Why take a laptop computer on a bike tour? After all, it’s heavy, fragile and just another expensive gadget to worry about or lose. Anyway, shouldn’t you be out mingling with the locals instead of stuck to your computer screen?

These are all common criticisms of bike tourists who travel with a laptop but we use ours every day. Here are our justifications for taking one on an extended journey:

• Photo editing: Great if you’re planning a multi-month tour and want to sort out your pictures as you go, rather than leaving them all until you get home.
• Journal writing: Some people don’t find writing by hand as comfortable or as easy compared to typing on a computer.
• Internet access: Internet cafes can be frustrating on a number of levels. Computers can be poorly maintained and full of viruses. They are often stuffy or full of kids yelling Counterstrike moves across the room. Prices vary between affordable and outrageous. With a computer, you can take advantage of a growing number of wifi hotspots or, at the very least, compose your emails offline and just use a USB stick to take your emails to an internet cafe to briefly send everything.
• Information storage: When you have internet access, you can download information and maps about the route and destinations ahead and keep it on your computer for future reference. Scrapbook, a plugin for Firefox, is helpful for this.
• Data backup: With a laptop you can burn your own DVDs and send them home, without relying on internet cafes or photo shops to do the job for you.
• Entertainment: In many parts of the world you can buy movies on DVD or CD for next to nothing. You won’t have to watch CNN for the tenth hour running. This use is questionable if you’ll mostly be tenting and therefore without power to make use of it very often.

Now that we’ve convinced you, here’s what to consider when looking for a machine.

Above all, you’ll want it to be durable. We’ve heard quite a few stories of computers that have died on the road because of the constant jarring, bumps and dust that travelling by bicycle inevitably involves. One solution is to go for a line of computers developed for industrial use, such as on construction sites. Panasonic manufactures the Toughbook series, one of the better known brands of this type.

There are several models to choose from but they’re all built to withstand more than your average laptop when it comes to bumps, falls and grit. They also tend to be quite light. We bought the Panasonic CF-W4, on the lower end of Toughbook series. It weighs in at a mere 1.2 kilograms and the hard drive is fully supported so its moving components don’t get pushed around while you’re riding down a potholed gravel road. It also has a DVD burner and wireless capability.

Overall we’re very pleased with our choice. The screen and keyboard are big enough for comfortable photo editing and prolonged typing and over two years into our trip, with intensive use, we haven’t yet had any problems. In below freezing weather, we noticed some lines developing on the screen but as soon as the temperature rose these marks disappeared. We use a soft, fitted case from SF Bags to protect the laptop from dust and so far the bag has worked well and remains in perfect condition.

The downside to the Panasonic is its small disk space and price. When we bought it in 2006, the cost was £1,200 from an eBay seller in Japan - well above comparable notebooks in terms of size and storage space. Theoretically, these cheaper laptops would be less durable.

Today’s bike tourist looking for a laptop has to consider the Asus EEE. It’s very cheap, incredibly compact, gets great reviews and is produced by a reliable brand. What could possibly be not to like? At the price, it almost doesn’t matter if it fails or gets stolen because it’s no hardship to replace, not counting of course any data you might lose. It’s so small that it should be easy to pack between your clothes for extra padding.

We haven’t had the chance to try one yet but we did examine one and noticed a few potential drawbacks. The screen and keyboard are very small so this could be annoying if you’re serious about photo editing or typing out a manuscript the size of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. There also isn’t much room to store data so you may need to invest in an external hard drive. It also comes with a choice of a Linux or Windows operating system. Linux has some great free software, including word processing and photo editing tools. On the other hand, if you want to use a program or application that is only designed for a Windows platform, getting these things to work in Linux can be time consuming and require debugging.

Our laptop runs on Linux and we can easily edit audio, videos and photos as well as write journals, log our expenses, create PDFs and surf the internet, all courtesy of free software like Audacity (audio editing), Kino (video editing), GIMP (pictures), Inkscape (drawing program) and Open Office (office suite).

No matter your choice, check the battery life. It’s easy to go a few days on tour without access to a power outlet so you’ll want the longest battery possible. Memory size and CPU speed aren’t usually an issue, unless you’re planning on playing Counterstrike in your hotel room! Disk space is likely to be your biggest concern. Check also what voltage the laptop can accept without starting to spurt smoke if you’re going to be travelling internationally. Ours takes power between 100-240 Volts. The last thing you want is to plug your laptop into a foreign socket and watch it blow up before your eyes.