Laptop
When travelling, you need a proper place to store all your images, letters, e-mails and other digital items. If you want to access your stuff without need to hook up on the Internet, laptop is the best solution.
While selecting a good laptop, remember that every gram counts and you do not have too much extra space in your cabin luggage. Select a reasonable small laptop with good connectivity options. CD-ROM, DVD-ROM and floppy drives are not that essential on the road and one can usually suffice with external ones. Docking station should be left home. Instead, pay extra care for the keyboard and the pointing device, as the laptop will be your primary computer and nobody really wants to suffer from the carpal tunnel syndrome. Check also that the AC adapter is not too clumsy and it can be used everywhere in the world – in other words it accepts voltage from 110V to 240V and frequency between 50Hz and 60Hz.
The connectivity of the laptop is essential, especially while hanging out in airport lounges. Every laptop has modem and Ethernet plug, but if you want to have also wireless access, make sure that the laptop has at least infrared and WLAN built-in. Check that the WLAN chip is able to use both B and G networks. Bluetooth is also extremely nice, if your phone or PDA supports it. You can get both WLAN and Bluetooth with a PC card, but the cards consume the only PC card slot that has better use; please see about digital cameras.
When pondering the performance, do not stare only to the CPU power. The processors used in the laptops are more than able to run all generic software without any hiccups. Instead, the amount of memory is the crucial factor as today’s software tend to be large. Have at least 512 megabytes, preferably more or at least option to expand. The graphic chip should be decent, especially if you are fond of playing games or watching videos with the laptop. Check also the external video modes, if you are planning to use the laptop with an external monitor from time to time. The chip should be able to use video mode of 1280×1024 with full colours and with scan rate of 85Hz or better.
Remember that Apple provides excellent laptops in competitive prices nowadays. Mac OS X is easier to use and things just work with these machines. No need to fiddle with driver updates and viruses.