I'm not a driver, but I've had a lot of luck with my lenovo ThinkPad T400-- shock absorption is good and I've dropped a few times with only cosmetic damages... A little bit of a battery hog though.
Laptops
Discussion in 'Trucking Electronics, Gadgets and Software Forum' started by Hammer 2, Jul 31, 2010.
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I am a trainee to be and heading up to Roehl for training in 2 weeks, so I am getting stuff I need. bought a used Dell latitude d800 with wifi.
My question is can I get by on wifi(at truck stops) or do I need an AT&T device? -
Truck stop wifi is pretty deplorable, in my opinion. It used to be a lot better, but it seems one company, which will remain nameless because they like to respond when they see their name get mentioned on this board, now sets up all the truck stop wifi hotspots. Some work pretty good, but a lot of them are unusable, so it's luck of the draw, and you never know until after you plunk down your $4.79 what kind of service you are going to get.
AT&T limits your data, and spanks you with huge penalties if you go over. If you get a smart phone through them and tether It's not as bad as their dedicated air cards. The aircards are 60 a month for 5 gigs and $500 for every gig you go over. The other carriers, Sprint and Verizon, charge $60 a month and $50 a gig if you go over. AT&T's smartphone plan, like the iPhone or the Motorla Backflip, has a 2 gig cap and $10 a gig if you go over. The iPhone is the only phone they actually allow tethering, the others you can, but you have to do a little bit of googling to make it happen. If you have an AT&T "dumb" phone with unlimited data, I've seen tethering done on those, but if you do it, they will catch you and charge you for using data without a plan, since those phones don't normally pull a lot of data. You can get the $60 plan with one of these phones, though, which saves you the hassle of buying an aircard, but then AT&T's $500 per gig overage charges come back into play.
Virgin Mobile has a prepaid plan, $40 a month for unlimited, on the Sprint network. The downside to that, there are reports that you play second fiddle to Sprint devices, and when one is using the same tower as you, your device gets throttled. Even still, it's still faster and more reliable than truckstop wifi, so not a bad deal. T-Mobile has a $40 unlimited plan as well, but their 3g coverage is not all that great. On the upside though, 2g on T-Mobile and AT&T isn't all that bad. So T-Mobile isn't a bad deal either. If speed isn't that important to you, either one of these is the way I would go.
If speed is important to you, go with Verizon. either get an aircard, or, they have about a half a dozen or so phones out that allow tethering, a few of them will even turn themselves into a wifi hoptspot so you don't even have to plug them into your laptop.tennmoto and Dieselboss Thank this. -
Features better than laptop/netbook include up to 10 hour battery life, shock proof flash drive, 200K apps and you can also view ebooks, as well movies/tv on hi-res screen. Besides the special truck apps, the Google GPS maps would come in handy to search for fuel and restaurant locations: http://www.apple.com/ipad/features/maps.html
I don't mean to sound like a commercial, but this is the first computer I've seen (and I've seen them all since Altair in 1976) that ANYONE can figure out how to use. After finishing trucking school and start to get paychecks again, you know I'll be getting one soon.Last edited: Oct 9, 2010
tennmoto Thanks this.
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