Hi

Can anyone recommend a good netbook ,mini netbook or small lap top that would be suitable for taking on a motorcycle on a trip to north africa ?

Cheers

Neil

How much money do you wanna spend?

Macbook Air is great, but expensive; SSD means no moving parts to beak due to vibration.

Personally, I'd take a cheapie Acer Aspire 1 or similar - fewer tears if it gets nicked or destroyed on the trip....

Hi,

Im using a Samsung NC10 and did not have problems even i did quite a bit of offroad riding. Got it used for only 100 US$ with 160 HD, 2GB Ram and Win7.

Travel save, Tobi

I take cheap ones, and I favor flash harddrives and Linux instead of spinning disks and Windows....but the real answer to your question is "It doesn't much matter." Bring whatever you want (and can afford to trash and/or have stolen). Treat it well, or not. Don't spend a lot of time fretting about it unless feeling unusually obsessive, in which case I'm not going to be much help.

Mark

I've traveled with a little Asus (Seashell series, model1015PE) in my saddlebags for the past year.

Sturdy, inexpensive, reliable. Nothing fancy but does what's needed.

I have a neoprene slipcase and a Pelican hard case for it that I sometimes use.

I bought a used Asus 1000HE for my 10 months RTW. It lived in its neoprene case, inside the topcase. Dropped twice onto pavement from seat height & never missed a beat, even with a standard HDD.

Agree with the others, there's not much point in going overboard with price/advanced features/etc. It is a piece of equipment that will suffer abuse and possibly be stolen. There is no panacea.

We just had a presentation on this very topic at the Australian HUBB meeting. The presenters main recommendations were:

- Buy one by the mainline asian manufacturers who specialise in cheap volume product (Toshiba / Acer etc) not the European or fancy name brands; if it breaks much easier to get parts / get repaired.
- Don't buy a thin notebook - the thinner they are, the easier they twist and the easier the screen breaks.
- Whichever one you buy do not store it in a tankbag with a magnetic base (will upset your hard-drive).
- Solid state drives (SSD) are good if you can afford it.
- Buy one with Windows 7 (or XP). Vista was a disaster area and from what he has seen from beta version Windows 8 might be as bad.
- Do not use Linux as an operating system unless you are a nerd who knows what you are doing / likes playing with settings etc.
-Recommended software included:
-Windows 7
- Google Chrome as browser - free
- Google Picassa (for photos) - free
- Open Office / Libre - for word processing, spreadsheet etc - free
- Microsoft Anti-virus - free and nowadays very good.

Other advise included doing regular "image" bacups to an external drive and the best of these were the Lacie "Rugged" drives. Also carry lots of memory sticks / cards and back up your photo's etc to these and then carry them separately to the computer (plus post copies home)

Hope this helps.

FYI I travelled for 6 months with the cheapest Acer netbook I could find ($199), coincidently loaded with most of the free software he recommended and it performed flawlessly and in fact I'm now so used to it I use it 75% of my time at home.

__________________
Martin

finally back on the road again


http://awayonmybike.blogspot.com/

I've got a Linux netbook (first generation EEE PC) and it's never given me any trouble. It's quirky, but I'm no geek, don't have a clue what I'm doing, and I sure don't like "playing with settings."

Take that as a single data point.

Mark

Samsung N150 Plus netbook. Has 250gb hardrive, three usb ports, wifi and bluetooth, with Windows 7 home basic. Battery life is 9 hours. I've used mine 1.5 years without problem.
£250 from Amazon.
I use free software:
Open Office word processing.
Audacity audio editing.
Firefox browser (Chrome sucks at the moment).
Windows Movie Maker for video editing.
Avast! anti-virus (protected my extensive web use for ten years!).

The netbook is small and light enough to hardly notice in a small backpack.