I’m about to do some extended traveling.
I want to have a laptop along for
Top priorities are that it is small and cheap and lightweight. I don’t care what OS is on it. 100GB of storage is plenty. It should be very cheap because I don’t want to have to worry about it getting stolen. Used or refurbished is fine.
Why not get a tablet instead with external hard drives?
How to Back Up Your Pictures Using an Android Tablet and External Hard Drives
PastTense, there’s something to be said for ability to repurpose your mobile device for serious heavy work that a tablet may not always handle well (I have been thinking of that because my old netbook – remember those? – is going to need replacing soon. I am always at risk of being asked to prepare a report with presentations from info sent to me in various business-standard formats while clear across the continent). But otherwise for what the OP states, a tablet as in your link should be good – the major brands of tablet only give you up to 32GB onboard and maybe a SD slot.
I am using a netbook, Intel Atom processor, 1 gig memory, 250 gig hard drive. Got it new for $250. Smaller than your usual laptop, lightweight. The day after I bought it they went on sale for $200
I have an ASUS netbook that I use for watching movies in bed and taking on vacation for traveling tips. It’s three years old and still a very competent little device. Think I paid about $250 for it but you can get different styles of them for less.
I’ll consider it. Do you have a specific recommendation?
Yeah, something like that would be ideal. Which one is it?
I’ve got a bottom-of-the-line tablet I bought for my mother and I’ve been using it to edit “office” style files (the docs, excels, ppts and pdfs I was recently given to study were full of errors, so I helped stave off the boredom by editing them), what I wouldn’t be able to do is show them unless the projector accepts USB.
It can read regular document formats just fine, but if you need something special (say, a Visio or MSProject) you might be SOL.
I’ve been running on a couple of netbooks.
I’m currently on an Acer Chromebook. It’s got a tiny SSD only (32GB), but its price was right: $199. I actually bought it because I spilled a bowl of pho on my other netbook, an Aspire One. I was on the road and I desperately needed a computer.
The Aspire One is pretty nice. It’s got an Intel processor with a 330GB hard drive and runs Windows 7 64bit. I can run all my modern 64 bit apps such as Photoshop and Illustrator. After I woke up in Vegas with the screen mysteriously smashed, I was able to pick up a refurbished but essentially new one for $200 from Amazon or eBay; the new one was closer to 400 bucks.
One bummer thing about my Chromebook is that it doesn’t have an SDHC slot and it also seems finicky when attempting to hook up USB peripherals. I seem to recall it wan’t recognizing my camera, which is really lame, hence making the lack of SDHC even worse.
OP, you should tell us what screen size you want.
I have been wondering: can everything the OP wants to do be done on a smartphone?
My frontrunner right now is the Asus T100 Transformer. It’s an Atom-powered Windows tablet/laptop hybrid with a 10" screen and a built-in SDHC card slot.
I’m wary of Chromebooks or tablets, the former because I expect them to want/require an internet connection more than I expect to have one, and the latter because I don’t know how to navigate the system well enough. PastTense’s link on how to back up photos to an Android tablet looked a lot more complicated than I’d like to deal with.
But maybe I’m wrong about those restrictions. If there’s an easy and simple way to use a tablet or Chromebook for backups, I’m open.
I have a smartphone, but it doesn’t have sufficient space to store video to watch or to backup photos.
Probably wouldn’t hold too many movies…
T100 might be a great choice. Go try it out and see if you like the keyboard. This is the acid test - do you like the keyboard or not. I used a netbook for over a year. Net books are okay if the keyboard is good enough for you. The T100 is more expensive but much much better than a netbook.
You will probably need to add a micro USB 32 or 64 GB card for additional storage. I’m not sure if it comes with regular USB or just the micro.
where are you traveling to?
That wasn’t backing up TO a tablet, but from one to external HDDs. If all you want to do is back up to the tablet (or to it’s inserted micro-SD), what you do is:
Step 2 is so you’ll manage the transfers from the computer, if you tell the tablet that you want to transfer data it means you want to use the tablet to drive the transfer.
I’ve been drooling over the Trio myself, but my current project comes with a client-owned laptop so I don’t have a good excuse to buy one.
I don’t know if it qualifies as “cheap”…I just got a 11.6" Acer Aspire V5 to replace my XP travel laptop. Windows 7, 4GB memory, 500G HD, 3 USB ports, and a card reader. It’s going for $347 right now. So far, so good. I’m getting ready to take it on a 3-week road trip – I’ll use it for photos, web browsing, etc, and I got a $30 DVD drive for watching movies.
Looking back at my OP, I wasn’t totally clear, but what I want to do is take pictures with a camera and back those pictures up to another device.
My understanding is that tablets are generally still designed to be peripheral devices, not primary devices, so plugging my camera into it is not (generally) going to work the way it would with a laptop. Am I out of date? Can you just plug a camera into an Android tablet and expect to be able to import pictures?
This is what I’d probably get. It’s got a touchscreen and going for $300 refurbed at Tiger Direct.
How many gigs do you need? Bigger-screen smartphones come with up to 64GB and a micro-SDHC slot that can take another 64. Plenty to rotate what, maybe a dozen choices in for a trip?
My current phone does not have much space, nor an SD slot.
And most smartphones with that much space cost around as much as the low-cost laptops we’re discussing, don’t they?
For those requirements, I’d probably just go to eBay.