Rain Recording

Odds are you didn't buy a LiveBook because you just wanted to open up Excel spreadsheets. Its hard drive might be carrying the beginnings of a hit record, edits on a client's music video, a virtual guitar rack, details about tonight's venue, or a complete DJ set that's ready to get people up and moving on the dance floor. Given the LiveBook's importance, you need to use it both efficiently and securely.

Sure, you know not to drop your laptop, protect it in a strong case, and back up all its data before you leave home. But there are some less obvious tips involving travel, theft, and power; let's investigate.

General Security

Write down your LiveBook's serial number (found on the bottom of the case) and keep it in a safe place at home, but also upload it to your email address. If your LiveBook is stolen while you're on the road, find internet access, retrieve the number from your email, and alert the authorities. Not that they'll find it, but you never know...

Some hotels have in-room safes, although not all of these are big enough to accommodate a LiveBook. However, angling the laptop (place one side or the end on some socks, coffee cup, or whatever) may allow it to fit. If there's no safe, carry the laptop with you, or have the front desk put it in a secure location. If you must leave the laptop in your room, place it somewhere inconvenient and not readily visible (like on top of a closet, where you would need to step on a chair to see it). I know one road warrior who places his laptop on the bottom of his suitcase, with dirty underwear on top; he doubts anyone will dig through the underwear to look for something.

Use an innocuous-looking case for your computer, not a designer computer case that screams "Hey! I own a cool laptop!"

Power Trips

If you can't find an AC outlet at the airport, ask the custodial staff ñ they use the outlets for plugging in vacuum cleaners. Other guidelines: Look on posts, under hinged covers in floors near walls, and near ledges located next to windows. Don't assume the outlet is live; check your LiveBook's charge LED to make sure it really is charging.

Pack an AC extension cord (or better yet, a barrier strip with surge suppression) in your luggage - hotel rooms never seem to have enough outlets in the right places. And given that a lot of adapters for devices such as portable music players, cell phones, camcorders, and the like work on anything from 100 to 240 volts, take along that barrier strip if you're going to Europe. Then you need only one adapter, for plugging the strip into the wall; all your other wall warts can plug into the barrier strip.

You can spend a bunch of bucks for foreign AC plug adapters from a laptop accessories company, and they'll come in a nice little designer package. But if you don't care about the packaging, you can pick up the adapters for a lot less at places like Radio Shack.

Buy a spare battery and keep it charged - either another LiveBook battery (Rain sells spare batteries for $159.95), or one of those large batteries that fits below a laptop. Even though the LiveBook has excellent battery life, it never hurts to have a spare.

Your LCD's backlight consumes a fair amount of power, so when running off batteries, use the minimum brightness you can handle. If the screen is too hard to read when it's dimmed, try switching resolution from 1024 x 768 to 800 x 600. The screen will be fuzzier and "stretched," but the larger size graphics and type will be easier to read. If you're using a word processor, keep the standard resolution but magnify the type size by 150%.