dan braithwaite said:
Hi, my cousin is enlisted in a trucking unit stationed in the mideast and thinking
about getting a laptop. Does anyone out there have experience with
the kind of conditions she's living with? Specifically, I'm worried about:
1. heat (119 degrees in the barracks tent at her base camp)
A Speedstep CPU running on low should be fine, as should an older laptop.
If additional cooling is needed, there are a few PCMCIA cooling fans
floating around. You can probably find one on Ebay.
This is the biggest problem. A scratched screen isn't the end of the world,
vents can be covered with nylon stockings, and everything else can be
covered. A keyboard can be shaken out some (with the power OFF) or
vaccuumed or blown out with compressed air in a pinch, but none of those are
great options. I believe there was a company making thin rubber keyboard
covers that would work really well, but I don't recall who. May want to
search this.
3. limited access to electricity. battery life is important.
Easy one, especially if she'll be around trucks or other vehicles. You can
get a DC to AC converter (inverter), and a car cigarette lighter adapter,
which has the lighter socket on one end and alligator or battery clips on
the other. As military vehicles run on 24 volts, and the inverter is
designed to run on 12 volts, she'll have to clamp this device directly onto
just one of the two batteries, as the batteries themselves are 12 volts. (in
most cases...check this FIRST) She will have to start and run the engine
every once in a while to avoid draining the batteries. A small multimeter
would be handy to check how much juice the battery has left, giving her the
chance to sneek over a jumper cable and start it up before her sergeant
chews her ass. heh
This may sound complicated, but after the first couple times, it will only
take seconds to get everything working.
Also, many, if not most, large generators and communications trucks the army
uses have standard 110v outlets.
Extra batteries and/or a solar charger would be nice, but a solar panel that
the laptop could actually run off of would be large and cumbersome, not to
mention expensive, around $300 and up.
Who's been in this position and can give her pointers? Is it
a bad idea to get a laptop at all? Maybe a pocket PC plus
some trips to the internet cafe would be better? If she gets
one, what kind should she get? Her main needs are email
and websurfing, and wordprocessing with MS Word.
I'd recommend a fairly cheap laptop, the older the better, as long as it
runs somewhat modern apps. I had a Compaq Contura that worked. It was slow
and the screen wasn't all that great, but it was very cheap and ran Windows
95, Office 97, Internet Explorer and even an old game or two. Did I say it
was slow? Very slow. But, it got the job done, and it took a lot of rough
handling without a problem.
This laptop is small, very cheap, durable, reliable, needs less cooling, and
won't break your heart if it's damaged or destroyed, which is easy to do in
this environment. It's almost a disposable laptop.
An added bonus is that the battery was very small. It was like a bunch of
"C" batteries in a row roughly 11" long. You could hold maybe five of these
in your hand. They should be easy enough to carry and store in the field.
Unfortunately, even with brand new batteries, the battery life will probably
be pretty short. An external battery mentioned by another poster might be a
good bet.
The only real drawbacks to this laptop are it's small screen, speed, battery
life, and small hard drive. I did a fresh install of Windows 95, Office 97,
IE, and a couple other things. I only installed the minimum, and I was left
with little extra space. If you just install Word, as opposed to the entire
Office suite, you'll have more space. Also, a flash card or PCMCIA storage
solution should do fine, and it would be wise to use these for storing
important letters, documents, and pictures. That way, if the laptop poops
out, she'll still have the important stuff handy.
I looked them up on Ebay, and found one listing which pretty much shows what
these laptops are all about. Note that I'm not endorsing this listing, nor
do I have any experience with the seller.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3423499950&category=42197
When
this is over, she'll also want to use the machine for grad school.
Not a chance. She'll want something a bit more modern, which hasn't been
dragged through the deserts of sand and heat.
However, since the laptop I've discussed will cost less than $100, including
the gadgets to run it off the vehicle's batteries, nobody's going to have
much invested, so a newer laptop would be a smart bet. For serious school
work, she's going to want something with a bigger screen, USB ports, sound,
CDRW/DVD, and speed. Emachines has a very nice laptop for around $1,100,
and even includes a wide screen. That would be ideal for school, but I'd
never take something that nice into the desert.
any advice would be greatly appreciated.
The Panasonic Toughbooks are very nice, as are the Itronix laptops.
However, the Panasonics are very costly (over $1000) compared to the Compaq
Contura and such, and whether they'll hold up to the heat and sand is
debatable, as they're more complex and have much hotter CPU's. Panasonic
doesn't even sell their Toughbooks to the public, so you'd have to again go
to Ebay or the like to buy one. They're also somewhat underpowered compared
to brand new laptops, so even if it survives the desert, it'll be a slug
back home, as well as bulky and short on options.
The Itronix laptops are tough, but I don't have any personal experience with
them. I've seen them on Ebay fairly cheap for monochrome displays, but the
color ones were too much in my opinion. They're also somewhat slow, for the
price.
Pagan
