Pay for internet accesss on the Noordam with own laptop?

[Piper's~mom]

Hello all

We will be bringing a laptop along on our Sept 06 Noordam cruise. Will we be required to pay for internet access using our laptop?

thanks!

[innlady1]

Yes, the price is the same....whether you use your own laptop (which I did in February) or the HAL computers. Taking your own laptop sounds ideal, but I almost think we're all better off to use HAL's. I ran up a ton of minutes, going on line from the comfort of our own verandah or stateroom...and lost track of time!

Seriously though, I will be much more careful next time!

[Krazy Kruizers]

Whether you use your own laptop or the ship's computers -- the price is the same.

$3.95 activation fee.

$0.75 per minute.

$55 for 100 minutes.

$100 for 250 minutes.

Sometimes there is a special on embarkation day. Anextra free 10 minutes with the $55 package and extra 20 minutes free with the $100 package. Check with your internet manager.

[Piper's~mom]

Ouch - those are steep rates, especially given that we're using our own laptop. Good point about loosing track of time, especially at .75 a minute!

We may rethink bringing our laptop. We use it to keep in touch with home, charge our Ipods and download pictures off of the camera. Thinking about it, we can bring extra memory cards, charge our Ipods off of an electric charger and use internet cafe's in port to give quick updates to home.

Thanks all for the information, it is appreciated!

[jtl513]

We may rethink bringing our laptop. We use it to keep in touch with home, ...With your own laptop and a mail handler application like Outlook Express or Windows Live Mail you can save money by doing your email mainly off-line. Connect, download everything incoming and disconnect quickly. Then do your reading and writing off-line and reconnect to send everything you've written.

If you don't have such a mail handler installed, at least do your writing of long emails off-line with something like Word, and just copy-and-paste once you connect.

Also, if you have a fairly complex home page like I do, you can save time by temporarily setting your home page to the very simple google.com. Or, if you are going to usually going to check email first, you can set your home page to your ISP's webmail page (such as http://webmail.aol.com )

You may not think that would be worth doing, to save a few seconds ... but once you see the speeds you get on the ship you may change your mind!! :D :D

[LoyHAL]

What an excellent idea, re: changing your home page on your computer to your Internet provider's! I will do this for sure before leaving home!

Also, good advice about the Mail handling.
Thanks!
LoyHAL

[Kween Karen]

First thing tomorrow I am going to change my homepage on my laptop. Great idea. Since I plan on blogging my entire 67 day voyage each little bit of time I can save is important....I am sure it will add up.
I appreciate all of these time saving ideas.