advice one laptop or handheld

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)
2. dust/sand
3. limited access to electricity. battery life is important.

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. When
this is over, she'll also want to use the machine for grad school.

any advice would be greatly appreciated.

thank you,
dan braithwaite

I have worked in similar conditions. Dust, heat and sunlight are all
problems--most laptops are barely readable in bright sunlight.

First thought is, I doubt whatever she gets will survive to get her through
grad school. She needs to think of whatever solution as expendable.

If battery power is a major issue, I would buy a cheap, expendable laptop
for under $1000. and then spend some money on either a solar charger or one
of the large, "coast-to-coast" batteries that fit underneath your laptop
like an inch-thick slice. Several internet battery houses sell these.

for example: http://www.ctsolar.com/ExpeditionFoldingPanels.htm

or http://www.aapspower.com/sunporensys.html

or
http://web1.applelaptopbattery.com/c...prod&ref=ED369

I would get a hard, Zero Halliburton or imitation case or a briefcase rather
than any kind of nylon case, which won't protect from dust.

If she doesn't go to the internet cafe, how does she get internet access?
If she doesn't have access at her barracks, she'll still need something to
store data on and to get it back and forth from the internet cafe to her
computer. I'd recommend one of those USB memory devices rather than trying
to burn CD's or even using a floppy. In my experience, those are the first
things to be damaged by dust and grit.

Wish her good luck.
Joe Davis




"dan braithwaite" wrote in message
...

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)
2. dust/sand
3. limited access to electricity. battery life is important.

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. When
this is over, she'll also want to use the machine for grad school.

any advice would be greatly appreciated.

thank you,
dan braithwaite

I'm afraid that the requirement for the middle east and grad school are
two different animals. Costs is the biggest problem. You don't need that
good of a laptop for grad school compare to the middle east . I would do
the internet cafe thing . If you go with the pda , make sure you have a
ethernet card , backup batteries , Compact flash card for memory .

Also , looking at a carry case that would protect what ever you
choose. Their laptops design for hard use , but then you have to spend
$$$. IBM has a laptop that runs up to 6 hours , but it cost. Find out
what type of warranty the laptop or pda has to offer. Explain your
situation to IBM or dell sales rep. Both make excellent laptops and
handhelds.
Wouldn't hurt to do goggle search on the army doing in Iraq. I
believe they are using laptops.

Just read a letter to the editor of PC magazine from a someone station
in afghanistan . Sand go into everything . He even put cellophone on
top. Didn't work. Thing would popup with out warning.

I have worked in similar conditions. Dust, heat and sunlight are all
problems--most laptops are barely readable in bright sunlight.

First thought is, I doubt whatever she gets will survive to get her
through
grad school. She needs to think of whatever solution as expendable.

If battery power is a major issue, I would buy a cheap, expendable laptop
for under $1000.

Nonsens.

A cheap pseudo notebook with Desktop CPU will need more
than double the power of a modern Centrino.

So the cheap notebooks needs twice the solar equipment.
This adds much weight and money.


--
Roland Mösl
http://www.pege.org Clear targets for a confused civilization
http://web-design-sutie.com Web Design starts at the search engine

Amen. Sand and dust is the big problem. Brand new equipment is wasted
after about 3 months. The screen will be scratched, the case will be
scratched and half the stuff won't work. Keys will jam. The Panasonic
Toughbook is good--but it's not really that much better for the desert than
anything else.


"Drew Cutter" wrote in message
...
Just read a letter to the editor of PC magazine from a someone station
in afghanistan . Sand go into everything . He even put cellophone on
top. Didn't work. Thing would popup with out warning.

"dan braithwaite" wrote in message
...

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.

2. dust/sand

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...tegory=42 197

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

thank you,
dan braithwaite

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)
2. dust/sand
3. limited access to electricity. battery life is important.

Acer Travelmate 800

The system is thermical extrem healthy.
The system is built into the same box and has the same
cooling system like the Acer Travelmate 650 series with
the hot so called "mobile" P4.

So a cool Centrino is working with a cooling system
designed for a much hoter CPU.

This gives much thermical reserves.

For example, the harddisks rund typical
only 17 degree Celsius above room temperature.
15 degree Celsius less than at several other notebooks.

Great battery run time 5 hours with first 3 plus with
the smaller second battery.

I use it with a 12 V 7 Ah lead acid buffer battery and
a 20 W peak photovoltaic all the day on the beach


--
Roland Mösl
http://www.pege.org Clear targets for a confused civilization
http://web-design-sutie.com Web Design starts at the search engine

"Joe Davis" wrote in message
rthlink.net...
Roland, you don't understand what a harsh environment this is. I agree
the
Acer is a nice machine, but it will be worth about $5 after a couple of
months there. A real waste in my opinion.

I agree. Although he's right on about the Centrino's power and heat
benifits, I've yet to see one that could stand up to even low to moderate
abuse. These things are made for the city folk.

Pagan

"Roland Mösl" wrote in message
y.telekom.at...
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)
2. dust/sand
3. limited access to electricity. battery life is important.

Acer Travelmate 800

The system is thermical extrem healthy.
The system is built into the same box and has the same
cooling system like the Acer Travelmate 650 series with
the hot so called "mobile" P4.

So a cool Centrino is working with a cooling system
designed for a much hoter CPU.

This gives much thermical reserves.

For example, the harddisks rund typical
only 17 degree Celsius above room temperature.
15 degree Celsius less than at several other notebooks.

Great battery run time 5 hours with first 3 plus with
the smaller second battery.

I use it with a 12 V 7 Ah lead acid buffer battery and
a 20 W peak photovoltaic all the day on the beach


--
Roland Mösl
http://www.pege.org Clear targets for a confused civilization
http://web-design-sutie.com Web Design starts at the search engine

On Thu, 17 Jul 2003 13:48:24 -0700, dan braithwaite
wrote:


Hi, my cousin is enlisted in a trucking unit stationed in the mideast and thinking
about getting a laptop.
1. heat (119 degrees in the barracks tent at her base camp)
Except for low power real modern laptops, I'd say the older the
better (less heat generated, not as sensitive to heat in the
first place).
2. dust/sand
Will utterly destroy whatever you get quickly. Get something
cheap enough that you can throw it away afterwards (if it isn't
destroyed in the first three months). Plan to get something else
(more modern) for college life.
3. limited access to electricity. battery life is important.
Make sure it can accept either a 12 volt input (one truck
battery) and/or get a 24volt (if that is what your trucks use) to
laptop voltage converter. Lots of older laptops did accept 12
volts. More recent ones seem to prefer 15 volts, which isn't as
convenient in the circumstances described.

Install low drain applications, and fine tune the system to avoid
access to the hard drive. Personally, I'd install Windows 98SE,
then use 98Lite to remove Internet Explorer, and use something
non disk intensive like Opera as my browser (when required).
Unless you have a pressing need to use MS Word all the time, I'd
install a simple text editor as well, and run these from a RAM
drive. Just save your stuff to hard drive (or even a Compact
Flash or USB disk if the old laptop has USB) at the end of a
session. Do whatever you can to avoid disk intensive programs
unless you can get access to a power supply.

If going the PDA route, you need something that isn't going to
need access to a PC for power and recharge. I think most PDAs
(except specialist field use stuff like Psion NetBook and NetPad,
or Symbol) are too fragile, and too dependent on a PC for almost
everything. Great in an office situation, but not for three
months in the field.

I use an obsolete Psion 5mx for notes on long trips, as it has a
decent keyboard, AA batteries are available widely, and a pocket
solar charger can keep rechargeables for it going. However sand
would destroy the keyboard and screen cable eventually. There is
a limit to how well you can use it while it is sealed in plastic
(a dirt cheap AA powered hand plastic sealer and a roll of
plastic wrap will help heaps), and in my experience in Australia,
sand will eventually get through every barrier you can make
anyway. Although I carry a modem, my experience is that phone
connections are not available in most remote places (or the
"phone line" turns out to be hanging on the end of a 2400 baud
radio link when you try data). I carry a GSM phone with IrDA and
a built in data adaptor. If passing near a town, I make a
connection that way (at vast expense). I think most of the middle
east uses GSM, but expect the rates would be even worse than in
Australia. So I'd plan on trying to use whatever connectivity
the military provide wherever you are stationed. That may be
ethernet, may be WiFi, but either way even an old laptop with a
PCMCIA slot can usually handle it just fine with the right card
(if it is so old neither are installed).

--
Eric Lindsay http://www.ericlindsay.com/guff
Airlie Beach Qld Australia - Great Barrier Reef entry
Psion & Epoc site http://www.ericlindsay.com/epoc