I´ll be traveling for a bit, and I thought it may be interesting to explain how to work remotely without having to carry your laptop. I have a 4gig USB drive loaded with http://portableapps.com/. This is familiar FOSS compiled to run as standalone applications. Any application could be run this way - it´s just that most software uses standard directories for putting data - like your bookmarks or your saved emails from Thunderbird. A USB drive can also be used to boot your own special OS, but often you won´t have permission to do this in an internet cafe. You will need a machine with USB 2.0 . I have XAMPP, Eclipse, Thunderbird w/ PGP, Firefox, GIMP, and CygWin in an encrypted and/or password protected directory. Easy to back up and carry. I´ve attached a few screenshots: happy hacking!