Politely - if you're worried about your laptop's hard drive being the major
source of failire then you've never been to africa.

Your major machine killer will be electricity, both dirty and lack-of.

You should look at buying the following items
	a couple of batteries
	some method of charging all/many of your batteries at once
	a solar panel capable of running the laptop and charging a battery
	wall adapters for whatever countries you're going to
	Optionally a universal UPS and spike protection

And I'd advise strongly that you check with your laptop supplier/maker to
make sure you have a true international warranty.

If hard drives worry you, then take a spare HDD and install CDs.



-----Original Message-----
From: Pascal Gaudette [mailto:pascal underscore gaudette at yahoo dot ca] 
Sent: Tuesday, 26 July 2005 2:11 a.m.
To: m0n0wall at lists dot m0n0 dot ch
Subject: [m0n0wall] Colour me impressed! Plus a question...

Now on to an off-topic (but related) question, which I
hope some here will have experience with and reply
off-list.  Has anyone here tried to run a laptop from
a CF card?  Not a firewall, but a client box with X11,
OpenOffice, Mozilla, etc?  I'll be taking a laptop to
West-Afica soon, and I'm thinking about swapping the
internal HD for a CF card, and using external storage
(eg USB HD or Flash, CD-RW) only as needed.  My goal
is to increase reliability and battery life.  Most
...