I've been in a similar trip.

I wouldn't bring anything special, bring your laptop, bring a backup drive to store you photos, if you get bored, buy a sim card and tether.

Chances are, if your like me, you'll start with a lot of energy and you'll be able to work on stuff for a while but you'll loose yourself in the local environment and use your laptop for images. That's what I ended up doing. I don't think I missed a beat in technical terms (truthfully, I was working about 10 hours a month which withered down by itself). There are a lot of internet "cafe's" in that region, so unless your going somewhere with no roads you should have the ability to connect from time to time. Last time I went, even in the bigger villages around anapurna (which can only be accessed by trekking) they have internet cafe's connected via satellite.

Good luck!

This is a heat neutral technology. The sunlight that hits the collectors would have hit the atmosphere instead if the reflectors weren't in the way.

It's kind of like a magnifying glass concentrating a bunch of energy into a smaller area and in a form that we know how distribute better.

The start menu search is something you can add to XP (and is similar to spotlight and quicksilver on the mac)

If you do have to go back to XP, try Launchy. It's an open source start menu indexer that works a lot like the search bar in Windows 7.

The parent is correct. The push of the stick would be like a wave in medium and that wave could not travel faster than the speed of light. A similar example is a network cable. You cannot push the electrons in the network cable faster than the speed of light, they just propagate in a wave that travels near the speed of light.