I am heading back to the UK for 2 weeks. I'll be taking my laptop or possibly my netbook thing for internet access.

Unfortunately, the friends I am staying with do not have WIFI and a couple of the hotels (I will be doing lots of travelling) charge around 15 GBP for the day.

I thought about buying a pre-paid dongle thingy from the likes of Vodafone or O2 when I arrive. Is it as simple as loading it up with credit and away you go? I take it you just plug the thing in and it works?

My next question is that I have 8 hours in Singapore and 3 in London. I know these places have WIFI spots but how do I get my laptop running? I know if a friend wants to use my WIFI in the house I need to give them my security key to set it up. Is this the same at any WIFI spot and I need to ask for a password or security key?

Thanks for any advice you can give. I am not that great with computers!

Places like the Little Chef have free wifi hotspots - you have to register with them and then log on (Maccas also free that way IIRC). Others which profess to have free spots are apparently only free if you have a UK telco (Starbucks). If you can find a place with "The Cloud" (said from memory) then you will be fine. Bit of a chore to be eating Little Chef food all the time but you can make a carafe of coffee go a long way!.

I think I would be buying a payg dongle if I took the laptop. As it was, I took the phone (SE C905) and got a plug in to my O2 phone payg and used the phone for emails and the occasional surfing. Not ideal but not expensive - I think maybe next time I will put the sim in my iphone and see if that works.

Edited to say, dont know about wifi hotspots in Singapore but there are loads of free internet computers - 15 minutes a go but there were usually quite a lot free when I went through the last couple of times so if you can use the net without stuff on your laptop then you can do that easily.