Getting your tech toys ready for vacation

By Jay Dougherty Jul 2, 2005, 2:59 GMT

But just like the clothes you'll need for your trip, your technological gadgets require some extra thought on your part, for maintaining them on the road is not the same as having them around the house. How can you prevent your tech toys from becoming useless objects while you're away? Here's a checklist of things to remember.

Better batteries

Almost every tech gadget these days requires batteries. If you purchase traditional, nonrechargeable batteries, your battery bill will soon outstrip the prices you paid for the gadgets themselves.

So by all means, switch to using rechargeable batteries - and remember to take a battery recharger with you on holiday. Aside from cost savings, there's another good reason to use rechargeable batteries: today's best last longer than nonrechargeables.

There are plenty of good battery retailers online, places that sell batteries for just about any technical device today - as well as rechargers. ThomasDistributing (http://World Wide Web.thomas- distributing.com) is one. There are even recharger units that will charge five or six different types of batteries. The German-made Ansmann battery chargers or the AccuPower AccuManager are good examples.

It's in the bag

When technology travels, it needs protection. But as people accumulate different tech toys that must tag along on vacations - mp3 players, digital cameras, camcorders, notebook computers - all those cases can add up to a major nuisance.

So think consolidation. Bag makers such as LowePro have heard the cries of the tech-laden vacationer, and they've come up with bags designed to hold all of your gadgets conveniently in one pack.

Lowepro's CompuTrekker  products, for example, are backpacks designed to hold both notebook computers as well as cameras, camcorders, and lots of other technological odds and ends. Kinesis, another innovative bag maker, makes a unique modular bag system to which you can add individual components to fit the kind of gear you plan to carry.

Notebook preparedness

Vacationing will often find you using your notebook computer on battery power more than usual. To conserve the life of your battery, remember the golden rule of notebooks: run the battery completely dry before plugging in the power again.

Doing so prolongs the useful life of your notebook's battery. Plugging in before your battery is fully discharged will, over time, hasten in the demise of your notebook's battery.

Also, if you'll need to run for long periods exclusively on battery power, consider purchasing and carrying an extra battery.

Digital camera necessities

If you'll be snapping a lot of digital pictures on vacation, you'll need to think about where you're going to store pictures that you've already taken so that you can reuse your memory cards. You have three choices here: bring along a notebook computer, buy lots of memory cards, or purchase a digital image bank - a tiny enclosed hard drive made specifically to download your digital images so that you can reuse the cards.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach. Notebook computers, of course, give you the most flexibility - allowing you to view decently-sized slideshows or editing your pictures after downloading them. But notebooks are also heavy. Purchasing lots of memory cards can get expensive quickly, but they are the most space- saving option. Finally, an image bank will be larger than a handful of memory cards, but these devices can be expensive. Plus, if you offload all of your images into one of these devices and it breaks, you've lost a vacation's worth of photographs.

There's no best solution. You just need to make the image storing decision that's right for your circumstances. For instance, if you want to bring along not only a digital camera but also a digital camcorder, bringing the notebook could be a great idea. You'll be able to use it to store both your digital images and your digital videos. Plus, you can view photos and movies on the same device.

And remember: if you start running low on memory cards, you can always reduce the "image quality" setting on your digital camera. Today's high-megapixel cameras take photos of good quality even at their lowest resolution setting, which would allow you easily to double the number of photos that you can store on a typical memory card.