Downsizing Gearbag
Fujitsu recently sent me a Lifebook P1510D to test and review over the next 30 days. I'm going to use that time to see if I can pare down my normal backpack full of travel gear into a much lighter load. My goal is to see if I can travel with the Lifebook, the M-Audio Microtrack, a microphone, PSP, cell phone and the necessary support cables; completely abandoning a full-sized laptop and all the junk I might be inclined to stuff in my larger 3 compartment backpack.
Last year I picked up the bag pictured at the right from REI, which has room for about the equivalent of 3 hardback books when fully stuffed. The Lifebook fits perfectly, with plenty of room for the rest of the gear I need to travel with and a little room left over for the random stuff I always take just in case. I'm going to make a test run this week while my office is still recovering from our basement flood and I'm out at Podcast Hotel toward the end of the week.
Assuming all goes well, this will be my travel bag for the following week's trip to Search Engine Strategies in New York. Before I get to serious about going portable, I'm going to need to load up the Lifebook with all my usual apps, which I documented about a year ago when my HP dv1000 first arrived. I'm updating the list just a bit because I've switched away from Copernic and over to the enterprise version of MSN Desktop search and I likely won't install SysSense or Cakewalk Kenetic, but the rest of the apps are all necessary for me to provide an accurate picture of what my usage pattern is like on a much more portable PC. The one app I think I'm missing on the list is OneNote, which should be part of every computer user's application arsenal. Microsoft offers a free trial of OneNote and I highly recommend testing it for yourself; it's doing for productivity what WordStar and the other early text editors did years ago for word processing.
My big concerns with the Fujitsu Lifebook P1510D are how I'm going to use my Cingular BroadbandConnect service without a PCMCIA slot (rumor has it there's an external adapter, I'd love to find it) and whether I can get really get by at 1024x800 maximum resolution. I'm sold as the Lifebook being an ultra-portable alternative to my clunky hard drive, but I'm a little nervous about living with a screen resolution I haven't used in years. 1280x768 on the dv1000 was already a concession compared to the massive difference on my desktop system. The other thing I'd like to find is a bigger stylus for the Tablet PC features. About 18 months ago I said Tablet PC is cool but not for me, but a convertible in this small form factor is making me change my tune already.