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Cyber Persia

The most misrepresented and misunderstood country of the world.

by Reza Hashemi, Iran

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Chistmas traveling without a laptop

Dec 26, 2008 05:04

I wish you and your loved ones a happy and relaxing holiday season and Merry Christmas! Christmas is a time for family, spending time with the loved ones and putting family first. So, are you going to carry that laptop with yourself everywhere you go?

Give your shoulders some rest and switch to portable applications. Portable applications are packaged so you can carry them around on any portable device like USB flash drives, iPods, portable hard drives, memory cards and other portable device. These will let you take your preferences with you and will run without needing to install them on the computer.

portableapps.com has an excellent collection of useful portable programs like Firefox (for web browsing), OpenOffice (like Microsoft Office), Pidgin (for chat) and GIMP (for photo editing) designed to run from any removable disk without installation. It also includes VLC Media Player that can virtually play all multimedia file formats.

All these applications are open source, and free.

You increase your privacy by using portable applications too. Keep all your browsing information, emails and your Internet traces in a removable device that you keep with yourself.

If you insist on carrying your laptop while traveling, don't forget that the holiday season has the maximum rate of laptop loss and theft.

Recent studies by Ponemon Institute show that every 50 seconds a laptop goes missing in US airports (download link to complete report).

To help keep thieves at bay, take the following 10 steps when traveling with your laptop during the holidays (According to Absolute Software Advices):

1-Back up valuable data before traveling.
2-Use laptop recovery and data protection software.
3-Don’t put your laptop in your checked luggage.
4-Clearly label your laptop to distinguish it from others at security checkpoints.
5-Ask to put your laptop in the hotel safe when you're not using it.
6-If you are using a public computer, be aware of keyboard loggers/trackers.
7-Do not log on to unsecured wireless networks.
8-Do not access financial or bank records while traveling.
9-Deselect "remember me" when browsing the Internet.
10-Clear your history and cache after using a Web browser.

Happy Holidays
Reza

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About Reza Hashemi

Reza Hashemi is a Web entrepreneur.He has an engineering degree in computer hardware and a Master in computer systems and networks architecture. He has experienced a condensed history of computers, operating systems and dot com generations. In his younger days, he mastered the art of playing computer games and programming for Commodore 64 then IBM 370 mainframes with card readers in university and hooked up to the Internet via a 19.6Kbps shared connection in 1993. He is also a university instructor, IT consultant and founder/CEO/board member of a couple of e-businesses since Y2K.