Thanks for all the helpful advice. Because of a downturn in the Macska economy, Mr. Macska will have to make do with his PocketPC + my desktop for at least a few months.

Would it make a difference if he put the powerpoint on a pen drive and then ran it off his colleague's laptop? At least one of his colleagues will have a laptop with them when they travel.

Mr. Macska never used his laptop on the plane (I won't even address Mr. Furious's comment ;) )

Putting the power point on a USB drive would make a huge difference. I dont know exactly what he wants to use it for other than Powerpoint, but I can do most other things with a PDA. I wouldnt want to do a 200 page document or a spreadsheet with several thousand entries on a PDA. But I routinely do simple spreadsheets, letters and one time even a short scientific manuscript that I wrote and submitted to a journal from a PDA.

Here's a plug for the Fujitsu Lifebook P Series:

I've had mine for about a year and adore it. It is a cute little thing: about 8x11x1.5 inches and weighs a little over 3 pounds. The battery will spin a DVD movie for about 2.5-3 hours and if you are just using the hard drive, I've gone up to 5 hours on a battery: plenty for a transcon when the g*dd*amn empower is non-functional. Built-in WiFi and a swappable CD/DVD combo and 3.5 floppy drive. i understand you can also put another battery in that drive bay for extra time, but if you want to watch DVD movies on a plane, that sort of defeats the purpose uneless you save the DVDs to your hard drive, which in all honesty is only really big enough to hold a couple DVDs at time.

IME, the P is a FANTASTIC compromise if screen size is not your major consideration. I have tried to travel with regular-sized Dell work laptops since I got the P and find that they are inferior in too many ways to enumerate for business travel, so now my personal laptop is my business laptop, too.

This is my second Fujitsu, and my old (ancient) C-4120 still runs like a champ, so I have no worries about reliability.

Here are the specs on the P and Fujitsu's price:

LifeBook P7010 notebook
FPCM20262

• Intel® Pentium® M Processor Ultra Low Voltage 713 (1.10 GHz, 400 MHz FSB, 1 MB L2 Cache)
• Microsoft® Windows® XP Home
• 10.6" wide format XGA Crystal View TFT display
• 512 MB DDR micro-DIMM SDRAM memory (256 MB x 2)
• 60 GB hard drive²
• Modular DVD/CD-RW combo drive
• Built-in Intel® PRO/Wireless 2200BG LAN (802.11b/g), multinational³ 56K4 V.90 modem and 10/100 Base-Tx Ethernet
• Two USB 2.0, IEEE 1394, Memory Stick®/SD slot, Compact Flash slot, PC Card slot
• Standard high-capacity battery
• One-year International Limited Warranty
• M-Code FPCM20262

$1,999

I've been a dedicated laptop user for donkey's years. Mainly with ThinkPads and PowerBooks over the last decade or so. Before that, well... KayPro comes to mind for some reason.

About 5 years ago, my not yet boss handed me one of the early Toshiba Portege's sub-notebooks. Nice machine for the time and carrying it instead of the TP770 lightened my bag on longer trips. It was a different experience learning to keep one's business life coordinated amongst three machines, each with unique characteristics.

I got a Compaq Ipaq 3955 a year or so ago before I had a notebook computer, and for the purposes you mention, I think a Pocket PC can work fairly well. However, I do find I use it less and less now that I've got a notebook computer.

PowerPoint: If all you're doing is playing PowerPoint presentations, then it should be fine. As noted, you should have the .ppt file on a thumb drive for transfer to another machine in the event of "technical difficulties". I wouldn't use a PDA to author/edit a PowerPoint presentation - at least not one that's complicated in any way.

Word, E-Mail: Reading Word documents and e-mail is o.k. It's not great if the Word document has lots of formatting or if its very long. Same goes for e-mail. Authoring/Editing documents is o.k. as long as you're not doing any fancy formatting.

Adobe PDF: PDFs are a pain on a PDA. If you make them big enough to read, you're forever scrolling up/down and side/side. Ugh.

We had somebody actually do this at the office! Word got around about it and we started to come up with names for it. My submission was...

You can compress DVD's with xvid or divx codec and store 10 or more movies in the space a couple of uncompressed DVDs would take. A DVD compressed to about 750 mb is very watchable on a notebook.

A 10.6" screen is too small for my taste.

Right, I havent tried this because of concerns about the screen size. But People do compress movies even more and watch them on PDAs even. I keep planning on trying it but never get around to it. I may give it a try as I am always trying to travel lighter and being able to perhaps watch a DVD is one of the things that often puts the notebook in my bag.

Gadget:

I have a 5" Mintek portable DVD player. I am very happy with it. The screen is small, but big enough. And the entire thing fits on my lap easily, or even in my hand. I don't have to take it out of my bag when I go through security [insert knock on wood sound effect] and it is very small & light. They alos make slightly bigger ones, such as 7".

Laptop Desktop
 

Seems like this thread is off on several directions so naturally I want to help it stay that way.
Desk top with bluetooth keyboard and mouse seems like the best deal for me.
If I had a lap top I would actually have more stuff on my desk and it would still have to be connected to printer, router, backup external drive, etc.

I am trying to figure out how to travel without a lap top. I have a Blackberry and have to make a final decision about it in 1 week. Has anyone actually had their hands on an HP ipac6315 yet?

Thanks

Yes. And was not impressed. Slow and large.

I'd wait for an XDAIII if I were you.

.....Microsoft?

I've been using (work provided) sub-notebooks (Compaq Evo N410c currently) exclusively for the last five years. Before then I used a combo of a notebook and desktop and was always pulling my hair out trying to keep the files sync'd across them.

I have docking stations at work and home, so I can use full size monitors and keyboards, though at home I mostly use it as a laptop. I've had wireless at home for several years, so the bathroom remarks above are, uh, on the mark. :)

While the performance tends to be lower than desktops, for work applications (Word, Excel, Outlook, et al.), and listening to MP3s and watching DVDs on planes it does as well as any desktop. I've got a console at home for playing games.

As mentioned by another, the TCO for desktops _IS_ lower than laptops. Our company has a 3 year lifespan for PCs, and I don't think I've ever had a laptop make it to the end -- it either fails by being accidently dropped or just quits on its own. [I wouldn't be surprised if business PCs evolve into laptop like form-factors, but would expect policies to prohibit using them as portables.]

I've wanted to try using a current gen palmtop to see if it'd do all I wanted while on trips (email, note taking, light web surfing, MP3 player) using one of those folding keyboards. Cost-cutting prevents work from providing one, so I'll likely wait until the OQO style devices are common and try asking for one again.

From Scott C Yes. And was not impressed. Slow and large.

I'd wait for an XDAIII if I were you.


Thanks Scott. I'm sure its a dumb question but what is an XDAIII and who makes it/ provides service.

bbkenney

I have never owned a laptop, thank goodness. Seems like the silliest thing to lug all of that weight around, when you travel. Everything I need I can do at a desktop. I am not in a business where I work on the road or in the field living out of hotel rooms and meeting clients face to face everyday.

I hear people talk all of the time about how you can be more efficient and productive with a laptop when traveling and such. The most productivity I see businessmen with laptops do is check e-mails, surf the web, play games and watch DVD's. Does not seem efficient or productive to lug around 10lbs worth of equipment for those uses.

I have a PDA, mobile phone and a USB flash drive. I read books on planes not watch movies.
I can see having a laptop for home use because of space constraints but to lug one around for minimal business use or entertainment does not nake sense to me.