Maybe it's because I'm a wanderer

Ah, the joys of travel - the sights, the sounds, the troubled inflight entertainment system, and the horror of getting your email to work outside your own home. Yes, this week's column comes from none other than the Fall 1999 Intel Developers' Forum, in sunny Palm Springs, California.

I can report the heat is hotter than ever thanks to nearby forest fires, depositing a healthy coating of ash on everything, including me.

But back to the plot. Since deadlines have forced me to submit these words before hearing the wise words of Intel's Gelsinger, I'm forced to return to the subject of keeping in contact while away from the office.

This week, I've once again taken away a HP Jornada 680 Windows CE handheld, complete with a built-in 56k modem. But what about getting online when abroad? If you can stomach the call charges and persuade your ISP to give up a non-0845 number to dial outside the UK, then you could go for this route. However, it seems more sensible to make use of a local access number.

This is where international ISPs such as AOL really score, but without a WinCE client or dial-up networking details, they're no good to me. Better to approach an ISP with networking support and local numbers.

I discovered Pipex, U-Net and Netcom would do the trick, but they all wanted to charge extra for this roaming facility. You could install a free local ISP from a magazine CD - the tiny domestic flight from LA to Palm Springs boasted an inflight magazine on CD, featuring an ISP installer.

But no WinCE client, and no good to anyone travelling without a CDRom drive - increasingly common in today's tiny portables.

Wondering how my fellow UK journalists coped, I asked the nearest three - let's call them Peter, Jack and Mike - what their tips were. Despite his colleagues regularly making international calls to replicate their corporate Notes database, Peter was carrying WinCE, pre-installed with a global ISP. Jack carried a notebook and favoured AOL, while Mike fired up his trusty ThinkPad and connected locally via Pipex.

If it all sounds like hard work, you'd be kind of right. In fact, if I only have to check messages, I prefer not to take a portable at all on foreign travels. Instead, I join travellers in internet cafes and log onto Hotmail. Not to use the email you understand. No, under the options menu is the facility to enter standard POP3 account details and access any messages residing on your mail server, attachments and all. A cunning plan and the same one which got this copy to PC Dealer.

Oh, and in case you're wondering, the inflight entertainment failure hinted upon at the top of this page interestingly revealed the processing muscle behind the movie chooser and Super Nintendo games system employed on Virgin 747s. Thanks to merciful video failure during Entrapment, our silver-tongued captain announced that the system should be reset. Favouring the CTRL-ALT-DELETE approach, the familiar boot sequence showing on the screens in the back of every chair proudly announced the show was run on a 25MHz Intel 386SX. Who needs internet streaming extensions anyway?