Laptop suitable for f/t Bushcraft Traveller... any thoughts?

[Ethereal-Mooncat]

Just wondering if anyone has any reccomendations re models, or general advice re features or their own experiences re a suitable laptop for a prolonged Bushcraft Journey around the UK? Any thoughts on solar or other 'green' chargers would be welcome too. More specific details of relevant considerations below...

BUSHCRAFT CONSIDERATIONS
From around 20th August I'll be living more or less f/t as a Bushcraft Traveller (Green Dwellings or Camping... wilderness survival stuff, no mains electricity) altho sometimes I'll also be Wwoofer-ing / doing casual labour on farms / staying with friends who have 'normal' houses! Going back to my own house won't be an option, it's going on the market once it's fixed up. I don't know how long this journey will last - probably at least a year. It won't be a continual 'on the road' journey: Whenever I find somewhere favourable I'll may stay there for 1 - 3 months before moving on. So access to mains electricity will be variable.

WORK CONSIDERATIONS
As well as possible casual labour on farms or in residential gardens (I'm an experienced pro gardener) I'm also a semi-pro Photoshop Artist / Photographer on the Alt Scene (see links at end of mssg) so altho I don't have a prob w/ living lo-fi I will be carting some hi-tech digital gear around! When the house sale has gone thru I might get an Apple Mac laptop, but for now I need an affordable reasonable quality PC laptop (so I can take Photoshop / my Wacom Pen&Tab / my photostock files with me (currently I use an old desktop PC). So I can send out / recieve files/ keep in touch w/ contacts I'll also be getting a mobile broadband dongle (altho I daresay I'll have to end up climbing to the tops of windswept hills, fells, or mountains to get a bloody signal!).

MIN TECHY SPECS / PRICE CONSIDERATIONS
Price: Pref under £300
Processor : Intel Pentium or AMD Athlon or equiv.
Speed : 1.1 GB min (pref a bit higher but doesn't have to be top-end)
RAM : 512MB min (pref a bit higher)
Memory : doesn't have to be that big: 40GB would do, 160 would be plenty
OS Hmmm, pref XP (I hate Vista & unfortunately some of my essential software doesnae work with Linux, apparently). I don't know anything about Windows 7 - is it as control-freaky & restrictive as Vista!?
Screen size : 15" (pref not widescreen!) Yeah, I know a netbook would be more compact / light, but I need the screen size... my work is full of curly swirly detail! I have seen one model on ebay, apparently good specs w/ a 12" screen which would do at a pinch, only £200 & v. thin / light. No optical drive, which is kinda essential so I can send oot discs from photoshoots... but I think you can get extrenal usb DVD/CDRW's for less than £50?

OTHER UNKNOWN LAPTOP CONSIDERATIONS
Durability (re temprature & humidity fluctuations / resistance to airborne debris (smoke / dust), knocks & bangs (when off & closed!)... Are there models designed to be more rugged for use 'in the field' I wonder?
BATTERY LIFE As long as possible! With power saving / minimal system use options during use... if they exist?)

NON MAINS CHARGERS
I've heard mixed reviews about solar chargers. My brother (who has been a f/t Bushcraft Traveller across Europe for about 3 years) reckoned that altho manufacturers claim you can charge a laptop with a days full sunshine, that (here in the UK anyway) they are OK for mobiles... just... but not much cop for anything that needs more power. I did have a notion of trying to convert a folding exersize bike into a kinetic charger... but that's not going to happen in the near future, I fear.

I may sometimes need to charge the dSLR battery too (altho this lasts pretty good, I'd est maybe 10 hrs of continual use, which in practice is several weeks).

Anyway... any thoughts appreciated.

*tips tophat*
E. Mooncat Esq.

 

[Echo]

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/156-...-C220-12GHz-2GB-DDR2-320GB-HDD-Win-7-Home-Pre

http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Lapt...+11z+11.6"++Laptop+-+(A23JY)+?productId=40356

http://www.microdirect.co.uk/Home/Product/47609/HP-Renew-laptop-CQ61-312SA-Sempron-M100-2-0GHz

For under or near 300 it's not worth buying a laptop to use for photoshop, save up and get a mac, those 3 will give you an idea of what about 320 would get you.
When buying a laptop ALWAYS read reviews of the laptop's performance and the processors performance before you buy, nothing worse than a slow laptop!

Although, I'd save the £300 and buy a mac personally. Might take longer to save up for a mac, but at the same time you know that it will be fast running and reliable!

If you're going to buy a £300 laptop, do some serious research into the performance of the laptop first.

Best bet to finding a good one is to join a tech or computing forum and ask there.

 

[sirex]

the budget is seriously low, otherwise an IBM toughbook would be my recommendation. For 300 quid your going to be on the acer end of the market.

 

[sandbender]

I have some experience of trying to keep one foot in the digital world while living an itinerant and roughty toughty lifestyle and I think you will struggle to find a machine that will fit the requirements you have listed.

Obviously the digital artwork thing is an important part of your day to day life however I think you may be overestimating how much time you will be able to devote to it once you 'adventure' begins.

Additionally the one piece of advice I can give is that traveling with expensive gizmo's does limit your freedom and enjoyment a little, there is always the worry that someone or something will take them from you.

In the end a paper notebook and an artists pad may be the way to go.

 

[salan]

Hi what concerns me is running Photoshop on this low a spec.
what version are you talking about?
If youn look at the min/reccomended spec for photoshop cs3 for example. then you are no where near it.
Charging a laptop is the hard bit.
No solar charger will do it as they just can't provide enought watts (talking about somehting you could/would carry).
So plugging into a car? is that pos?

When I go camping I use a netbook (eeepc) with linux and GIMP) for photo editing.
I have a car charger lead and use that to charge the battery.
The current that takes is about 4 amps (to give you an idea of what a solar charger would need to provide).
Not a netbook would be too small a screen for you prob but perhaps worth a think.
#Also the new netbooks use Windows 7 starter (its VERY quick to start up and (within its restrictions) quiet versatile.
Alan

 

[Fredcompanybushcraft]

I have a Dell Mini 10v that's hacked with Snow Leopard.
It's now a HacBook...

Price: I think it's about £300 for a 6-cell battery, which lasts for 7 hours running OS X
Processor : Intel Atom (sorry about that)
Speed : 1.6 GHz
RAM : 1GB
Memory : 160GB
OS : OS Xa
Screen size : 10", but on OS X you can hold command (alt on mine) and scroll to zoom into the screen, basically making it bigger.

 

[xylaria]

Maplins have specials on solar panels until the end of august. I can't speak for the larger ones they have on sale. The small mobile phone charger I bought for 7 quid takes five to eight hours in bright sunshine to charge up, and doesn't fullly charge some phones.

 

[Doc]

I'm not well up on computers, but I can comment on power off grid.

I'd guess a laptop is going to use 20-50 watts. You can generally run them off a car battery though you may need a DC-DC converter to do this. They are readily available and being a mass-market item not too dear.

You can get sealed lead acid batteries cheaply- An 18Ah should run your computer for an evening. They're pretty heavy.

Then you need to charge the battery. You could do this with solar, but in the British winter you'll need a pretty big (read, expensive) panel. I'd be looking at something like 60 watts plus for winter use. And you would need a weatherproof one if you're going to leave it outside.

Another option is a handcrank generator- you can get a army surplus Clansman one for £35. Generates nearly 25 watts. They are designed for 24v clansman Nicads but you could charge 2 12v lead acid batteries that way. The connectors are military and you would need to homebrew a cable.

You can also get 12v windchargers - Rutland make good ones that you often see on dinghies.Not cheap.

 

[ged]

I think the idea of trying to run a computer while you're camping is insane. When I'm camping it takes so much more time to do anything than it does at home that I would never have any time left over for messing about with computers anyway, even if there was mains electricity and an Ethernet connection in the tent. You can more or less forget solar power unless you want to be carrying a huge solar array everywhere you go and constantly be tending batteries. Why not put all your data in the cloud, find half a dozen old PCs that have been thrown out by businesses upgrading to the latest Windows fad, and send them to the friends that you'll be staying with? You can get the computers for nothing and with the money you don't spend on a laptop you can ship a computer overland on a carrier when you have to, or spend the occasional hour in an Internet cafe.

 

[sirex]

out of interest, how viable is charging from a small 24 inch wind turbine ? - i heard they put out a fair bit more than solar (on average, obviously).

 

[ged]

out of interest, how viable is charging from a small 24 inch wind turbine ? - i heard they put out a fair bit more than solar (on average, obviously).

Well obviously comparing wind and solar is a bit like comparing apples and onions. A turbine can produce power in the dark, for example, and there are relatively fewer maintenance issues with a solar panel... But if you look at the number of commercial wind farms and the number of commercial solar plants that should tell you something.

The smaller they are, the more turbines struggle for efficiency, and the less cost effective they become. This is true for any turbine. But you can get a few watts most of the time, especially if you're in location which is reasonably exposed such as the coast or a hilltop. If there are buildings, trees, etc. around the turbine then you really need to get it high (tens of metres) off the ground as the layer of air that's close to the ground will be moving slower than the layers above. The trick then is to get something which will start turning at a low wind speed. Most wind generators designed to produce serious amounts of power don't start to produce anything at all until there's what you might call a fairly stiff breeze. If you have a very calm spell of a few days then unless you have a very large capacity battery bank you might not have enough charge stored to, er, tide you over. I wouldn't expect to run a laptop continuously on a small wind turbine. They excel at trickle charging the battery bank on a boat but they're not so good for a continuous heavy load.

Typical performance and costs:

http://www.wirefreedirect.com/rutland_913_wind_charger.asp

There are loads of self-build designs and websites devoted to this stuff.

 

[Ph34r]

You could always run it from the old fashioned hamster wheel + dynamo. or you could use the smoke form your fire to spin a turbine w/ a dynamo.

The new delll precision is not a bad pice of kit. ( Dad's a computer wizard and as a result i get to 'fix' some of his clients pcs when I am around. For just over £300, it's quite good wiht a 15.5 inch screen. I have the old version (and run Xp on it, also hate vista - but 7 is ok). I reckon that you should just get a macbook now rather than later, I know that they star at £800, but that would be my personal choice for what you want to do, and you could just run Xp ona virtual machine.

 

[ged]

Just a thought, it might be worth considering thermo-electric generation. Some of the motor manufacturers either have already brought out or will soon be bringing out vehicles which produce some of the electricity that they use with thermo-electric devices feeding from waste exhaust heat. This saves a bit of alternator load and improves fuel efficiency. It won't be long before they're being written off and you'll be able to get them from the scrapyards...

[journalism]
If you search for anything about thermo-electric generation and vehicles, you might want to, er, steer clear of anything that talks about radioactive materials. There's some real tripe in the press about putting radioactive things in cars to generate electricity. Thermo-electric generators produce electricity from heat. The heat could be produced by radioactivity, but it could also be produced by burning something. Burning something happens anyway in an internal combustion engine, there's no need for anything radioactive.
[/journalism]

http://www.tegpower.com/

 

[Nagual]

Dynamo + bike + cycling everywhere = free power, and very healthy for you too....

Ooo or attach a wind turbine to your bike while using above dynamo for an added boost..


Sorry I don't have anything real to add, but the picture of that idea amused me and had to share.


Cheers

 

[iano]

I just got an Asus EeePC netbook, £200 from Argos on offer a little while back, I'm not a computer expert (far from it, really!) so I'm not sure if it fits your parameters but could be worth a look? I've never used mine out in the wild but shortly am to, me and the other half are off WWOOFing in Scandinavia soon too! ^^ We are taking my netbook along as she is running a full size Mac laptop, but it's less for camping and out of doors, and more just to have the ability to send an email to our families once in a while, empty photos from a camera onto without going through 10 memory cards, and have our CVs to hand if we find a place we figure we want to stay at. I think it'll live in my rucksack for about 95% of the time, you don't go out and about in order to take all the creature comforts, connectivity and technology with you, in my case I generally go to leave that sort of stuff behind.

I know you're against netbooks because of the screen size but I think you'd do well to consider them. My old full-size laptop was a ricketty ricketty piece of junk by the time it died on me, being lugged around in my 'schoolbag' with a load of library books and other assorted stuff day after day. But the netbook seems far sturdier, chunkier even. I guess you get less 'flex' and torsion over a smaller area and length/breadth than you do with larger dimensions - I wouldn't like to guess the life expectancy of a full-size laptop on your back with a load of other stuff for any length of time, plus they just get heavy bulky annoying and need, presumably, more power to run... Could you get around your full-screen size requirement some other way?

 

[Ethereal-Mooncat]

TO JED...

Thanx for the thoughts. That is interesting actually... Altho I've got a small gas burner as back-up, I'm intending to use DIY wood stoves / woodgas stoves as a primary heat / cooking source (a small portable one, or a medium sized one assembled on site if staying somewhere for a while). Altho it is said that if there is normal ventilation woodgas stoves don't need a flue (and I'll have a carbon monoxide detector), for the sake of safety (air pollution wise & fire hazard wise) or if using a normal wood stove inside, I am planning to experiment with creating interior flues in mid-long term camps / green dwellings. The idea is that in wet or cold weather I can safely & discreetly use a stove 'indoors' and utilize partial retention / partial control of escaping heat (for heating / drying / anti-damp purposes. It had occurred to me however that most of the heat/ airflow from such flues was wasted energy... that could perhaps be used to power a small turbine / dynamo. But when I mentioned it to a few ppl who I thought would grasp the idea & have some useful insight, they looked at me as if I was a lunatic. This is the kind of response that one often gets for thinking outside the fawking box that Mainstream folk live in & mistake for Reality - if the Jonses haven't got one & you can't buy it in Argos then it's a crackpot idea *rolls eyes*

If everyone thought like that the wheel would never have been invented for fawks sake! "You can't live in 'hovels' without running water & electric mains" they say in horror " It's just not right, it's not realistic" i remind them that this is how humanity has lived for the vast majority of it's 100,000 year history (without the techno advantages that most modern bushcrafters use: gortex, tarps, mobile fones, etc!) ... that if anything the urban life most of us now dwell in is the one that is the unreal & un-natural one. Just some of the reasons I want out of the Institutionalized Insanity of the Zombie Teaparty of this Society, nes pas? That and being literaly 'persecuted' for 'daring' to think outside the box, a bit, sometimes. Certain uptight, narrow minded, pompous middle-class asshats have spent the last few years sneaking around like backstabbing little weasels spreading false slanders & plotting silly little plots because pacifist non-conformists like me scare the **** out of their tiny minds. It would be laughable except my so-called nearset & dearest have swallowed this ****e. A year ago, just as I was on the verge of long-overdue success as a PS artist, I suddenly found myself caterpulted into a downward spiral for reasons I did not understand at the time. My long term g/f walked out, I was suddenly socially isolated, my dayjob business collapsed, my artistic carreer collapsed, & now I am facing homeless destitution. The 'caring' proffessions don't give a toss... so I am off. The asshats pressumably hoped I would be reduced to huddling in a doorway begging for spare change. Behind their 'respectable' veneer, such persons are loaded with spite & prejudice, they would derive a pathetic pleasure from that scenario... a pleasure I intend to deny them. They have torn my life apart... but I am going to make an adventure out of it. They have ruined my career... but I am going to build a new one on the back of what they have done. As they have sown so shall they reap... and I know where they sleep. As for my beautiful Lost Love... Link removed ...that broke my heart: but now I'm over that & am starting to rediscover my self-esteem, I think that I deserve & can do better.

We shall see.

Anyway, I shall take a lookee at that link... & yeah, don't worry: I shall avoid the radioactivity! In all my urban years I have never even had a microwave oven. I mean, Jeez: it's like cooking with a nuclear reactor! It's un-natural dude!

*tips hat*
Mooncat

 

[Glen]

Well there is already a woodgas stove with a built in Thermo Electric Generator but I never did find out what sort of power range it had, not a lot judging from it's size ( will do a search for links later )

Trying to power a turbine from a flue probably isn't going to produce too much power but like all things if you can do it for long enough it'll add up. eg bicycle dynamos tend to be around 3W but run one for 12 hours and you've got enough to run a 36W laptop for an hour.
You could build yourself a take down verticle axis windmill out of one of those I guess.

There are equations for getting an idea of how much power you can get from what size swept area of a turbine and the gas speed, if you want to work that out for your proposition don't forget that you'll be using hot, turbulent flue gasses so I'd expect a proportional drop in power compared to cold linea air flow.

http://www.picoturbinesite.com/whwitukit.html looks to me like the sort of thing you might be interested in. Though getting electicity from there into laptop batteries could involve several more steps.

Hmm some of those people in your photographs look very farmiliar... Slimelight? Vagabonds?

 

[Jolyon]

If you need a 'real' PC then it is Panasonic tuogh book or nothing.... although charging it is another matter. There are some solar charges out there but i would question their effectiveness in the the UK.

Personally i would take an iphone!... I run an interactive media company and the iPhone does it all.... even edits HD video and we spent 7k on HD edit desks only 5 years ago.
That and a power monkey and your good to go. enuogh to take some pic and update a blog/ youtube anyway...assuming you have good 3g access..... But if you can afford the iPhone and its related tariffs and you are close enuogh for a good 3g signal then quite franckly just buy a cheap PC and recharge it when you pop to the pub!..

;-)

 

[Metatron]

I'd just go for a cheap Asus netbook and get a 12V adaptor for car charging or hooking up to solar panels. There are companies that sell waterproof cases.

Edit: if you want to get fancy with charging you could use a thermoelectric compound, or get cheap Peltier cooler units off ebay heat one side (fire) and cool the other (air, water) and it will produce electricity.

 

[wattsy]

just like to point out that there's nothing 'nuclear' about a microwave they use radio waves i.e tv signals, radio one that sort of thing. just so happens that radio waves excite water molecules making them vibrate, which lead to heat being generated and the food being cooked