In truth, though, I bottled out here. I do carry a small modem cable with an RJ11 at each end. It's actually one I got as a Lotusphere freebie a year or two back, a tiny thing that rolls eight feet of cable up into a small flat package 10mm thick and the size of a credit card. TeleAdapt (at http://www.teleadapt.com) sells a similar cable. Fortunately, most phone systems I encounter in offices in Europe now terminate with RJ11 plugs and sockets, so I don't need the array of huge phone adapter plugs that used to be required.

Just one word of caution for travelers to the UK however; here you may well need to carry an RJ11 to UK adapter. RJ11s are not that common in the UK yet. I also carry a device for checking phone lines. Plugging a modem into a digital phone line can be very expensive for the modem or for your laptop. Some, including the ThinkPad, can detect digital phone lines, but it's better to be safe. I use an IBM Modem Saver, which I got from TeleAdapt, but they don't seem to keep it any more.

Infrared port
Ensure you have an infrared port on your laptop and get it set up and working. I use mine not only for performing HotSync operations with my Sony CLIE, but also for a modem connection with my mobile phone and even occasionally for printing. Using a GSM mobile for data isn't very fast, so I don't do it when I can't find a land-line, but being able to do it with no extra equipment is a valuable saving in space and weight. [We suspect we'll start to see Bluetooth filling this role in future years. - DG]

Stand-by
While you get to grips with your laptop power management, set it up to enable stand-by and hibernation. Stand-by (suspend in ThinkPad terms) is a Windows facility that keeps Windows and other programs loaded and running while actually stopping the laptop. This means that you can close the lid of the laptop and stop working in a few seconds. It also means you can get going again more quickly than if the Windows has to be started from scratch.

Hibernation is valuable here too; it means that you can save the current operating state of the laptop to disk and stop work. I have the ThinkPad set up to do this automatically if the battery dies. That way I don't lose what I was doing. It also means that when the cabin crew brings you a meal just after you get your laptop out, you can just shut the lid rather than having to power it all down again.

CD or DVD?
If you spend a lot of time in hotel rooms, you can use the laptop as a CD player or DVD player. I actually rip my favorite CDs to the hard disk--saves carrying them--and play them off the disk with ThinkPad's sound system. If you have a DVD drive, you can also watch DVDs on slow and boring evenings-assuming you remember to bring some with you. Actually buying that new flick on DVD before you travel might even be cheaper than one play of some hotels' Pay TV systems. I also have an MP3 player, a Diamond Rio (at http://www.riohome.com), but I hardly ever use it; I tend only to carry the headphones about and use them with the ThinkPad. Do you need a diskette drive? If so, then get a laptop that exchanges the diskette drive with the CD/DVD, rather than one that plugs in separately. They are smaller, and there are no cables to carry.