Hi all,

I'm after a garage laptop (!). The current project is a 1967 TR4a restoration, and I've taken about 2000 pictures of it as all the bits have been taken off and stripped down. Now I want to put it all back together, and need to be able to look a the pictures as I do. I don't want to get my PowerBookPro covered in grease, oil and general garage gunge....

So - what sort of spec laptop should I be looking at just to view the pictures, no internet, games or anything else...

It does have to run windoze XP as I've got a little program to organise bits of car that runs under that.


Thanks

Chris

Ive got a dell inspiron 7500 which is about 8+ years old now.
Bought it 2nd hand for 60 quid a couple of years ago, it is a pentium 3 - 650meg processor and has an upgraded 40gig hard drive with 256meg of ram, running windows XP, Does exactly what i need it to do as far as its bullet proof - slightly bulky to carry around but for the garage its spot on.
Im typing on it now, its hooked up to the internet fine, doesnt run slow and will be used to set up my megasquirt when i get that far in my build.
I actually use it as my main computer and have done since i got it.
Have lots of pictures stored on it and for the price, it owes me nothing.
Theres plenty better out there but if it finally gives up on me, i will pick up something similar as i dont need a high performance laptop for playing games on etc.
Think they still go on ebay for about 50 quid, well worth it in my opinion, has a nice big screen and doesnt take up much room on the work bench

Hope this helps, regards Andy

[Edited on 6/6/09 by Andybarbet]

Might be a hard search, but maybe you could get some kind of rubber keyboard cover? You know just to protect from the grease, or maybe get a separate mouse and thus that's the only bit you need to touch

if you are just looking at photos, can you use a digital photo frame?

Would be well worth saving the photos to a folder, duplicating the folder then bulk sizing the second folder images to the screen size, i.e. 1280 pix x 768 pix
This will reduce the image file size to one that can be scrolled through with ease by any computer and as the image size is the same as the screen size no loss of visual quality.
If you want to print or zoom in to image detail use the folder with the original full size, full resolution images

I think one of the new cheap netbooks would be good, you certainly don't need anything powerful and they have great portability. Something like this for £196.62 would be great, this will run windows but comes with Linux, worth mentioning that many windows programs will run under wine on linux but if not then you could install windows. You can also buy this same laptop with windows preinstalled but then it doesn't come with the SSD hard drive.

[Edited on 7/6/2009 by Keith Weiland]