What I Use: Mexico City, January 2022 (Premium)

Our third trip to Mexico in 6 months was structured more like a home swap than our previous trips, and I packed accordingly. We stayed in the same home---excuse me, Airbnb---in Mexico City for most of the trip, but we also took a quick side-trip, in this case to nearby Puebla. And as I’ve written elsewhere, I was able to test my more mobile computing setup on the road for the first time.

Here’s what I brought to---and did in---Mexico.
Tech gear
I’ve written about the “more mobile” computing setup that I brought to Mexico twice---in More Mobile: On the Road (Premium) and More Mobile: Packing It Up (Premium), respectively---so here I’ll focus on the PCs, phones, and other tech gear I took.

PCs
I brought two PCs, both of them former review units, the HP Spectre x360 14 and the Microsoft Surface Pro 8.

Both are what I’d call best-in-class in their respective categories, but I originally hoped to bring at least one newer review laptop; unfortunately, the Elite Dragonfly G3 that HP sent me earlier this month was a pre-production unit and didn’t work properly. But that reminded me of how much I liked the Spectre because of its similar size/shape/form factor. I had to scramble to get it into traveling shape, however, as it had been wiped and was boxed up for shipping. So that was a last-minute scramble.

The Surface Pro served as a backup, just in case, but it’s configured now for screenshots for the Windows 11 Field Guide. I didn’t use it all that much, but I kept it charged and up-to-date.

Instead, I mostly stuck to the Spectre, and it worked well for the most part. I did have two weird issues, however. During a side-trip to Puebla, the bus we took ended up being too cramped to work, so I watched some of the old Microsoft videos I had downloaded to it instead. Since the Spectre is an x360 (convertible) device, I did this with it in tablet mode. This worked OK, bus jostling aside, but when we got to Puebla, the Spectre would occasionally “lose” the keyboard and touchpad in clamshell (laptop) mode and I started getting worried that it had somehow been damaged while traveling. But it’s been fine since then, so I’m not sure what happened.

The second issue is related to the touchpad and has been ongoing and is frustrating. And while I sometimes experience this issue with other PCs, I’ve never seen it this bad. One of the reasons I don’t like large touchpads is that you often have to really stretch over to the left to get a left-click. And I often have an experience where I select something, right-click, choose Copy, and then go to wherever the target is and select Paste, and instead of pasting the thing I just copied, it pastes the previous thing. I did this enough over the past two weeks that I started really paying attention and making sure I was as far to the left as possible when I selected Copy. But it kept screwing up.

I spent a lot of time screwing around with the touchpad se...

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