Well good afternoon, everyone!!

The programmes I wish to use are, fairly obviously, Excel and Word. But I also need [ ? prefer to have the possibility of use ] of Quicken, for our bank account, and Investor 3 for my shares. The reason that I need to keep an eye on our bank account is that we were with RBS, and our branch was sold to Santander, and yes I am a racially biased bigot and did not want dagoes having control of our money, so we switched to NatWest. We have a current account with a linked deposit account, and the deposit account used to have a reasonable rate of interest. Not now!!!, it only pays 0.1% gross!! So my wife, who already had a Sainsburys account we used for some 'spare' cash, we now use as our deposit account. All the accounts can be accessed electronically and monies can be moved virtually instantaneously, and the Sainsburys account pays 2.6%, not very good but brilliant when compared with other accounts. So our accounts need to be watched so we don't get into the red. So the two holidays we are going on will require me to connect with the UK at least every other day, and I thought a tablet MAY be better in that it would be easier, and smaller, to carry around and I thought connect, using a payg dongle, that everyone seems to rave about. But these dongles use local networks so I will still have to pay the liner and the Maldive authorities for use of their networks, whereas I had thought these dongles used satellites. In the Maldives the charges are $5 for the first minute and $2 there after, so this means a charge of $13 for a 5 minute connection, whereas using a satellite I would hope that they would offer a MB data rate that was reasonable. But this is not to be and I don't see the need to go to the expense of getting a tablet, as I like and wish to continue with my desktop, and I will only be using my wife's laptop in 'shortish' bursts. Just about livable with, and free!!!

Many, many thanks for everyone's comments, as I was hoping to get at lest 3 or 4 replies, not the significant amount that you have all made. A deep felt thank you, from me to everyone.