Tips on Travelling with a Laptop

When considering purchasing a laptop to bring with you on your travels, you'll need to take more factors into consideration. After reviewing the cost, performance and warranty it is very important to look at its weight.  Large screens are nice to have especially when viewing your photos and videos but the added weight is not worth it.

     Laptops have significantly dropped price in the past couple of years. Because the rate of the  obsoleteness, it can be frustrating when you want to up upgrade your system. I recommend adding the largest hard drive and the maximum memory that you can afford at your initial purchase.

     If you travel a lot and want to access your laptop on the plane you should consider some design issues. If you are sitting in a coach section you will find it difficult opening a widescreen laptop. Chances are slim that the people sitting next to you will want to see what you're working on. To avoid annoying other passengers or interrupting the airplanes navigational system, having external controls for Wi-Fi and volume is an excellent idea. You should bring along a second battery for those really long flights.

     As laptops are more likely to be damaged or stolen while on the road, it is a good idea to have a backup plan. Do a regular backup so if something bad does happen, you don't lose too much data. The easiest way to do this is to buy a laptop with a built in DVD burner. One DVD disc should be more than enough to store your work data. You could also use a CD burner, but you would probably need to carry multiple discs. If you only have a small amount of files you need to backup, a USB flash drive would also do the job.

     The more you move about with your laptop you increase the chances of damage and theft. So you should have a backup plan in case things do "go south". This means backing up your data on one disk using a DVD burner. CD burners are also an option but you will have to carry around more disks. For minimal backup, you can use a USB flash drive or a "cloud" (ie Dropbox, Icloud).

     A good carrying case that has decent padding and keeps your laptop snug is a must have.

     Warranties are usually for 12 months and are usually limited. Some companies like Best Buy offer extended warranties to cover other damages caused to your system.