A good presenter has prepared his talk very well. This preparation not only includes the preparation of sheets and the rehearsal of the talk, but also to take a number of hardware and logistic preparations. The speaker should be well prepared for a number of surprising circumstances.

At home

Beamer (obsolete now)

If you are not sure whether there will be a beamer, tell the organizers you will need a beamer (overhead projector is outdated).

Laptop

Power management

Screen savers are outdated anyway.

Laptops have power management features to save battery power when you do not need the hard drive or screen. You must rehearse at home what power management setting you need. There are two reasons for this: (i) you must be able to know how to wake up your laptop and (ii) for some laptops some power management features (like hibernating) either cause a crash or at least a long wake-up time. You do not want that during your talk.

If you can plug your laptop into the mains at the conference, then turn off all power-saving features.

Laptop rebooting

Be sure that you know how to reboot your laptop computer quickly.

A number of laptops refuse to reboot unless you are following a special procedure (not just <Ctrl-Alt-Del>, for instance by manually disconnecting the battery). You can almost always switch an unwilling laptop off by holding down the power button for five seconds.

Laptop resolution

Be sure that you can change the resolution on your screen almost blindly.

Sometimes you will discover that the old beamer of the provincial French university that invited you, shows only half the image of your presentation. Changing the resolution will solve this.

Wifi

If your laptop does not have wireless capabilities (Wifi) installed, get a Wifi (PCMCIA or USB) card (⇒).

Wireless mouse

It looks silly when you have to walk to your laptop everytime to switch to a new sheet. It gets even worse when you use animated outlined lists. This continuous walking to and from your laptop hampers your freedom. You could stumble over cables or block the view of the audience.