MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
Must have:
Long battery life
A full sized usb port
As rugged as possible or be able to purchase a case etc
Sub £200 for a newish second hand price!
Preferably with a keyboard but not essential
Will mainly be used for transfer of large photo/video files from DSLR to remote hardrive and some movie watching while travelling in a very dusty environment!
Cheers folks
What kind of things is to be used for, primarily? Edit, ah you updated!
I bought a used Lenovo x200 but you might get an x220 for that nowadays. Extremely rugged. Ticks all boxes except maybe battery life, I take a spare battery with me. Although you'd probably be better off with a tablet that can handle an external drive - laptops hate dust, tablets shrug it off.
I looked into this and worked out it was cheaper and quicker to buy more SD cards, but I guess it depends on the cards and how many you need. It takes a long time to transfer big files from a card to computer, especially a cheap laptop.
Take a look at Sanho HyperDrive COLORSPACE UDMA2, it is a standalone unit, no need for a computer and runs on standard sized batteries.
What milkie said, you can watch movies on any old tablet, and spend the other 100 quid on a bunch of SD cards?
In saying all this, my Acer Aspire one (zg5) netbook with a mahoosive battery costs less than a hundred quid all in (used netbook, new battery) and has survived a whole year camping, i even got photoshop to work on it with extra stick of ram. Only real complaint is noisy fan that seems to stay on forever, common problem, managed now by third party software and not so annoying.
So many options, depends what screen size you feel you need, how long a battery life, portability etc.
Sadly my camera is a sony and only eats expensive Pro Duo cards!
Would like 4+ hours battery
screen size approx 10"
bonus points for keyboard/wifi/ability to skype etc
Never tried one but wouldn't a used Asus transformer fit yr requirements? 10 in tablet, 11 hrs battery, usb 3, removable keyboard...not sure if it would handle external drive and usb reader at once tho...
Surface RT sounds like it ticks all your boxes.
We've got a Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 11. It's a proper laptop with 11.6" screen that folds back on itself to be a tablet. It was bought partly to take on holiday to back up photos as it's so portable.
Bought new it was twice your budget but they used to make an older model that had an Nvidia Tegra chip in it that might be available a lot cheaper...?
It's well made for a cheap-ish laptop but I wouldn't call it rugged...
Asus transformer looks perfect, amazing battery life, will look out for a cheap one on the bay, cheers