Computer Spot

If you’re a gamer and you’re working off a limited budget (who isn’t?) then you’re almost always better off buying a desktop computer and not a laptop. You get a lot more mileage for your money.

But laptops, more and more, are becoming mainstream and don’t really cost as much more than desktops as they used to.

You really could find a laptop for gaming that was designed with all the right features, that wasn’t that much more expensive than the desktop equivalent. This is what you need to know.

How do you know that a given machine is a gaming laptop? Well, usually, they don’t build them to be as slim and lightweight as regular laptops. These, they built for performance, even if it means a less flattering figure.

Now a laptop for gaming isn’t just a powerful laptop. It needs to have specific features built in that don’t all have to do with performance.

Let’s look at something to do with performance first of all and get out of the way. It goes without saying that a laptop for gaming needs a powerful graphics card built into the system.

Since this is meant to be an evergreen advice article and not just something for today, it’s hard to specify what kind of graphics card it should be.

As of late 2011, one specification you could look for would be a card built-in that had 2GB in graphics memory. That isn’t the only specification you need to look for though. Just look for the best discrete desktop graphics card for gamers they are selling at the moment, and look for something that’s nearly as powerful for your laptop.

A good way to judge how adequate the graphics card on your laptop is, would be to look up the recommended configuration for the games you intend to play. If your laptop has something like that, you’re good to go.

But apart from the performance, you’re looking for things that make gaming actually easy and convenient. For instance, if they call it a laptop for gaming and the keys seem all crammed together, that’s poor design.

Look for well-spaced backlit keys and a tapering keyboard design. You need to be able to hit those keys in a split second.

Of course, you need a good screen that’s at least 15 inches, and Full HD would not be a bad idea either. But you do want screen quality and sound quality that really live up to what the game designers have intended. And intend very well, they do.

They build those games these days to spectacular Hollywood movie levels of budget. The better your screen and sound are, the better you’ll enjoy your game.

Look for audio ports that will allow you to directly plug your laptop into a surround sound system if it’s available.

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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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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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If you are on the market for a laptop for the student in your family, there are basically four things that you need to keep in mind as you shop around.

Laptops for students need to be light because they do need to carry them around a lot, and they need to be small enough to slip into a satchel or something.

They need to have the kind of power your child’s course of study requires, and they need to be the right operating system for the kind of software your child will be using in the course of her studies.

What that means is, if you have a student who is studying video editing or animation, you don’t want one of those mass-market $300 laptops. Those will almost certainly be underpowered for this kind of thing.

On the other hand, a powerful and bulky desktop replacement type with powerful graphics processing ability will be overkill somewhat for the student who just wants to take down notes in law school. Let’s look into it a little bit deeper.

As much as you would want to buy the most powerful machine out there that you can afford, you do need to remember that with bag and power supply all put together, a powerful computer can end up weighing 10 pounds.

It’s really too much to expect students to carry around all the time. You don’t want something that’ll tire her out before she even gets into class. So when it comes to buying laptops for students, you have to really accept that portability trumps power.

And it’s not just about how light the machine is, either. While you might find yourself loving a large 16 inch screen on a laptop when you’re working at home, try using that same laptop at the coffee shop or something where there are lots of other people and you don’t find yourself free to spread out.

That’s the kind of environment your child will be using her laptop in – in class or in the dorm. There really isn’t much room at a classroom desk for a large laptop. Go for something that’s 11 inches or 13 inches in screen size, and your child will thank you for it.

Actually, the small size of the thing should work out really well. The smaller the screen on the laptop is, the smaller the battery has to be. All put together, it has to make for one lightweight laptop. Not to mention, a smaller screen is likely to use less power. That’s more battery life for you.

Try your best to look for a laptop that has the longest lasting battery. Try to get something with seven hours of battery life at least. It shouldn’t be that hard these days.

And finally, you really don’t need to buy a really powerful computer unless your child really needs it in the course of her studies.

You do need to remember that a young person can be really tempted to stray into gaming in her spare time if she has a really capable computer. Get as little computing power as your child can actually manage with.

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So let’s start with the basic question here — what is a refurbished laptop? Is that like a really old laptop that’s been used for three years and sold by someone and cleaned up for sale again? Not really.

A refurbished laptop is, in the lingo, also called B-stock. It’s either a laptop that’s been on the computer store’s display for while and been poked and prodded by everyone passing, or it’s a laptop that was sold to someone but was returned for one reason or another.

Sometimes, these are review units handed out to different magazine reviewers for a few months; and sometimes, these were returned after a business lease expired. In any case, the laptop is given a proper once-over by the manufacturer, and is certified to be as good as new.

Refurbished laptops are not secondhand or used in any way. These are the latest models. If you are willing to have something that’s not factory-sealed in a box, cheap refurbished laptops could be spectacular deals.

Choosing to go the refurbished way, you can either buy directly from the manufacturer or you can buy from some vendor that you trust. If you haven’t done this before, going with the manufacturer would be best.

Whatever source you buy from, cheap refurbished laptops should still come with at least a three month warranties. Sometimes, it’s six. Compare this with used or pre-owned laptops, and you’ll find that it’s a poor deal in every way. These are usually obsolete models and they don’t come with warranties either.

Whatever vendor you buy your cheap refurbished laptops from, you want to make sure that you read all the fine print. You never know about the warranty they offer you until you read all the exclusions there.

This should be especially required reading when you go with a previously untested vendor. The warrantee aside, every purchase should come with a return policy in case the unit doesn’t perform to your satisfaction.

As soon as you receive your laptop, make sure that you do a few tests — try the optical drive in a few ways; use all the ports a few times; try switching the resolution of the screen; and charge the battery to see how well it holds up.

When you find a good unit advertised anywhere and it’s priced just the way you want it, you shouldn’t hesitate too much. Laptop prices and inventories go up and down really quickly. You wouldn’t want to lose just the right model to hesitation.

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We have certainly been working on lopping off the wires that get our gadgets speaking to one another. The remote control takes care of one, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth take care of some, and the cell phone takes care of one important wire.

Somehow, it’s hard to get tired of the magic of going wireless, no matter how many times we get to experience it. Samsung has come up with a new wireless connection to lop off a few more wires now that happens to be particularly exciting.

The device looks no different from any particularly trendy looking 27” high-def computer monitor. It costs about $500 to buy.

So why would you pay that much money for a 27 inch monitor when you could probably get it for $350? You’d pay that because this is more than just a monitor. It’s a monitor with a wireless docking station built in.

Have you ever had the misfortune to use a laptop docking station? A docking station is a device that works with certain laptops; the docking station connects to a proper keyboard and mouse, a full-sized monitor, external hard drives and every peripheral you need for a proper desktop experience. Read the rest of this entry →

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People who travel on business certainly do need and like their laptops. Manufacturers have always tried their best to provide their users with the best lightweight laptop experience possible; while they have succeeded to a remarkable degree, the latest full-blown laptops out there can still be bulky and heavy to carry around.

Now that tablet computers like the iPad are here and everyone has one, business travelers who are sick of carrying 6-pound laptop bags all around the world look at this new product and wonder if it could possibly replace the hated laptop bag on their shoulder.

Is the iPad the best lightweight laptop ever? It has the potential. Once you load it up suitably with the right apps.

The first thing you need to turn your iPad into a lightweight laptop for business use is a small portable Bluetooth keyboard. This should let you type into every office productivity application you need.

With that out of the way, let’s start with two of the most important business apps you need to make your iPad usable in a business laptop context – Numbers and Pages. Read the rest of this entry →

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It all started with the seriously imaginative Acer Aspire 5738DG-6165 (seriously unimaginative naming going on there, by the way) about an year and a half ago. At the time, the stores didn’t even have 3-D television sets.

If you are a little tired of having csceneblock. That Acer notebook computer was a phenomenal product for its time time.

Overall, it was a pretty middle-of-the-line laptop: the Core2Duo processor, 4GB RAM, and ATI HD 4750 graphics card all positioned it as a solidly mid-range machine. It would be a completely unremarkable Acer notebook computer in every way if it wasn’t for the fact that it had something no one had ever heard of – a 3-D screen.

That kind of performance would have been adequate back then. No one else had the killer 3-D feature they had, and that seems to have been about enough. Cut to a year later, and there is competition closing in on every side on the Acer notebook computer that started it all.

A simple 3-D screen with polarized glasses is no longer enough. Which is why for this year, we have the new Aspire AS5745DG.

Keeping up with the way the state-of-the-art in notebooks has progressed in the past 12 months, the new 3-D Acer notebook comes with a robust Core i5 processor,Nvidia GeForce GT4210M graphics, and the party trick of this piece, the 15.6 inch 1366 by 768 LED 3-D screen that you view with active shutter glasses. And nearly as attractive too is the fact that it comes on the market at under $900.

The Acer Aspire 5738DG from last year really impressed buyers and critics alike with its fine 3-D rendition of native 3-D movies and its impressive ability to convert 2-D movies effectively. The way it dealt with 3-D games seemed nothing short of remarkable too.

3-D computing is much better accepted now and Acer doesn’t really need to build its devices to an aggressively low price anymore. This year’s model, the Aspire AS5745DG, takes the laptop’s 3-D credentials forward.

To begin with, the 3-D is experienced through active shutter glasses of the kind you see on the latest 3-D televisions. The glasses keep in touch with the computer through an IR receiver.

The main reason Acer believes you will like one of its 3-D laptops is it believes you would like to dive into the world of 3-D gaming – as supported on its line by Nvidia’s 3D Vision technology.

But Acer doesn’t want to limit the appeal of its 3-D laptop to gameheads alone of course. Part is the beauty of this Acer notebook computer is that it has a Blu-Ray drive that you can play 3-D movies on. Even more exciting though is the fact that if you pop in a 2-D movie, the 3-D engine will convert it to 3-D on the fly.

This is a feature by the way that not even HP’s much more expensive Envy 17 3-D includes. It certainly speaks well for Acer’s knowledge of its audience.

Sadly, certain ergonomic features are compromised to the sake of portability. Good posture, keyboard spacing, screen measurement and positioning, and pointing devices usually take the best ergonomic hit.

Even though laptops are designed for portability, many people use them being a desktop computer. Despite the poor ergonomics inherent generally in most laptops, certain steps could be taken to create any sound ergonomic laptop setup as a desktop. Whether it’s being a main computer or a temporary setup, you can  set yourself and ergonomics.

General Ergonomic Points

* Make your laptop setup as near to the desktop ergonomic computer station setup as you can.
* Keep the wrists while in the most natural wrist position you could achieve.
* Rotate the screen in order that bending of the keyboard is minimized.

One of the best Ergonomic Laptop Solution – Try a laptop docking station. These devices let you plug in the laptop to a base station that includes a monitor, keyboard and rabbit already connected. You basically employ a desktop setup with any removable computer that just happens to have a keyboard and screen attached.

If a docking station is from the budget or otherwise impractical do your next best thing. Have other keyboard and mouse for the desk. This lets you place the laptop for the correct monitor position and have a comfortable keyboard and mouse at their suitable locations.

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