Laptops

[gfaith]

My advice would be get a solid state hard-drive minimum size about 256 MB and 13" screen.
Lost a regular old hard-drive in Cozumel thus sshd recommended. Fortunately, I had a clone
of the hard-drive back home and only lost a few photos of the trip. I also recommend a passport
1 or 2 terrabyte to load all your photos onto.
Then maybe Subsurface (freeware) Dive Log works on Linux (my pref), Windoze or Mac .

 

[dmaziuk]

I will be downloading my dives to the laptop

Make sure your downloads work on the system you choose. I.e. mac'o'sex may be very nice, but it'd suck to find out it won't talk to your DC after you dropped umpteen thousand on the thing.

@gfaith: SSDs are not infallible. I don't delete the pix from the card, when it fills up I just replace it. This way I have the originals in the little card wallet somewhere around here.

 

[RyanT]

Another vote for 11" macbook air. It's small and light, but I find the screen still big enough for my 40+ eyes. Mine has been has spent years with me diving and in tropical rainforests and has never missed a beat.

 

[BoltSnap]

Mac's are sweet... But there not durable, I'd be afraid I'd bust it on my trips.

Is loveno a tough computer.

I'm looking for a computer that can take the bumps and grinds for hard travel, light weight, about 15"

I have had my Lenovo since circa 2009 and it traveled with me all over the globe including running in the desert with Qaddafi battalions chasing us all the way to the Tunisian borders in Libya. They have very small Windows based tablets that are very thin and travel friendly with accessories that would turn them into a power house.

We have 5 Lenovos in our school now. We had other big brands in the past but we standardized on Lenovo the last few years.

 

[stuartv]

I have a Dell laptop and a Macbook Pro Retina.

For dive trips, I take my Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 9.7 Android tablet (and a dry bag). 64GB of built in storage plus a 128GB microSD card.

I use Photo Mate R3 for editing the RAW files from my camera. I use a Sabrent OTG adapter to get the photos from the camera's SD card onto the microSD card in my tablet.

I use PastoDeco Pro for planning my deco dives.

The only thing I would need my actual laptop for these days is to upload the dive data from my dive computers into Subsurface. I could use the OTG adapter to get the dive log data off at least one of my dive computers and into my tablet. But, as of yet, I'm not aware of any dive log software for Android that would load those log files. So, I just wait until I'm home to upload the dive log data from my dive computers into Subsurface.

 

[dmaziuk]

... you dropped umpteen thousand on the thing.

That was supposed to be umpteen hundreds of course.

 

[ghostdog72]

I think what I'll do is just download everything to a hard drive and the cloud...
Thanks everyone...

 

[dmaziuk]

I think what I'll do is just download everything to a hard drive and the cloud...
Thanks everyone...

Well... up until recent Win 10 builds you couldn't download the logs from IR-interfaced dive computers. No idea if they work with macs at all: Apple keeps building up the walls around their little garden. For the cloud, you have to have an uplink. Not everywhere it's a) available and b) fat enough to push a bunch of hi-res photos. (I'm sure with a little roaming surcharge on top of per-megabyte charges, your cellphone carrier will be happy to oblige, though.)

 

[jchance]

The IrDA interfaces very well with Mac and has for a few years. No extra drivers needed at all; just the right software. It was with Windows 10 that the problems started. At least with Build 1511 the dongles work again but you have to first preform a few tricks to make them work.

I use Macs pretty exclusively and only have to use Windows when there is an older program that has no current Mac equal. Even then, I run it on my Mac with Parallels. I use Divelog Manager for downloading my Scubapro IrDA computers but their LogTrak software runs just as good on a Mac.

 

[mattia_v]

Just so we're clear, Apple builds little walls around their iOS garden, no argument from me. But they have a very open operating system on their Mac OSX devices, no walls, if you want to go frolicking around with the command line, simply launch the terminal window and go for it. They're arguably more open and transparent than windows 10, which is currently pissing me off with its insistence of downloading and installing updates without allowing me an easy choice in the matter.