A second machine that travels

The problem it solves

Carrying a laptop everywhere is the usual answer to needing your own machine wherever you are, and it is not a good one. Laptops get left behind, run out of battery, get stolen, and hold the only copy of the file you need. A desktop that lives on a server and is reached from whatever is in front of you removes most of that.

Light is the cheapest way to have one. It is a full Windows 11 desktop with administrator rights, so it holds your programs, your files and your settings, and it opens in a browser tab on a hotel computer, a borrowed tablet or a phone.

How it behaves between sessions

• Close the browser and the desktop keeps running. Open it again from another device and the same programs are still open.
• Files saved on the desktop stay on the desktop. Nothing has to be synced or copied.
• Signing in from a new device needs nothing installed first - a browser is enough.
• If the device you are using is lost, nothing is on it. The desktop is where it always was.

Sizing

For a traveling second machine the workload is usually light: a browser, mail, a document. Three gigabytes of memory and four virtual cores carry that comfortably. If this second machine is going to become the main one, look at Basic instead.