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Travel was supposed to become a tiny bit less aggravating. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) approved use of carry-on bag designs that allow pass-through of laptops without removing them for X-ray inspection. Plenty of purveyors capitalized on the opportunity for selling new bags, including Belkin, Mobile Edge and Targus, among many others.

The reality of traveling through security checkpoint is different. You still frequently have to remove your laptop from your bag - along with everything else - to prove you’re not a bomb-toting terrorist. And the most troublesome set-back I’ve experienced is cables.

I travel with a huge rats nest of them: laptop cable, mouse with its cable, iPod cable, cell phone charger cable - those are just a few that I can think of right now. The actual pile that amasses before I leave is much larger.

This mass of unruly cables stuffed into my laptop bag is the real red flag, and the reason I’m asked to step aside and pull everything out of my case. Or, at least it was until I decided to wind all the cords up into one pile, stick them into a big zip-topped bag and carry those separately.

The result: security workers picked up my big zip-topped bag, turned it over and waved me through.

My partner spotted one of these at the jQuery conference in Boston on Sunday. It’s a cheap ($249.99 on Newegg.com) and adequately powered (2GB) tiny (2 lbs, 7″) laptop. It’s the perfect little buddy to take with you to conferences, off-site meetings or other events.

It’s also got a solid-state disk, which means you can knock it around relatively worry-free, since nothing is going to come loose inside. It’s also got a built-in WiFi that that the manufactures claim “automatically detects and connects to the Internet at any hotspot.”

It runs Linux rather than Windows, which keeps it fast and cheap. But the downside is that you won’t have a copy of your Outlook for mail or other Windows programs you’re addicted to. Some report that it doesn’t handle video well, although the manufacturers tout sharing videos on YouTube and Flickr. It also comes pre-loaded with Skype, one of my favorite programs for the nonprofit.