost of no use to me without a decent internet access. Of course I can use my mobile phone as a modem for my laptop to connect to the net, since mobile coverage is excellent in 99,9% of the places I currently spend time at. The fact of the matter remains that connecting this way is extremely expensive, and the access is sluggish as hell. I know, I know, in most occidental cities you can find decent wifi coverage. So for the time I intend spending in occidental cities in the future (none), yeah for sure that’s useful… You could also retort that most people possess a wifi router too, so if I want to stay a few days at a friend’s house, I could still use my laptop computer. Just a thought though : perhaps if they do own a wifi router, that’s because they also own… a computer! Therefore, I wouldn’t have a real need to bring my own with me.

So, what’s the point in buying a 1100€ laptop computer** that I won’t be able to use in that much more of a variety of places than, erm, home? Home, in which I already have a very good machine.

Even if the connectivity problem was solved worldwide, the main inconvenience remains the short use you can have of your laptop when it’s running on its battery. Thankfully, a number of research is being made on the topic. One of them is about using capacitors instead of cells (I can’t seem to find the url back, darn, please use the comment section if you have it somewhere in your bookmarks ;) ). The main advantage of a capacitor is that it has no “memory effect”. That means it can go through an unlimited number of charge-discharge cycles. With such a capacitor type battery, I wouldn’t hesitate charging it everytime I needed to, even if I have the chance to do so for only 10 minutes. That could be of some help, because with present batteries I never dare doing half a charge. It’s full charge or nothing. When you see the price of a battery, you for sure want to extend your battery life to the max.

But the most interesting research being made at the moment is the one considering the use of nanotechnologies that would allow the construction of 40 hours long batteries. If those finally hit the market, that would be a big incentive for me finally buying a laptop computer.

Despite all of this, I’m going to have to buy a laptop in the coming months. As I said in past posts, I have plans to go and travel the world a few years before ever thinking of setting down again. While traveling, a laptop is a must-have. There’s no way I can travel without a device that allows me to carry and connect to about everything I am, think and see. I will need it to run my business, to keep blogging and stay in touch with my friends and family.

I guess I’ll have to overcome my feelings that laptops are still pretty far from useful and actually usable before getting one.

** I know you can buy a really nice laptop computer for 450€. But If I ever buy one it has to have a decent screen, a huge hard drive on which I can store all my music in a non-destructive format, a real numpad like desktop keyboards have, decent built-in speakers for watching movies, the longest lasting battery ever made and a good audio output so that my AKG headphones can render their crystal clear sound. I’ll have to get a USB hard drive with it too, for backup’s purpose. All of this having to weigh less than a new born kitten, which goes without saying. Am I a difficult customer?

Anyway, check out this cool site that lists the best ultra portable computers bargains to be made at the moment.


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Comments

One Response to “Laptop or no laptop? That is the question”

  1. natural on May 22nd, 2008 4:30 pm

    i have a laptop and a desktop. my first laptop was used and i bought it cheap just for journaling and mobility…nothing heavy.

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