UKC

I have to go away for quite a while and I need a laptop to go with. I know nothing about technical specs and so on. Just been on ebay and there is too much and even more confusing than I'd imagined before I started looking.
Requirements, it will be packed in a my backpack and so take the usual moving around, back of cabs, on buses, planes, and will be in a tropical climate, might take the odd unlucky knock. Some I have had before had issues eventually with overheating and I ended up having to buy fan trays, I'd rather not as they last 2 secs and are very difficult to get where I am going.
Spec wise I really need nothing at all flash. I will want to stream movies online, connect to wi-fi, store some photos maybe, and that kind of stuff, forum chat etc. Really just to keep me sane and connected. I would like it to be fairly slim and solid. Weight not an issue.

Anyone know and have any ideas what I should be looking for?

In reply to Dominicandave:

Have a look as the Asus X102BA. I just bought one with exactly the same requirements as you. It's very small, well built, battery life is ok (4 hours), doesn't seem to heat up at all plus the fan vents are on the side not underneath, 500gb HD, 4gb ram, touchscreen if you're bothered, about £200 with windows and office.

Mine hasn't missed a beat so far, I'm really happy with it. Performance wise it's not gonna set the world on fire, but for films, internet browsing, word/excel, emails it's perfect.

I spent ages trying to narrow this down (if you want a tablet, they're worth a look as the choice is massive), but apparently these small simple laptops are called netbooks, so try searching for that too.

In reply to Dave 88:

Thanks, nice info.

In reply to Dominicandave:

Is there a reason you're looking at laptops? For those uses, I'd tend to choose a tablet (ie iPad or Android equivalent)..

In reply to Dominicandave: Try a Microsoft Surface Pro 2 - full-blown Windows on a tablet, and now their successor has come out, you can get some cheap ones off Ebay.

In reply to whenry:

like? Sorry, useless without names to look for, your obvious is not that obvious to me.

As far as tablet, I had an ipad but remember I could not stream movies off sites like putlocker, for whatever reason.

In reply to Dominicandave:

Hi
My girlfriend and I went on a round the world trip in 2012/13

We took the Samsung Nc110( equivalent now is the nc10)

The reason we went for this is that it has a 6 hour battery life and 360 gb hard drive
It's small enough to fit inside a day bag.


Neil

In reply to Dominicandave:

try Microsoft Surface Pro 2

That's a name to look for.

In reply to Dominicandave:

I'm no expert, but a quick Google suggests the problem might simply be that Apple won't use Flash Player, so some movie formats won't play - that shouldn't be a problem with an Android or Windows laptop (or you can jailbreak iPad, but that's a touch more hassle).

No reason not to take a laptop if it suits you, of course, I just find a tablet much easier to carry around.