A couple of thoughts... first of all, if your laptop has a bootable CD or DVD drive, you might consider using some sort of "live CD" for personal stuff. A live CD gives you rapid access to a complete operating system and applications, without having to install any software, and without ever needing to access your machine's hard drive. Since it can function completely independently from your regular operating system, it's almost as good as having a second computer.
There are many premastered live CDs to choose from. A good one to start with is
KNOPPIX. This is Linux-based, and uses filesystem compression to cram about 2GB onto a regular CD. There's also a DVD version with a lot more. When you boot this thing, it auto-detects your hardware, and attempts to configure networking using DHCP. I.e. it does more-or-less The Right Thing in hotel rooms with wired Ethernet connections. Don't worry--it supports most of the common wireless stuff, too.
Typically, I'll start it up with a command like
Code:
knoppix tz=US/Pacific desktop=icewm
¹
California is home for me; I believe the English-language version defaults to Eastern time.
²
KNOPPIX, unfortunately, uses the horribly bloated and slow KDE unless you override it; IceWM is very reasonable, and will seem quite familiar to anyone used to Windows.
As for VNC's performance, you can only really determine if it's going to be acceptable by trying it. Note that there are alternatives to
the original VNC. For example,
TightVNC is a derivative optimized for slow(er) connections. You might also take a look at the commercial product
NoMachine NX. The NX client is free; they make their money off the server. Of course, there's a
free server available.
VNC has competitors as well; for example, if the machine you want to access is running Windows XP Professional, you should be able to use
a Remote Desktop Protocol client to do things the "native" Microsoft way.
In any case, if you're using any sort of remote access technology that does not provide its own security (which is the case with all of the free VNC implementations I'm familiar with), you'll definitely want to tunnel through SSH or use some sort of VPN layer. And keep that USB flash drive handy.
