I bought a Targus laptop bag for my Apple MacBook Pro the year before our big summer trip to Europe in 2012. I was practicing with luggage as Rick Steves recommends in his travel guidebooks. If you can't carry it around your hometown you won't want to carry it on the go in Europe. [[ASIN:1612383696 Rick Steves' Europe Through the Back Door 2013: The Travel Skills Handbook]] I would take my laptop to a local restaurant using this laptop bag and see how it performed. In this case I thought it was awkward and heavy. The bag that I slung over my shoulder kept on swinging into chairs and even large bottles of Coke in a rather disastrous fashion. I tried carrying it around by the handle. I wasn't sure if it was strong enough to carry the weight of my laptop in addition to a few pens and two file folders worth of papers stuffed into the back pocket. I tried other laptop bags, some much more expensive. Nothing worked right. In the end I went to Europe carrying my laptop in a sleeve with a handle. It had a front zip pocket for pens and such. It also had a back slip pocket for those file folders. I had to embark and disembark the Queen Mary 2 carrying my laptop so I had to have a bag that was svelte and not awkward at all. This Targus Basic Messenger Case didn't meet the test.