The hubby (being a nerd - soz hun) would not only say take the laptop, he'd spend the next 2 years trying to figure out which one was the best one to buy and then worry away whether he'd got the right one!!

I wouldn't call myself a nerd, but we spent the best part of 4 hours talking to 7 people in 2 languages about a static IP address this morning and only one of those people had a glimmer of knowledge of what one was. At the end of it all, I was very upset and realised it was because I hadn't had my fix of 'news/emails/HUBB'.

It really depends on what you're going to use one for. I like to take the hubby out on my 'magical mystery tours'. I plan routes during the week and we ride them at the weekends. So last week, I spent most of a day planning a 150km route on road and down some remote dusty tracks. I got the longitude and latitude coordinates using satellite imagery (computer), then converted them to decimal degrees (computer). The hubby downloaded them onto his TomTom (computer). As a backup, I printed out the corresponding maps (computer). Off we go, the hubby with his TomTom mounted on his bike and me with 6 sheets of maps attatched to mine with a bulldog clip. Which do you think we ended up using? Well, both as it turns out. It soon became clear when we were off the roads that the coordinates weren't accurate enough (even though I zoomed in to 10m on the satellite imagery) and we ended up using the maps to get onto the right tracks.

Last year on our Euro trip, the hubby had his laptop (purely trasporting it from A to B) and I had a pencil and notepad. I wrote about our trip every night. The computer never came out of the pannier - it was too much of a hassle to set it up.

I'd say take an mp3, use internet cafes (can you upload pics there?), email all your docs to yourself so you can access them, take maps, talk to people when you're bored and never worry about it being nicked or breaking.