Laptop for a journey

A reader, Max asked about getting a laptop  to take on a trip to Europe.

First there is the question of which laptop to take. Now, unless you need a particularly powerful laptop for thing such as media editing, a thin and light laptop is the absolute best type of laptop to take. First the drawbacks. These laptops are not as powerful as some of their bulky brethren, many also lack a disc drive to reduce weight and the size of the laptop. 

If you can suffice even with these shortcomings, then a thin and light laptop will be absolutely perfect if you travel, or plan on traveling often. Their impressively light weight and thin frame makes them perfect for travel. The Macbook Air is the most prominent of these, with a space-age design and an impressive 6 hour battery life. 

If a Mac is not ideal and you require Windows, look no further than the Lenovo Thinkpad X200. This laptop lacks a DVD drive as well, but it is one of the fastest computers in this class of laptop. It also packs a comfortable keyboard, a six hour battery life, a webcam and a very nice-looking screen. Unfortunately, it does not feature a trackpad, only including one of the red button type mice that used to come on many older laptops to use as the mouse. To be fair, this kind of mouse does work pretty well, though I prefer trackpads.

If you absolutely need a disc drive, and think this over carefully as these days many people don't, then the Fujitsu Lifebook P8010 is ideal. This laptop has a DVD drive, a trackpad, and even a bimetric (fingerprint) reader built in. Just consider that the battery life is a little less at around 5 hours, the display is not widescreen and the keyboard is more cramped than the Lenovo.

If you won't be travelling very often upon arriving, maybe just frequent walks around a college campus or the like, then there isn't much need for an ultraportable laptop. You may as well save money and get a more powerful computer, which will also be larger. Its not worth the loss of power and the increase in price if you will not be doing frequent journeys. If this is the case, then to be honest, any reasonably sized laptop, between 12" to 15", will do.

The Apple Macbook is a reasonably sized laptop with a 13" screen, (the others were 12") It is thicker but not bulky.  It includes a disc drive, as do all laptops of this class, and is more powerful and cheaper than the Macbook Air. It also features a glossy monitor, a webcam and around 4-5 hours battery life.

This Dell Inspiron is also considerable, with a 13 inch screen, and the performance should be good, as it features at least a dual core 1.86GHz processor and 2GB of memory, which you can increase if you so desire. 

I would recommend going to a Best Buy or the like and checking out the different models and choosing one which fits your needs for weight and thickness, but don't get distracted by extra features or buzzwords which you don't actually need, we've all made that mistake before. As far as features go, make sure it has:

• at least a 1.8GHz Dual Core Processor
• at least 2GB RAM or Memory, aim for 3GB but 2GB is fine
• At least 160GB hard drive at 5400RPM
• A decent size.

These features are pretty much standard for a good laptop. The point is if a laptop has these features then the speed of the computer should be good, rest of the laptop is should be pretty good too. I have a laptop weaker than said specs (its a mac) and it runs perfectly, yet on a Windows your mileage may vary.

As for voltage, Apple makes socket converters for its laptops but it costs $69.99. It is much cheaper and easier to get a normal travel adaptor and use that, your laptop will be fine. I did this for years on 3 laptops and 1 desktop computer. Current converters are not necessary, the adaptors that come with most laptops can accept both the American and European (including Britain) voltage currents. A travel adaptor with the power cable which comes with your laptop is fine.