Toughest Laptop

[LakeSuperior]

My Dell Latitude D630 made it nearly 20 K miles over two years without failing.

We did pour a part of a French press of coffee into the keyboard half way across the North Atlantic. That rendered it inoperative for about 4 hours as it would not boot. We baked it out in the oven on low for 2 hours and it revived itself. We did lose the comma key though. I actually think the coffee made it run a tad faster after the accident. The speed increase may have been due to the caffeine.

Fortunately, we had two more laptops wrapped and stored as backups. That reduced the fear factor as we were depending on the laptop for the nav, AIS, and Iridium/SSB weather. I think that the backups are critical as the laptops are fragile. One drop of salt water could be deadly.

[boom23]

I am not sure if it has been mentioned but, to make any laptop faster and last longer in a bumpy environment replace the standard hard drive with a SSD.

[hellosailor]

noelex, AFAIK the very thought of connecting a rotating mechanical drive of any kind to an iPad violates the whole paradigm of the Apple iOs (phone/tablet) and if you try to make that work, it will trigger the self-destruct program, the command pod will fly off, the rest of the starship exploding violently as the warp cores go supercritical. Oh wait, wrong movie. :-)

Hey, you're messing with APPLE here. (Thinking of the line in Dr. Strangelove where a Coca-Cola machine is violated, see it again if that doesn't ring a bell.)

What you can do in the meantime is rip the DVD to some standard format that the tablet can recognize (mp4? etc) and then transfer the file over, or cloud store it. Of course you also might need to downsample the image since a native DVD movie these days tends to run around 5-6GB even if you strip off the extras and commercials.

But, you know, be careful. The iOs has ways of dealing with people who violate the paradigm!

[noelex 77]

Originally Posted by hellosailor

noelex, AFAIK the very thought of connecting a rotating mechanical drive of any kind to an iPad violates the whole paradigm of the Apple iOs (phone/tablet) and if you try to make that work, it will trigger the self-destruct program, the command pod will fly off, the rest of the starship exploding violently as the warp cores go supercritical. Oh wait, wrong movie. :-)

Hey, you're messing with APPLE here. (Thinking of the line in Dr. Strangelove where a Coca-Cola machine is violated, see it again if that doesn't ring a bell.)

What you can do in the meantime is rip the DVD to some standard format that the tablet can recognize (mp4? etc) and then transfer the file over, or cloud store it. Of course you also might need to downsample the image since a native DVD movie these days tends to run around 5-6GB even if you strip off the extras and commercials.

But, you know, be careful. The iOs has ways of dealing with people who violate the paradigm!

I would not want to destabilise the universe, alternative realities etc. This reality is too good to change

Most of my movies are are hard drive.

Some cruisers have reported using the wifi connectable hard drives linked to their ipad.
I would like to get one of these for iPad back up anyway.
If I can get the iPad to link to my HD monitor ( which I think is easy, but I have not been able to buy the appropriate cable yet) and play a movie from a wifi hard drive I think it would probably use a bit less power and save pulling out the laptop, which I now don't use for much else, but it remains to be seen if Its viable.

Has anyone done this?

[Celestialsailor]

Originally Posted by noelex 77

For those of you thinking of getting a tablet my experience may help.

I purchased one about 12 months ago after every single cruiser I met said "you have to get an iPad".

I was skeptical, and felt I would use it for 10% of of my time on the computer and laptop the other 90%.
In practice It is the other way around. I use the iPad 90% of the time. (If I could find I computer store and get some toys so I can play movies from my iPad (which I think is possible) it would be 98% iPad.

Hi Nolex..Can I assume you mean the tablet concept and not iPad in particular?

[Celestialsailor]

Originally Posted by boom23

I am not sure if it has been mentioned but, to make any laptop faster and last longer in a bumpy environment replace the standard hard drive with a SSD.

SSD...Solid state device???

[Albro359]

SSD....Solid State Drive

I've had laptops die from just one drop of saltwater...I had an IBM that was great, but a small deck leak killed it.

I replaced with an MSI netbook, but found that it diddn't have enough grunt...and, one day smoke started coming out of the LHS hinge.
And you know what they say...all electroic devices have a cetain amount of smoke in them, when that smoke leaks out they stop working !

Replaced it with a refurbished Acer Aspire from the Acer factory outlet..only $479 and its going great....
Just buy cheap and back everything up is my reccomendation.

[noelex 77]

Originally Posted by Celestialsailor

Hi Nolex..Can I assume you mean the tablet concept and not iPad in particular?

I mean the tablet concept.
Tablets are changing very rapidly at the moment.
I have owned both macs and windows laptops and can see pros and cons with both.
When I purchased my tablet 12 months ago the iPad had a clear lead for my requirements, but your requirements may be different and I think alternative tablets are catching up rapidly.

When used on a boat (rather than at desk) the tablet format works very well. Combined with low power consumption, long battery life, built in GPS, instant on, and great applications, like Navionics, tablets do what I want very well.

If running a business from my desk my requirements would be very different. My experience, full time cruising, is that my iPad is better solution, for most things I want to do.

[Celestialsailor]

Originally Posted by Albro359

SSD....Solid State Drive

I've had laptops die from just one drop of saltwater...I had an IBM that was great, but a small deck leak killed it.

I replaced with an MSI netbook, but found that it diddn't have enough grunt...and, one day smoke started coming out of the LHS hinge.
And you know what they say...all electroic devices have a cetain amount of smoke in them, when that smoke leaks out they stop working !

Replaced it with a refurbished Acer Aspire from the Acer factory outlet..only $479 and its going great....
Just buy cheap and back everything up is my reccomendation.

Yes...I've been threatening to buy an external drive for backup. If I keep just thinking about it, I'm going to be sorry...

[Celestialsailor]

Originally Posted by noelex 77

I mean the tablet concept.
Tablets are changing very rapidly at the moment.
I have owned both macs and windows laptops and can see pros and cons with both.
When I purchased my tablet 12 months ago the iPad had a clear lead for my requirements, but your requirements may be different and I think alternative tablets are catching up rapidly.

When used on a boat (rather than at desk) the tablet format works very well. Combined with low power consumption, long battery life, built in GPS, instant on, and great applications, like Navionics, tablets do what I want very well.

If running a business from my desk my requirements would be very different.

All this from you and others have me heavily leaning tablet with the Dell as a 5% back-up. Sounds like I should wait until a few months prior to take-off before buying. I will keep tabs on them to see any new innovations...

[hellosailor]

noelex-
In theory, absolutely, the WiFi hard drive (i.e Western Digital's "media centers" or "media servers" whatever they call them this week) or even any wifi router with a USB connection for centralized storage drives will work.

I say in theory because I recently bought a USB WiFi stick for a Samsung TV that is supposed to allow the TV to play all sorts of things from your computer without needing to run cords that way. Well....Yeah, but since it costs so much to print paper docs, they don't, and when you finally get support, they had to conference call their TV department with their laptop department (honest!) to figure out that even with the magic stick?

Their TV only recognizes .AVI or .WMV files. So if you've got any sort of standard DVD library, you have to rip it into one of those formats in order to play them. I hope the iOs is better about formats, or your library is already in something it likes, because I tried ripping one DVD into lossless AVI and it took a reasonably fast computer about 3 hours to do that.

Well, compared to rabbit ears and tinfoil I suppose this is still progress. (G)

[noelex 77]

Originally Posted by hellosailor

I say in theory because

I think you may be right.
I still want a wifi hard drive for backup and memory extension ( although my iPad tells me I am not near filling its measly 64g.)

If I can play movies via the ipad and wifi hard drive it will be a bonus.

I currently use a notebook to drive the larger screen for movies, but I think if it the iPad will work it would cut the power requirements. I suspect the iPad will struggle with the formatting of some of movies. In windows only VCL player seems to play them all.

[Celestialsailor]

I have a DVD player and a 25" LED flat screen soon to be run through an inverter. Probably uses more power that way but it's nice lying back in the salon watching a flic.

[DeepFrz]

Has anyone any experience with the ComNav sunlight viewable system?
ComNav