I presently own a Furuno 1502 and would like to hook up with a modem (pactor) and a laptop, in order to be able to e-mail from the boat, providing I have a provider like Sea Mail. In your opinion, which is the most effectively equipped laptop to do the job, or how should this laptop be equipped for optimum performance? Please share this info with me before I purchase the wrong laptop. Thank you very much. I plan to sail the Caribbean this spring, so I am getting prepared. Regards, Peter
Hi Peter: From our experience with SailMail, any computer which has Windows 95 or 98 on it will work OK with most e-mail programs. However, if you visit the www.sailmail.com website you will find some FAQs on the equipment issue.
If you are going to have a computer aboard for this usage, the odds are you may want to use it for a charting system, and perhaps as a weather fax. The odds are that these usage’s will probably be more demanding in terms of the computer’s capabilities.
Having gone through this ourselves a year ago, what we found out from the experienced users of these programs that the best thing was to buy the biggest screen and biggest hard drive that would fit or that we could afford.
The other issue is to make sure that the computer is electronically quiet. In the US, there are FCC standards about RF noise from computers, so most units will do the job. But a check with a local supplier of e-mail or charting software would probably yield up to date information. Regards, Steve Dashew
Posted by Steve Dashew (November 30, 1999)
