wrote in message
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I'm continually amazed at the number of people who have to overthink this
whole problem. I have been operating the same $450 laptop(IBM Thinkpad
600E, 366MHz,

So you definitely feel a laptop is the way to go on a
boat?

Re bouncing and such; about a year ago we went on a fairly windy
off-the-wind race. I had been accustomed to setting the laptop on the nav
station with no tie-downs unless we were thrashing to weather. For reasons
that I won't go into, we did a hard broach, which churned everything in the
cabin up pretty well. When all the dust was settled, I went below and found
the laptop across the cabin on the sole, still connected via the NMEA cable
to the serial port but unplugged from the power supply, and still running
merrily away. And it still is running.

As far as a laptop being the way to go, it's certainly an individual choice
thing. But it works very well for me. On a larger boat where space and/or
power are not a premium, a small desktop might be a better choice. I just
saw a large cruising sailboat which had installed two of the small Shuttle
systems in a dual redundant configuration. Not a bad choice, since he's
operating with a gen-set and a very large battery bank. YMMV

Max Lynn