Last week I wrote about using your laptop internationally (from the United States). I received several e-mails from readers and would like to share their tips and add a couple more.

Pierre M. Hahn of San Francisco (pierre28@pacbell.net) wrote:

I have been traveling with my laptop for the past three years. This year I went to three new cities. In the Czech Republic, there were lots of cybercafes in Prague, but not too many in outlying towns. Budapest, Hungary had fewer cafes, but they were still not too hard to find. And in Vienna, Austria, I was totally frozen out of cafes. To the best of my knowledge, I would say that when the country is in good shape economically, you will find fewer Internet cafes.

And yes, MailStart.com worked very well. I even set up my CompuServe mail to have POP3 capability. To my knowledge, you cannot do this with AOL.

A couple of things I would recommend: 1) if you need AOL, get the list of country local numbers to get to your account; and 2) if you have a digital camera, make sure you have enough room to download your pictures to your computer.

Lastly, in my travels to Benelux, France and to Switzerland, I have found that many hotels have changed to the U.S. standard of RJ11 telephone connectors, but sometimes they use the outside two wires instead of the inside two wires. So, I carry an adapter that will allow me to connect either to "line 1" or "line 2" of a two-pair RJ11.

Thanks, Pierre, for sharing your experiences with my readers. I would like to comment on his statement about fewer cybercafes in economically sound countries. There are several cybercafes in downtown Dublin, Ireland, and Ireland has been experiencing phenomenal economic growth over the past few years. So, I’m not sure his assumption is totally accurate. Bottom line: look for cybercafes in areas you are visiting, or come prepared to access the Internet in other ways.

Charles Gemmeke, writing from the Netherlands (ch.gemmeke@hetnet.nl), warns:

Please be careful care when using a laptop on German trains. The tables in some trains contain magnets, so several people have lost all of the data on their hard drives.

Charles, thanks so much for sharing this information. I don’t think one would normally expect train tables to contain magnets, so this warning should be heeded if you plan to use your laptop on a train. For the record, I’ve used my laptop successfully on Amtrak trains in the United States. Actually, I find Amtrak much more user-friendly in this regard than airlines. Each seat in most Amtrak trains has an electrical outlet placed strategically for laptop users. You don’t need to kill your batteries when traveling by train in the United States! Bottom line: check with the railroad before using your laptop to ensure you won’t be the unwitting recipient of a hard disk failure.

In last week’s column I wrote about accessing your e-mail internationally. One option I failed to mention is to look for free e-mail accounts that provide Internet access in the country you are visiting (or in the U.S., for that matter). I decided to look for such a service in Ireland before I departed, and found several free e-mail providers. I tried to sign up for one from the United States, but it wouldn’t let me because I wasn’t dialing in to its network at that moment.

However, I did successfully sign up for free e-mail service at Indigo.ie. Its service is called “Gofree,” and all you pay for is the local call. In Ireland, if I dial during off-peak hours, download my e-mail, and sign off the connection, it could cost me as little as 20 cents per phone call. That’s a huge savings over dialing back to the United States using AT&T, as I talked about last week. With that service, you don’t incur international rates, but you do incur long-distance charges based on AT&T’s rates. I’ll be trying the Gofree service in Ireland, and I’ll let you know how I fare.

If you’ve experienced international laptop travel and would like to share your successes and secrets, send them to me at one of the addresses below. In the mean time, bon voyage!

Elizabeth Kelley Kerstens, CGRS, is the managing editor of Genealogical Computing, editor of the Board for Certification of Genealogists’ newsletter OnBoard, the creator of Clooz—the electronic filing cabinet for genealogical records, and a frequent contributor to Ancestry Magazine. She can be reached via e-mail at liz@ancestordetective.com or at gceditor@ancestry.com.