MojoPac: A Laptop Hobo’s Best Traveling Companion

How many times have you wished that your computer was with you while out-and-about? You know, like when you’re checking emails at an Internet Café in some end-of-earth location and one of your customers has just emailed you an urgent request—a situation that requires you to use all the tools within your home computer. But, unfortunately, you’re nowhere near home. Now imagine that you have your entire home computer environment within your pocket hard drive, MP3 player or even flash stick.

I’ve been waiting for such a travel tool for quite some time now. A program which converts any PC operating on XP or Vista into a fully-functioning, near-mirror image, version of the password-protected computer I work on everyday—complete with programs, settings and document files. Thankfully I’ve found such a tool, Mojopac , and the test results are impressive.

How it Works:

Simply plug in your USB device (in which you’ve pre-loaded MojoPac, along with all the stuff you’d load onto your home computer—save for the actual operating system) into the host computer and their screen becomes your familiar desktop. Toggle back and forth between the host environment and your MojoPac view. Their Internet connection is yours, and there’s no need to add anything to the host computer.

After spending a week testing MojoPac out in various working situations: multi-tasking between half a dozen programs (Macromedia Studio, MS Office, and far lesser known applications), and going from one computer to another, I can say that the MojoPac can serve as your primary working environment, where you treat PCs as simple (to quote the makers) “dumb terminals”.

Road Tested:

I was on day 5 yesterday of testing my MojoPac when I realized that I had to renew my tourist visa (make a visa run), requiring me to drop everything to take a mini-bus to the Malaysian boarder. (I’m currently based in Southern Thailand.) That morning I check my email box and got a request by one of my customers to update several of their web pages. My primary computer, however, is an HP Pavilion zx5000—a heavy, oversize, desktop replacement machine. I wasn’t about to lug that beast along for the ride. However, I also have a Fujitsu p7120 ultra-portable notebook (for when I’m traveling light). Luckily (since there was no time to transfer files from one PC to another) all of my working files and programs were now on my MojoPac, and all I had to do to keep working (for the duration of that hellish 10 hour journey) was to grab my little p120 notebook, my mobile phone (with Bluetooth), and my MojoPac. (Yes, my passport too. Sheesh.) And by the time the mini-bus reached the first ferry off the island from where I’m based, I had already made the Web file change with Dreamweaver, created a new jpeg image (with Fireworks), uploaded the revisions to my customer’s web server, and logged the working time in Excel. Afterwards, I downloaded new emails and replied to them (via Outlook), and then read BBCNews.com and NYTimes.com before calling that spur-of-the-moment workday complete.

A few matters of concern:

I loaded the trial version (free for 30 days) MojoPac onto a 60GB, USB 2.0, external hard drive. Although I found little resistance in applying programs to it (involving the same procedures as loading applications to any PC), I noticed a couple of minor issues. One was “power twitches”. This blinking on and off of the MojoPac working environment was due to the fact that USB offers far less power than when working directly from a host PC. Secondly, I found that MojoPac would not allow me to load my Norton Anti-Virus. RingCube’s (the makers of MojoPac) tech people recommended that one uses a “USB power cable” or a “dual-headed” cable that attaches to 2 USB ports—one for data, the other for power. I experienced a little less twitching when experimenting with the later option. My external HDD does not provide for a power cable. The twitching, however, was simply a minor annoyance than anything else. As for protecting your MojoPac against viruses, MojoPac offers a list of other security product options that work (including TrendMicro) and have assured me that their next version of MojoPac (due out soon) will allow for Norton Anti-Virus. I did, however, notice (between toggling back and forth between the host and MojoPac view) that the Norton Anti-Virus on my host was already filtering out my emails for me on the MojoPac. And though this makes me question whether there is any sharing of programs or files going on between the host PC and MojoPac, the people at RingCube state that “no, nothing” is shared between host and MojoPac.

As for technical support,

Posted at 03:00 PM in Products for the Nomad, Ricardo, Stuff You Need, Tech Stuff | Permalink