Searching For a Travel Laptop

Soon I will be embarking on a trip across Europe and the middle east to document a trip taken to raise money for a charity.
I will be photographing/filming the journey, so I'm looking for a laptop that I can dump files onto (with an external) and do a little photo editing and possibly small bits of video so I can report back home.

So I'm after something reasonably light-weight and not too big, but has some up to date processing power so I can work with 7D images without grinding to a halt. It's also important to have good battery life, 4 hours or more ideally, if I have to sacrifice processing power so be it!

Mac/PC I have no preference, although any Mac will be too expensive really. I'd prefer to keep costs limited to say £800, but the lower the better!

Cheers for the help!

I just returned from 2 weeks in Botswana and had purchased an ASUS 1215n Netbook for my trip. It came with 2Mg of memory and a 250 Gb hard drive. I upgraded the memory to 4Mg and bought a CD/DVD accessory (uses 2 USB ports) to use before I left to load software and other things on it. It comes with WiFi, so I didn't need any other Internet connection. It worked very well, I downloaded my images after each days shoot (took a card reader with me) and was able to review them using Canon's Zoombrowser (I loaded all the Canon processing software on it, but only used Zoombrowser). I didn't do any further processing, as I decided to wait until I got home to do that. I did backup the images to a 32 Mg thumbdrive as well - never have enough backup when travelling.

I will try loading Lightroom onto the computer and see if I can do any editing, but the screen is so small (12.1 inch) that I don't think it was feasible to do any editing on it, although it gave a good image when I was reviewing the daily shots. It is very light (3.2 lbs/1.45 kg) and I found it very easy to use. Battery life was about 6 hours and then it shuts itself off to save enough power to keep things flowing - recharge takes about an hour or so in my experience. With the appropriate adapter, the charger functioned well in the 240v/50 Cycle electrical environment in South Africa, Botswana, and Zimbabwe. The detailed specs can be found here: http://www.pcworld.com …eee_pc_1215n.ht​ml?p=specs.

I like it because it runs Windows 7 Home Premium rather than Win 7 Starter which makes it closer to a laptop than a Netbook, because all the other Netbooks that I looked had had a 10" or less screen and ran Win 7 Starter. This one also fit very nicely in the "PC" slot in the back of my camera bag which meant I could put it in my carry-on luggage.

Granted, it is not a laptop per se, but it was the next best thing and it has become a permanent part of my travelling "photo equipment".

One other thing worthy of menion in my opinion...when I bought the Netbook, I asked the sales guy about MS Office and he suggested I look at Open Office, a free replacement for MS Office. I checked it out and loaded up and it worked very well. If you are already using MS Office, the transition is viturally painless - I will never buy another version of Office again! You can find the introductory page here: http://www.openoffice.​org/ . HTH a bit.

Cheers,

WesternGuy

Cheers, I hadn't thought about netbooks but now that you mention it, 6 hours of battery would be very useful. Out on the road It would be a pain to run out of juice, especially as I might not access a mains supply every day.

...thats about $1300 US....how about thinkpad x220?
just got one....with the 9 cell battery, it can last ~8 hrs....also has IPS display.

40dbaby wrote in post #12505902
...thats about $1300 US....how about thinkpad x220?
just got one....with the 9 cell battery, it can last ~8 hrs....also has IPS display.

That would be lovely... but they fetch for about £1200 in the UK

I'm actually surprised at how pricey even PC laptops are. I was expecting to find tons of i5 laptops in the £350-£450 range but it seems not the case.

FYI, the ASUS 1215n with the upgrade to 4Gb of memory cost me under $600 (Cdn) with our 5% sales tax. Not sure how that translates to £s. I did buy the CD/DVD reader as extra, but that was just for me as I needed to load some stuff on it that was already on CDs, but it cost me less than $50 (Cdn) and, of course, is portable to any other machine where I need a CD/DVD reader. I am not sure how much the "tax" would be on this configuration in the UK, but I don't know where 40dbaby got $1300 from, unless these things are very expensive in his neck of the woods.

Like a laptop, the netbook runs off the mains as well and did very well in Africa - the charger/transformer that came with it adjusts to both 110V/ 60 cycle and 240/50 cycle automatically, all I had to do was to provide an adaptor for the North American plug to the African style plugs - no problem, they were a few bucks here and worked like a charm.

Cheers,

WesternGuy

the $1300 US was in reference to OP's budget, converted to US dollars

40dbaby wrote in post #12506226
the $1300 US was in reference to OP's budget, converted to US dollars

Sorrry about that, it wasn't obvious to me - thanks for the clarification. I would think for $1300 US he should be able to get a real hummer of a machine, unless the prices are quite different in the UK. From what he has suggested, these units may be a bit more $$ than they are here across the pond, although a quick check of some of the UK discount PC houses, suggest he can get a decent machine for well within his budget.

My suggestion for Netbook was meant simply as a that - a suggestion - mine worked quite well in my travels and it is very light if carry on weight is a concern, which it was in my case.

Cheers,

WesternGuy

just throwing this out there.

how bout an ipad?, 10 hour battery life iMovie to edit videos and there are few worthwhile photo editing app for minor editing

for storage, maybe a hyper drive for ipad

kingdavidd wrote in post #12506966
just throwing this out there.

how bout an ipad?, 10 hour battery life iMovie to edit videos and there are few worthwhile photo editing app for minor editing

for storage, maybe a hyper drive for ipad

Interesting thought... But i'm not sure how it would like 7D raw files that's the thing. I assume you can plug in a keyboard though? That would be important.

For something quick this would do well, but I don't know how it's battery performs.

I'm thinking perhaps a core2duo might be better for me battery wise, and just sacrifice speed.

benesotor wrote in post #12504483
Cheers, I hadn't thought about netbooks but now that you mention it, 6 hours of battery would be very useful. Out on the road It would be a pain to run out of juice, especially as I might not access a mains supply every day.

I use a Dell Mini 10V running OS X, though it came with W7 - it has 2GB of RAM and a 260GB drive, and three USB ports. The battery is six cell instead of three. I've seen it run for ten hours on battery. It's almost totally useless for PP, but allows me to shoot tethered quite well, and when traveling I also have a 1TB drive to which I back up my images each night.

I just got my copy of Digital Photo this am and in it was a flyer from Dell, advertising a Inspiron M501R laptop for £499. It has a 15.6 inch screen, 4GB of memory, a 500GB hard drive, runs Win 7 Home premiun 64 bit an dcome with a 1GB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 550v graphics card. Sounds good to me and is well within your budget of £800. The graphics card looks ike it would support editing in the field...http://www.amd.com …ges/hd-560v-overview.aspx, and many other things. I would check out its battery life if that is a real consideration.

The flyer also listed a variety of other Dell laptops that you might want to consider. HTH.

Cheers,

WesternGuy

Do you guys think a 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo is enough for doing light editing in Lightroom/Photoshop? Reason being I'm thinking of maybe a Macbook with student discount at £780. Seeing as it's got very good battery life. Or a refurbished Mac Book Pro with even better battery.

The powerful windows laptops (like the dell Western just mentioned) would be great for editing, but most of them have 3 hours battery at best, whereas the slower Mac's can do 7-9 hours.

With exception of maybe this Toshiba i3 with 9 hours battery? http://www.laptopsdire​ct.co.uk …31LE-00X00CEN/version.asp

benesotr, I am afraid that I cannot comment on the "Mac" products because I have no experience with them, but if battery life is an important factor, then maybe that is the deciding factor. My question would be is what your main processing environment is. For me, I run a quad core 2.5 GHz system at home on a PC with Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit, so it was appropriate for me to go with the Netbook I mentioned to maintain the "PC" compatibility. If this is not important to you then the "Mac" solution may be your best bet. Good luck with what ever choice your make and do enjoy your trip.

Cheers,

WesternGuy

WesternGuy wrote in post #12510536
benesotr, I am afraid that I cannot comment on the "Mac" products because I have no experience with them, but if battery life is an important factor, then maybe that is the deciding factor. My question would be is what your main processing environment is. For me, I run a quad core 2.5 GHz system at home on a PC with Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit, so it was appropriate for me to go with the Netbook I mentioned to maintain the "PC" compatibility. If this is not important to you then the "Mac" solution may be your best bet. Good luck with what ever choice your make and do enjoy your trip.

Cheers,

WesternGuy

Thanks for your help. Processing wise it's not essential to have speedy editing power, as I'll use my quad-core desktop to do all the heavy stuff.
With that in mind a reasonably quick laptop with good battery is probably my priority.
At the moment the Macbook or the Toshiba seem good solutions, I'm leaning towards the i3 toshiba due to its newer processor and slightly better battery. I don't really have a preference regarding operating systems.