Computer Spot

There was a report recently about how young people these days, while they do watch television shows like everyone else, like to watch those shows on their computers or their cell phones.

More and more, television manufacturers are coming to understand that people don’t just want to connect their TVs to their cable or satellite dish and watch stuff as it comes.

They want to watch stuff that comes on their computers on demand., But they do want their TVs – to use as a monitor so that they can connect their laptops and iPads and cell phones to them and watch their on demand content on those big screens.

If you want to do the same, but you’re not quite as comfortable with all these new things the way young people are, here’s how to connect a laptop to a TV.

Here’s the thing – it doesn’t take much to connect a laptop to a TV. The connections are easy. You just need the right kind of cable, and your three-quarters the way there. If your laptop is somewhat recent, you’re sure to have an HDMI port on there.

Chances are though, that your laptop isn’t that recent, and you might not have one of these. What you might have instead is regular old-world VGA connection or, if you’re lucky, a DVI connection.

If you have one of these, you’re in luck. You get adapter wires that have an HDMI connection on the one side to plug into your TV, and a DVI or VGA connection – whichever you have on your laptop – on the other end. All you need to do is to plug each side into the right port, and you’re practically there.

The thing is, that DVI and HDMI are practically the same thing when it comes to the picture department. The only way in which they are different is that HDMI will carry sound only (if it’s there) and DVI won’t.

So if you’re connecting your laptop to your TV with a DVI to HDMI adapter cable, you only get the picturing on your TV. For the sound, you’ll need to run another wire from the headphone output on your laptop to the audio input on your television.

If you’re running a VGA  adapter cable from your laptop to your TV, your TV probably has a VGA port too, and it’s usually marked PC Input. If you don’t have that, an adapter cable will work just as well connecting your VGA output to the television’s HDMI input.

If you have a MacBook of any kind, you probably have a Mini DisplayPort connector. In this case, you’ll have to buy the right Mini DisplayPort-to-HDMI adapter, and you’re set.

On the television, whatever way you choose to connect a laptop to a TV, if your TV is getting the signal through some means, you’re now ready to view it.

On your remote, look for a button with an icon that looks like a square with a right-angled arrow pointing in. When you press that, it’s going to show you a list of all the inputs on your television. You just have to select the input that you’ve plugged your laptop into, and you’re set.

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I have worked for a number of years as a freelance sports writer, where a laptop is an absolute necessity. Because the lifespan of a laptop in my line of work is about two years, I am always looking for inexpensive laptop computers to make sure that I am covered.

The first year that I started covering high school sports was 1999. I was not really sure at that point of all the things I would need, but I did know that I had to be able to keeps stats and produce a story in some form or fashion.

I had been made aware of some inexpensive laptop computers that I could purchase to use, but at that point, I was not even sure how I would use one in what I was doing, which was covering high school football, as all of our stats and stories were called in by phone.

So, off I went to my first high school football game with a note pad, a score sheet and two pencils, and man, did I feel stupid!

Every other reporter at the game had a computer, and it became pretty clear fairly early on that I was the rookie out of the bunch.

I got some looks, and after a few people had asked if I needed to plug in and I explained that I did not have a computer, I got some very interesting comments.

Several of the writers tried to tell me about places where I could go to get inexpensive laptop computers, and I think it was then that it finally started to sink in that I would actually need one. I made a trip to a local electronics store the next day.

The store I went to had a pretty impressive selection of inexpensive laptop computers, and I was able to get a pretty good deal on one of them.

I took it home, got it all set up, and felt a lot better about going to cover my next game with my new laptop. The reality of the matter is, however, that I really was not using the laptop the way that many of them were.

All I was doing was completing my write-ups on the word processing program that came with the computer. I was not entering stats, updating online or doing anything else that everyone else was.

Fast forward a few years, however, and now everything is online and done by laptop. I get paid an awful lot more for assignments now and am in the market for inexpensive laptop computers every few years these days.

It’s funny how things change, because something I hardly used when I first started freelancing and for which I really did not see much purpose is something I could not get along without these days!

If you are perennially a price-conscious shopper, shopping for laptops has to be a unique experience. No other part of the electronics shopping experience ever encounters the kind of roller coaster of temporary discounts and sales that shopping for cheap laptops does.

The most important part to finding cheap laptops is this – you really need to know your stuff.  It can be easy to take a quick look at the specs on the machine and think you’re getting great value.

If you don’t really pay attention to everything, you could be missing a hidden unimpressive spec.

Well, here are a few tips on how to understand the market for cheap laptops. Go in armed with these tips, you should find yourself a lot better equipped to tell the good deals from the bad.

As you might expect, retailers put various brands and models of laptop on sale in the discount area because usually, they’re trying to clear out space for more recent inventory.

Sometimes, they just have to do that because they have B-stock – that’s the term they use for floor display models that they would like to get rid of or units returned by the customer for some minor reason.

All of these are sold as refurbished products. And of course, they couldn’t sell this kind of thing at full retail.

So that’s an interesting term you usually come across when you’re hunting for cheap laptops – refurbished.

What exactly is a refurbished computer?

Well, as you just read in the last paragraph, these are usually units that are either returned by a customer for no real reason or ones that have been sitting on the shelves as display models.

They typically go over these computers carefully to see that there’s nothing wrong with them, wipe the hard drive and reinstall all software, and they sell it.

There’s really nothing much to it. They just have to slap the “Refurbished” label on it because they have to by law if it isn’t completely new.

One thing you need to do before you go out shopping, you need to do your research. To make sure that you remember the specifications at the store, keep those specs written down on paper.

You don’t have to worry about how cheap laptops are somehow less durable or anything. They use the same quality standards more or less.

At their best, cheap laptops are merely marked down for no good reason – the manufacturer decided to overhaul the look of their laptops or something.

And do remember – if you are buying refurbished, make sure that you check to see that you’re offered the full guarantee.

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If only cars were as simple to maintain as computers were. If all you had to do to change the oil or to check tire pressure was to press a couple of buttons sitting in the comfort of your seat, no one would ever let any maintenance get out from under them.

Oddly enough though, they do let quite a lot get out from under them when it comes to computers. The thing is, computers don’t need any mechanical maintenance. You don’t need to oil your hard drive or put your i7 processor in the mineral oil bath to clean up the joints.

Whatever maintenance you need to do is all in the software. People don’t take software very seriously. This little computer maintenance checklist should help you identify what spots need a spot of care from time to time.

Have you ever noticed how when you first buy a computer or when you do a fresh install of the OS, that it runs in an inexplicably clean and smooth way? The moment you install your first program though, things become less than smooth in some hard-to-define way.

Computers do slow down when there is a virus there gumming the works up. They also slow down when there are programs of any kind installed. Of course, you can’t use your computer without installing programs.

But a lot of us just keep useless programs on long after you stop using them. Cleaning your computer up in this way can really help step your user experience up.

You must remember to put this on your computer maintenance checklist – look for any kind of program that you don’t use ever and just get rid of them. Do a proper uninstall, and see how it improves your experience.

Antivirus software by itself really can slow your computer down. The best kinds do manage to carry a light footprint. But they still do bog a computer down at least a little bit.

If you know what not to do on your computer to open yourself up to the risk of malware, you just could consider going without antivirus. It really would help with how snappy and nimble your computer felt.

This still doesn’t mean that you don’t have to have antivirus software. You can get something to install once a month, scan your computer to check for any problems and then you could uninstall it.

If you find that there are viruses found from time to time, that means you really do need the product. Keep scanning to find out if there’s anything there that tells you you need protection.

No computer maintenance checklist is ever going to tell you to try the politically incorrect move of uninstalling your antivirus. But you really should try it.

If you want that new computer feel, you really could back your data up and completely reinstall your operating system once every six months or so. Nearly nothing else you do can make your computer feel as new as this move can.

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If you want to expand your education, or if you want to go back and finish your high school education, you probably want to find a way to fit that into your current life.

Going back to school and sitting through classes with kids half your age is probably not your idea of fun, and if you already have a career, driving back and forth to classes on during your limited free time is probably not on your list of fun activities either.

No matter what your aims may be, you may find that the right computer courses can make you life and your continuing education all the more enjoyable.

If you want to finish your high school education, you can find computer courses that allow you to do this in the privacy of your own home.

There are many reasons why you may not have finished high school and none of those reasons are important. What is important now is that you get it done.

You will feel so much better about your life and your opportunities in life will open up some with your high school diploma.

There are GED and high school diplomas, which are two different things but serve the same purpose. Make sure you specify when you are searching for the right computer courses.

You can also use computer courses to home-school your children. You can use books and visual materials in your home just like a teacher would use in a classroom, but you can also find some great courses that your child can do all on their own with your guidance.

These are fun and educational, and if you go under the right program, some of them are completely free. Pennsylvania has a free cyber school that those living in that state can use, and many other states may have the same. These, along with whatever you want to use to supplement your child’s education, should serve you well.

To continue your own education, computer courses are a great alternative to going back to a school or college. You can further your degree or you can start on a new one.

You can also take random classes that you may think will aid you in your current career, even if they do not lead to a new degree.

You can also use compute courses to brush up on things you have not done in a while and to keep up with new trends and new information on things there were not taught when you got your degree the first time around. Overall, computers offer a fast way to get caught up on the information you need the most.

There are some things that you cannot learn entirely through computer courses. Some careers require some or a lot of hands on learning under the eye of an instructor. When you are searching for your classes, you will know how much you can do online and how much you will have to do in a real classroom environment.

There are some computer courses that you can do entirely online and some that are simply too hands-on. Whatever the case, have a good computer and some quiet time to do your classes. You may not have to leave home for your classes, but you still have to concentrate.

Looking at children these days, it kind of feels like they were born with an iPhone in one hand. Why, if you give them a BlackBerry or another kind of phone with actual buttons and keys, they keep trying to swipe their fingers across them and expecting them to spring to life.

That’s how used they are to technology. Needless to say, kids’ laptops these days make for a great idea. Not just because they’re going to play video games all the time or anything, but because theywill actually them learn well as well.

A lot of the time, parents have never heard of kids’ laptops. When they first chance upon them at a local electronics store, there are a little wonderstruck – what is it about a laptop designed for a kid that makes it different from one designed for a grown-up?

Well, some of the differences are rather common sense. For instance, you can’t get your kid a regular laptop and then expect him to be careful with it. Without a doubt, kids, when you place them in charge of anything, are going to be a little playful and rough with it.

So a child’s laptop is usually kind of toughened up – with a rugged and colorful exterior and a screen protector for the time your child decides to actually clamber on top of the screen in his enthusiasm to get to the bathroom.

Actually, if this were the only concern, you could easily buy a regular laptop and buy a protective shell for it.

But that isn’t the only kind of protection kids’ laptops need. Even if you do insulate it against all kinds of knocks and falls, how about the fact that a regular laptop has a very delicate moving device inside – the hard drive?

Hard drives aren’t really built for any abuse. Neither is a DVD drive. Kids laptops are built with solid-state hard drives – expensive storage devices that are made entirely of flash chips.

These are quite expensive, but you’ll find that your kid gets to keep his new laptop a lot longer this way.

As much as you would like to build protection and security into a kid’s laptop, what do you do about the weight? Even netbooks will tend to weigh at least 3 pounds. What do you do about that when even adults have trouble logging their laptops around sometimes.

They try to kiddie size everything on a child’s laptop. The one thing that makes a laptop quite heavy is its battery. They cut down battery size, and, to still keep the laptop usable over extended periods of time, they cut all kinds of other things to keep power consumption down. Kids’ laptops rarely have more than 10 inches.

What do kids love to do on their laptops more than anything else? It’s plain gaming, of course. You can get a child’s laptop built to handle this kind of thing. In fact, if you don’t, your child’s going to lose interest in it very quickly.

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Is there any reason anyone should go to the trouble of building their own computer from the ground up – buy a motherboard and all those components, snap all the parts together, install the operating system and so on?

Well, you could do that if you are really particular about performance and getting a good deal. The kind of motherboard you get has a great deal to say about what kind of performance you get. And who’s to tell what kind of motherboard Dell and HP and Lenovo use?

Not to mention, there are so many little things you could control if you built your own PC – you could get the latest kind of USB port (SuperSpeed 3.0), you could get exactly the right kind of graphics card that you wanted – no more, no less, and you could buy exactly the kind of monitor you wanted.

You just won’t be locked some impractical configuration that the geniuses of the computer company put together. And of course, you’ll save some money this way.

Okay, now that you’re clear that building your own computer makes a lot of sense, let’s talk a little about how exactly you buy the most important component of your own hand assembled computer – the motherboard.

Most people don’t seem to realize this, but if there’s one part of the computer that you could point to and say – “That’s the soul, the main part of my computer”, it would have to be the motherboard. It’s not the processor or anything else.

For this reason, if you’re building your computer, you need to buy a motherboard first of all. Everything else that you buy, you buy to suit the motherboard you bought.

Picking a motherboard, of course, you do want to think about what kind of stuff you would like to plug into it.

Most parts that you stick into the motherboard – the hard disk, the graphics card, the sound card, the memory – happen to work to standard requirements no matter what motherboard you buy.

If there’s one kind of part, the most important, that requires that the motherboard be specifically built for it, it’s the processor.

The processor and motherboard need to be built for each other. Basically, you have a choice in two different standards when you’re talking about the motherboard-processor match.

There’s the standard adopted by Intel, and there is the standard adopted by its rival AMD. Both are mutually incompatible even if you could get very good performance with either. The first thing you need to do is to choose which standard you want to go with.

Intel is widely considered to be somewhat better when it comes to performance. AMD on other hand, while it does offer nearly the same kind of performance, is often far cheaper.

Once you make a choice of standard here, your next step is to choose how powerful a processor you need. If you’re going with Intel, you want to know how powerful the processor you’re planning on buying will be – the i3, the i5 or the i7.

Once you do that, you’re pretty much set for what kind of motherboard you want to buy.

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If you haven’t actually bought your college-going kit a laptop yet, he is probably pestering you for one right about now.

How do you pick the best laptop for students going to college, actually?

Does he really need a full-blown laptop that costs $1200?

Won’t a $400 netbook do just as well if they just want to take notes in class or something?

Well, your kid probably so badly wants an iPad at this point that he’ll try to convince you that it could be his main computer for college.

Don’t buy that line of argument though. Most of what your kid will do in college, will involve typing. And doing that on an iPad can be a pain – even with a Bluetooth keyboard.

So basically, the best laptop for students is a laptop (surprise!). How powerful a computer is your kid going to need?

Well, he is going to need something for his homework – which, unless he is studying animation or computer music composition, is going to be fairly routine.

An Intel Corei3 processor and a 15-inch screen could do.

If your kid is a slightly built girl though, that kind of computer might be all too heavy to lug around between classroom, dormitory, library and home. A 13-inch laptop should be completely serviceable and should be large enough too.

You can’t just buy a computer for what it does though. Even if it’s technically exactly what it needs to be. College is as much about the social experience of being with your friends and getting along as actually getting work done. Basically, you want to get a machine that’s good-looking, too.

If you really like the idea of an ultrabook – which would be something like the MacBook Air – that might be workable, except that it’s really expensive without really bringing anything to the table other than lightness of weight.

Which actually brings us to an important point. College kids are not known for how careful they are with their possessions.

There’s certainly going to be a fair amount of being dropped, and being slid across floors, and being sat on involved (for the laptop, and not the kid).

While the idea of getting a really lightweight computer might appeal, and ultrabook like the MacBook Air is not really going to be suitable.

Because these computers are by definition, really, really thin and light. They aren’t going to take that kind of abuse. This isn’t the best laptop for students.

You could go with a standard MacBook or MacBook Pro depending on your budget. That’ll cost you about $1200 or so.

On the Windows side of the aisle, ta Core2 Duo or Core i3 should be perfectly adequate. A Core i5 and a 1TB hard drive wouldn’t be a bad idea, either. A machine like this shouldn’t cost more than $600 or so.

Do see if you can get an educational discount. You can usually get $100 off when you’re buying a laptop for a student.

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It used to be that your real computer was always your desktop. Your notebook was always the standby – what you tried to use when you were outside.

You came home and tried to sync your laptop to your real computer so that you could get some real work done. But that’s all changed now.

There is only one real computer in our lives, and it isn’t a desktop. Choosing a laptop these days though isn’t just about choosing a laptop. Laptops have just gone and morphed themselves into a half-dozen different subcategories.

There are the full-featured laptops of course that everyone knows and pays $1500 for. But there are lots of other contenders for the throne – chrome books, net books and ultra-books being important among them. How do you know what to buy?

Let’s start with the newest in this category – the ultra-book. As far as mobile electronics manufacturers are concerned, thin and light are the mantras to live by.

It’s actually a pretty great one as mantras go, and it’s driving quite a bit of innovation in the mobile PC market right now.

You could say that Apple invented the ultra-book category with its MacBook Air. These are notebooks that have a full-sized keyboard and screen and full-sized power – except that the notebooks are thin enough to dangerously bend when you try to do that.

The MacBook Air was quite expensive at first; and rare. But many manufacturers have hopped on the bandwagon now and they all offer something at about $1000.

These laptops are quite powerful full-sized devices; the only place they ask you to sacrifice anything is in the connectivity options they give you and in the presence of an optical drive.

Asus invented the netbook category. It was so successful that Intel really went to town with a whole new kind of stripped-down processor for the category – the Atom.

While ultra-books look incredibly sleek and attractive, net books don’t try to be small in that way. They’re actually just small – with screens under 10 inches.

Their keyboards are small and cramped, and they clearly look like budget offerings. But they’ve been runaway hits with physically very small.

You can get netbooks the size of paperback novels for $250, and they fill a real need – anyone can throw one of these into a handbag or even a coat pocket. And for most purposes, these do work like actual full-sized laptops.

Google came into the market at some point and wondered if it could do something with the popularity of the netbook and hijack the market to its own ends. They’ve come out with something they call the chromebook. While netbooks and ultra-books run proper Windows or OS X operating systems and are real computers in every sense of the term, chromebooks run a special Crome OS. It’s an all new operating system that you can’t really install programs on. There’s just one thing you can do with it – you can run the Chrome web browser. Whatever you want to do, you’re supposed to do on the cloud through this web browser.

Ultra-books really are the perfect compromise. While they are full-size, they’re very light. And you don’t sacrifice any on performance. The ultra-book can usually give you almost everything you are looking for in a computer. They’re the new benchmark.

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Here’s an interesting concept – attend university for free – on a computer, through iTunes. If you’ve been hearing a little bit about something called iTunes U and have been meaning to look it up, this is what it is.

The answer to the question of what is iTunes U is simple – it’s a feature on iTunes that universities pipe their free courses to you through. But it isn’t just university courses that you get, of course. K-12 education is available on a separate channel, as well. There are 800 universities around the world that participate.

Now that you know what is iTunes U, you’re probably anxious to get started. And you probably have lots of questions. Let’s get right to it. Let’s see how it works.

If you have iTunes on your computer, you’re already halfway there. There is an iTunes U button on the toolbar on the front page.

It takes you straight to where you’re going. Right away, you get your full selection of subjects, schools, the top 10 and so on.

Click on it, and you get a full series of lectures or books or anything else. Once you have the course content on your computer, you can port it to your iDevice (which is an easy way to say iPhone, iPod or iPad), or you could read on your computer.

There’s no homework and there’s no one pushing you to go faster. It’s completely user-determined, how fast you go.

If you’re wondering about what is iTunes U good for if there’s no one pushing you, this is probably not the application for you.

You don’t get any university degrees or credits at all. This is just for those who pursue knowledge for the sake of it.

If you find that this is a great concept, to get great lectures and books and study material to take you step-by-step right from the basics to the most advanced levels, if you really want to have the benefit of the kind of education the ivyleaguers get, then this certainly is for you.

So is this a great idea or not? It depends on what you’re looking for. Of course, if you’re looking to your iPhone to substitute a college degree, you’re pretty much going to be out of luck.

But if what you’re looking for is education in something new for a practical purpose – you are in luck. And just think about all those people all around the world who just don’t have access to reasonable education.

Or else, think of all those young people in this country who would like to give a college course a dry run before they actually commit.

It’s a winner of a concept, and it’s the promise that the Internet came with, all along.

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