After a few days or weeks of traveling it can be relaxing to take a day off and pop open your laptop lid – except when you find it’s sluggish, screaming incomprehensible warnings, and in a general state of crankiness. Traveling can be rough on a laptop, especially since we tend to neglect their needs until our bouncing backpacks finally come to a halt.
You can avoid a bad case of travel laptop by getting your computing companion prepared for the road and giving it a bit of tender care along the way.
Most people, whether traveling or not, tend to put off software updates as long as they can; a big cause of computer sluggishness. You can get away with it for a while, that is, until all of your programs are begging for their latest versions in unison, leaving you with a frustratingly slow machine.
The first thing you should do with your laptop when returning from a trip is to run major software updates. I know you’re excited to email, Twitter, and Facebook your friends about your trip to Germany but the longer you hold off on software updates, the further they’ll accumulate to make your laptop feel like its from 1998.
Even a good padded day-pack isn’t sufficient insulation for your laptop. Between the bouncing around in your backpack and the touch of the floor each time you set it down, a traveling hard drive takes a soft but sustained beating. A laptop case that fits around your portable device inside of your backpack will prolong its life and the little bits of data in the hard drive as well.
Also, don’t forget that you’re carrying around a sensitive, albeit portable, piece of technology. Be gentle when stuffing your laptop back in your bag after a long security line, and when running through the airport to catch a flight.
Be Weary Of The Weather
Extreme heat can not only shorten battery life, it can also reduce your laptop’s longevity by causing internal parts to expand, potentially damaging them.
Ideally you want to wait to use your laptop until you’re somewhere near room temperature and you’ve given it a chance to adjust before turning it on. Don’t use your laptop in extreme temperature conditions or when the relative humidity is above 75%.
Most newer laptops have sleep modes that let you power up your laptop quickly after opening the lid. They work by keeping memory (RAM) chips running at low power which increases heat and may require your hard drive to be accessed from time to time.
Your data is most vulnerable when your hard drive is spinning so when transporting it, shut it down or use hibernate mode (built into Windows and can be enabled on Mac).
Perhaps the best precaution is having a good backup of your data offline somewhere physically separate from yourself. One of two free online backup options is Crashplan, a personal favorite. (Here’s how to create a free offline backup system with Crashplan.) Those of you who might need to recover quickly from a dead laptop or are working from the road should consider cloning your system. Finally, take special care to protect you digital photos and physically lock down your laptop to keep it secure while traveling.
[photos by: ismh_ (smashed laptop), lunchtimemama (Windows update), welshkaren (man holding laptop case), SashaW (woman enduring heat), notemily (cat sleeping on laptop)]