I have plenty of overdue blog entries, articles and two newsletters to write… One thing is for certain – I will never travel without a laptop again! The screen on my trusty Toshiba just stopped working and its only CTRL key hasn’t worked for a year now. I’ve traveled with a wireless keyboard for the past year or so, but loathe to take an external screen, I’d left the laptop in Melbourne and opted for PortableApps on a 160G USB drive.

In theory, the idea of traveling with all your essential applications on and files on a USB memory stick or portable drive is a great one… no laptop to be concerned about, gear small enough to carry in your pockets and a computer in just about every port to serve your needs.

WRONG!!!

Here’s a list of cons:

• No USB 2.0 support and you’re going to wait a long time for applications to load. Some may not load at all.
• Little memory and your portable applications will also load slowly and may often crash your drive!
• Some USB cables work and some don’t. I was astonished to find that my USB cable wouldn’t work with the laptop I’d borrowed from the APC office in Johannesburg! Luckily I found one that did.
• Some net cafe’s will have placed limitations on how USB devices can be used. In most cases this will mean that NO applications can be run from them.

If that isn’t enough to stifle one’s creativity, lets look at the workstation options one may deal with.

• Foreign language operating systems.
• USB ports that don’t work.
• Keyboards with inappropriately placed keys that one just can’t get used to.
• Foreign language keyboards (less of a hurdle, but in combination with any of the above, a pain…).
• Re-conditioned laptops with the least amount of memory and overall running capacity dragging one’s workflow out for HOURS!
• Inconsistent network support… wireless cards that don’t work, or will find networks but won’t get you online.

The latter point leads to the problems one encounters, and the cost, of getting online in a place such as South Africa. I’ll leave that for another post, but for now… after too many hours at this computer just to customize style sheets on this blog and prepare a newsletter for Secession’s 10th year (try running a browser, a CD player and OpenOffice on 125mgs of ram!) I need a break and my back needs one too.