LaptopAdvisor

Lenovo ThinkPad Series

ThinkPad laptops have long been favored by business men and women, since back when they were made by IBM. Now that Lenovo has the line, they’ve kept up the good work by providing strong, durable notebooks that have plenty of power under the hood. The ThinkPad laptops can be equipped with Core 2 Duo processors.

Sony VAIO Z-Series

The Sony Z-Series laptops mix sumptuous style with strength and power. They’re packed in heavy-duty carbon fiber and aluminum bodies, resistant to damage from drops or bumps. They also feature a unique “G-Sensor,” which can tell when the laptop is falling. It locks the hard drive so it will not get damaged or lose important data.

Panasonic Toughbook Series

The Panasonic Toughbook laptop computers are intended for users who’ll be venturing into harsh conditions like a construction site or any other scenario that would otherwise destroy a typical laptop. Encased in a thick magnesium alloy shell, the Toughbooks are very resistant and very strong. There’s almost nothing you could do to this laptop that would endanger your data.

Apple MacBook Series

Apple’s MacBook computers (the standard MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air) are remarkably light and thin, making them a great choice for travel. They’re also very powerful, with lots of excellent features that will make your work on the road a lot more pleasant. The Air in particular is extraordinarily thin, thin enough to fit in a manila envelope.

Check out our buyer’s guide to the best gaming laptops! Updated 2/2010

Being a former serious gamer, and a laptop enthusiast, many people have asked me what to look for in a gaming laptop. So, in this article I’m going to point out the 4 most important things. These are also ranked specifically, because a lot of people tend to be on a budget, so try and upgrade from the top down if you’re looking to get a good gaming computer. Also, if you’ve got the money, I’ve got some expensive upgrade options included in some sections.

The first two aspects are actually a tie, in my opinion – these are the processor and the graphics card. When running games, you need them to run at decent speeds, so they’re not choppy and don’t freeze up. For this I recommend at least a dual core processor, with a speed of 1.8 GHz or above. You probably shouldn’t go below 1.8GHz, just because even most of the games that are a couple years old don’t run well on processors below 1.8GHz. Also, over time, computers get slower (not by themselves, there are several contributing factors), so a 1.8GHz computer can eventually run like a 1.6 or even a 1.4 after a couple of years. So to ensure longevity go with as high a speed as you can. Also, if you can afford the new quad core processors, have at it, those things make for a very pleasant gaming experience. Additionally, you cannot have choppy video. If something is shooting at you and your images don’t render well, or fast enough, you’ll probably be dead by the time you can even see what it is that’s shooting at you. So for this, I recommend at least a graphics card with 256 MB of dedicated video RAM. Personally, I like NVIDIA, but the new ATI CrossFire could prove to be a good challenger (stand by for future articles reviewing those). Either way, don’t dip below 256MB, and try and go up to 512MB, because I can’t even begin to stress how important video is. If you’ve got the money, check out SLI enabled systems (again, look for future articles that discuss SLI technology).

Next, we come to our laptop RAM (as opposed to the dedicated video RAM). To be able to run all the grueling tasks that most games require, you’re going to need at least 2 GB of RAM. Again, most games will run very choppy on anything below 2 GB of RAM. But, in this specific aspect, it may not be worth while to go above 2 GB of RAM, unless you have money to burn. Most games don’t fully utilize RAM above 2GB, so anything more is in excess. In the future this will probably change, but for now if you don’t have the money don’t worry about upgrading too much. Most of the time you’ll be limited by processor speed and video RAM before laptop RAM.

Finally, a big change from the past, is the sound card. This normally wasn’t that important, and you could get by with using the integrated sound card. But recently, gaming companies are all about high definition video AND high definition sound. This means if you don’t have something good enough to process your sound, even the sound will come in choppy. In some more rare cases, games can even crash. I personally like Creative, just because they’re not too overpriced. There are other options as well, like Audigy. This isn’t as important as the other aspects, so if you can’t afford this, don’t worry too much about it. You can probably make do with the integrated one.

Now, this is hardly an exhaustive list of all of the things you’ll need in your new gaming rig, but it lists a lot of the basic internal components. There are some aspects that play a slight role, like hard drives, but since most games are run off the internet the size and speed of the hard drive is becoming less and less important. Also, keep in mind that this is some of the internal technology. I’ll talk more about some external factors like speakers, monitors (laptop and external), internet connections, keyboards, mice, etc in future articles to help you make your ultimate rig.

Let’s face it: there are two things every person needs.  The first is a winning lottery ticket, and the second is, obviously, a longer battery life on your laptop.  We can help provide one of those two things for you.  Just a hint, it’s the one that doesn’t involve you winning millions of dollars, sorry.  But, who knows, maybe with that extra hour of battery life, you can go online, enter a lottery, and win.  Anyway, down to business: we’re going to give you 5 simple solutions to help extend your battery life, because who doesn’t need more battery life?

Dim Your Screen

This is probably the main saver of battery life.  If you take your screen from the current brightness setting to the lowest possible brightness setting, you can increase your battery life by up to two times.  Unless you’re watching a movie and require the extra backlight, then this is a great solution on the go, especially if you’re crunched for some extra juice.

Lay Off the Graphics

Your non-dedicated graphics cards are one of the largest battery hogs of your laptop parts.  So try and either A) disable the graphics card and use the integrated graphics, if that’s an option, or B) use programs that do not require a lot of graphics.  This may mean less video, and less Adobe programs, but you sometimes you have to make the sacrifices in order to preserve your precious battery life.

Avoid CD-ROM Usage

If you plan on watching DVDs or playing computer games, try either getting the movie on to your laptop (legally), and/or mounting an image of the computer game (again, legally) beforehand.  This will save on yet another part of your laptop which consumes large amounts of power.  If you have information on a DVD or CD, try putting the information on a flash drive instead, which uses very little power.

Unplug the External Devices

This means things like USB powered mice, iPods, cell phones, etc.  Not only do a lot of these devices draw out a lot of power to run, while connected to your laptop, but they also tend to charge from your laptop battery.  At times of critical battery level, you don’t want your last minutes to be converted into cell phone or battery power.  Also, avoid using things like external mice, and use the touchpad instead.  This especially includes Bluetooth devices, which tend to use much more power than the rest.

Close Non-Essential Programs

Try and close as many programs as you can.  This means both turning them off through the msconfig command so that they don’t start up with your computer, and/or ending processes through the task manager.  Taking off non-essential programs can increase your laptop performance, and battery life, at the same time.  So kill two birds with one stone and close those unnecessary applications.

Alright, so there are a lot of people who are wondering what exactly Solid State Drives (SSD) are, and how they differ from Hard Disk Drives (HDD). Hopefully this article will clear up some questions. If you’re thinking about buying an SSD, or rather upgrading to one, you may find some useful information here. Also, if you’re looking to make your own SSD check out our other article on that.

The Problem with HDDs

A normal HDD has a platter inside of it which is constantly spinning and creating a significant amount of heat, and as you can imagine, takes a significant amount of power. In addition to that, hard drives have these tiny platters spinning at 5400 RPM or 7200 RPM. Now, imaging dropping something that is spinning that fast – yeah, not a pretty sight, chances are it’s going to break or at least crash, making you lose most, if not all, of your data. Some hard drives have a falling mechanism, which tries to sense when they are falling and automatically shut off, but this is hardly a fail safe.

The Solution

Now, SSDs, on the other hand, instead of using a spinning platter, use flash memory. You’ve probably heard of it in the small thumb drives. Same concept in both: there are no moving parts. This means no heat, less power used, no chance of dropping it and having a plate shatter, etc. It also means a less likely chance to crash, in fact there is almost a 0% chance of crashing. In addition to that, SSDs are between 10 and 1000 times faster than HDDs, depending on the tasks performed. SSDs are sounding pretty good now, aren’t they?

The Downfall

There’s only one real downfall. SSDs cost a lot. And by a lot, I mean between hundreds and, and even up to thousands, of dollars more than their HDD counterparts. That’s pretty much the only downfall. Right now the technology just isn’t at the point where the SSDs can be made for a reasonable price. Now, if you’re one of those people that always have the top of the line toys, or if you just have the money, then by all means purchase one. But, for the majority of people, I’d hold off on the SSDs until the technology becomes cheaper.

So there’s the low down on SSDs and HDDs. Hopefully this makes your decision easier, or at least more informed. In some time we hope to get more in depth testing on SSDs, just to find out to what extent they are better than HDDs, but more than that later. And, more importantly, check out our article on how to make your own SSD for much, much cheaper than you can buy from the laptop companies.

In the vast pursuit to increase computer speed, some upgrades obviously give you faster computers, including, but not limited to, faster processors, more RAM, and many more options. But one topic I come across quite frequently is does laptop hard drive speed really matter, and more specifically, is it worth the money to upgrade? If you read the “Gaming 101” article I wrote, you can see that hard drives are one of the last things I said to spend upgrade money on, especially if that money is highly limited. So, if you’re to the point where you’ve got the extra money to upgrade hard drive speed, or you’re just curious, let’s address some issues.

The most common speeds today are 5400RPM and 7200RPM, some slow drives still run at 4200RPM, and you’ve got some elite drives like the Raptors than run at 10,000RPM. But for comparison purposes, we’re going to mainly look from the 5400RPM to the 7200RPM. Now just to start, I went to several (and by several, I really do mean several) laptop sites, and the average upgrade price from a hard drive of the same size going from 5400RPM to 7200RPM was approximately $50. In the world of laptop upgrades, $50 is hardly a large amount, when you upgrade a processor 0.1 GHz you’re looking at spending more than $100 in some cases. But either way, $50 is still $50 out of your pocket, so let’s continue.

7200RPM is obviously faster than 5400RPM, so there are going to be slight differences, but whether these differences are worth it are up to you. First of all, there is usually a couple ms (millisecond) time difference in reading and writing seek time, which is basically loading and saving files. Again, we’re talking about time differences on the millisecond level, which over time can add up, but the most is perhaps a minute lost out of your day, unless you’re doing some serious photo or video editing with hundreds of files. The slightly bigger difference you will see is in transfer rates, which usually increase by about 5-10 MB/s (numbers can range quite a bit, some were as low as 2 MB/s, while some where as high as 22 MB/s).

Now, moving on to some more technical aspects, several tests have been run by several different companies using WorldBench. If you are not familiar with it, WorldBench is basically test software that scores performance based on application scripting. And, in even more simpler terms, it can help tell you which things, whether they are computers, or different parts within the same computer, are faster/better.

The differences in scores between 5400RPM and 7200RPM ranged slightly, but in the end the average difference was no more than a couple points (if any). The only programs that really produce a difference between the drives are compression programs (like WinRAR), video editing programs (like Adobe Premiere), and CD writing programs (like Nero, also note that this takes into account writing data form the hard drive onto a CD). Here, differences were actually rather large, up to 100 second differences in Adobe Premiere, and up to several hundred seconds in Nero. So if you plan to use these programs frequently, upgrading the drive for $50 is definitely worth it.

Furthermore, the load times of several programs was also lowered, but the most any program was lowered by was approximately 5 seconds. So if loading really annoys you, then I suppose upgrading your drive might be worth it, but don’t really expect your computer to run all that much faster.

So, in the end, is it worth it to upgrade? Well, the answer really depends on what you’re doing. In general, I would probably opt for the upgrade just because I tend to do photo, video, and music editing. Plus, a $50 difference in a laptop that costs thousands of dollars hardly seems valuable to skimp on. But then again, if none of those things interest you, you’ll be just fine with the 5400RPM drive. One of the more interesting things is that, even more so than the differences in speed (5400RPM vs 7200RPM), some hard drive brands clearly outperformed others. In some instances, the 5400RPM version of some hard drive brands even outperformed the 7200RPM version of other hard drive brands. I’m not going to name any names right now, but look for an article in the near future comparing brands.