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Fellow MyBlogLogger Chris Mitchell has an excellent post in his blog on Thailand and East Asia travel with Seven Tips for Taking a Laptop Travelling. There are some great ideas there, especially about protecting yourself in the event somebody finds (or “obtains”) your laptop.

I’ll add two more ideas:

• PortableApps.com is a suite of free software programs specially configured not to be installed on a USB drive, and not leave tracks on a computer’s hard drive. It includes installations of Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice and GAIM.
• Consider buying a account someplace that lets you pay for WiFi hotspots by the minute on a major network. The Azure network, for example, will let you purchase ten hours to use at hotspots over the course of a year for A$66. That is significantly cheaper than Telstra’s A$5 for just fifteen tiny minutes. [Exising Boingo users can access Azure hotspots for US$0.12/minute above their monthly fee, and existing IPass users can access both Azure and Telstra sites.]

Finally, if you decide that laptop access is just too expensive and are going to go the internet cafe route: remember to have two disposable email addresses as well as somebody you trust back at home who can access your main email account and set the forwarding to the second disposable address if the first one gets compromised via a keylogger.

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