Foreign Power

One of Inc.'s editors tells a cautionary tale of what might go wrong when you take your laptop overseas.

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Laptops reduced to shrapnel? Melted PCMCIA cards? What to expect from plugging in overseas

I'd been warned. I was packing for a six-day trip to Brussels, and I wanted to stay as wired to the Boston office as I could. "Well, you can do it, but it won't be easy," one colleague told me. "Be ready for hours of frustration," another cooed. "Your machine will blow up if you use the wrong voltage adapter," added yet another, which led to a fourth arguing that it wouldn't really blow up but rather would melt down. Both agreed, however, that the destructive process would be swift and that there was little I could do to thwart it once it began.

OK, so maybe my colleagues aren't the best source of advice. But I took their words at face value and decided to gird my technological loins against the impending doom by stocking up on whatever it would take to keep my Toshiba T2130CS running overseas.

First, I gave Toshiba's technical resource division a call to ask what my laptop needed to run on Brussels electricity. Kara, in sales, advised me to purchase a "teleadapter" kit, which sells for $150. She couldn't sell it to me, she said, but I could call the company's accessories division, in Phoenix, and order it. Sure, pass the buck. Send me to the boys in the desert so they can take the fall when I'm found in my hotel room, computer carcass melted to my hands.

But I played along and called the 800 number. I spoke with a sales representative who told me that he'd be glad to sell me the adapter kit but that I didn't really need it because the Toshiba T2130CS has a universal power supply that lets you plug the machine into any outlet anywhere in the world. I brought to his attention my colleagues' concern about rapid meltdown. "Well, you can worry about that," he told me, "but it isn't going to happen."

What I would need, he said, were some outlet adapters and telephone-jack adapters to make my laptop's plug and phone-jack cord compatible with whatever European plugs and jacks I'd come across. So I trekked over to my local Radio Shack and paid $7.99 for a 273-1405D Foreign Travel Outlet Adapters package, which contained four different plug adapters that, the labeling said, would allow me to connect in "England, Hong Kong, Africa, Israel, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Australia, South America, and the Caribbean." I also dropped $14.99 for a 279-412 International Telephone Adapters package, which contained three different phone-jack adapters, one each for Germany, the United Kingdom, and France.

Still not convinced that I was safe, I did what I should have done in the first place: I checked the user's guide. Sure enough, there on page 279, directly under the heading "Power Cord Connectors," was this sentence: "Your T2110CS or T2130C Series computer features a universal power supply you can use worldwide." Lesson Number One: When you're ignorant and fear explosion, read the manual.

Of course, I continued to have my doubts about connecting to the computer back in Boston from a hotel room in Brussels. My colleagues (who else?) had warned me about incompatible tones and modems and data connections. Mostly I wanted to be able to call in for E-mail using the cc:Mail Mobile software on my laptop and to get on the Internet.

When I finally got to my hotel room, I immediately unpacked the laptop from my briefcase and spilled the adapters out onto the desk. I stripped down to T-shirt and jeans, ready to do battle. I saw right away that the plug adapter for England was the one I needed, so I connected it to the laptop's plug and then plugged the machine into the wall and waited. No smoke, no sizzle, no zapped hard drive. Curious, I thought. But I wasn't through yet. I looked under the desk and behind the bed at the phone-jack outlets in the wall. Hmm. They turned out to be the same type used in the United States, so I didn't need the adapters after all. I hooked up the laptop's modem to the phone jack under the desk and prepared for the true test: dialing into the Boston office and retrieving my E-mail. I booted up the cc:Mail Mobile software and switched the program's dialing to "manual" so that I could dial up the Belgian access number for my long-distance provider and then, using my calling-card number, dial up Boston.

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