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Archive for December, 2010

You may have spent a fortune on that brand new laptop. But technology is evolving at a fast pace, and your laptop will invariably feel old in a couple of years. It is, therefore, imperative that you buy a model you will be comfortable with for as long as you want to keep it.

Basic Laptops
Before buying a notebook make a realistic assessment of your requirements. Are you a compulsive gamer? Do you tend to watch lots of HD video on your computer? Most users have pretty limited needs that extend only to web surfing and word processing. Any laptop available in the market can meet these requirements. So there is no need to spend thousands of dollars on a high end machine. Besides cost, the other factors that need to be considered are portability and usability.

Do you travel a lot? Mobile professionals need a thin and light machine they can carry around. Netbooks are a good choice for them. These machines are incredibly popular now. They are ultraportable with 9 or 10 inch screens. Another reason behind the popularity of netbooks is their price. These are cheap computers. But buying a netbook isn’t a very bright idea if the machine is intended to be your primary computer. Compared to mainstream laptops, netbooks have much less powerful hardware. And the small screen size may strain your eyes if you use it for extended periods.

Upgrading
Upgrading a laptop isn’t totally impossible, but it isn’t very easy either. All laptops have some parts that cannot be replaced at all because they are soldered to the motherboard. Chief among the components that can’t usually be replaced are CPU and Graphics cards. There are of course some parts that can be replaced and they include hard drive and RAM.

Laptop Components
Laptop components are mini versions of their desktop counterparts. They are pricier than desktop components, but they aren’t necessarily more powerful. In fact, laptops tend to be less powerful than desktops. This is because laptop components usually run at slower speeds so as to reduce heat build-up inside the chassis.

Processor/CPU
The processor/CPU inside a computer has the greatest impact on system speeds. Intel and AMD are currently the leading CPU manufacturers. There are other chip-makers too, but they usually cater to the lower-end of the spectrum. Intel processors deliver slightly better performance than AMD processors, but they are also pricier than their AMD counterparts.

Graphics Card/GPU
The graphics card/GPU is an integral part of a gaming laptop. If you are not an avid gamer, then you don’t have to buy a laptop with a discrete GPU. But remember that having a GPU will be helpful while running photo and video editing applications and playing HD video. If you tend to play a lot of games, you should buy a laptop with a discrete ATI or NVIDIA graphics. Intel processors usually come with an integrated graphics solution such as the GMA950 or 4500MHD, but these are practically useless for playing graphics rich modern games.

RAM (Memory)
RAM stands for Random Access Memory. Having sufficient RAM is extremely essential for getting good performance from your laptop. For instance, you will not be able to run multiple applications simultaneously if you do not have enough RAM. So how much RAM is necessary? Well, it depends upon your exact needs. Most netbooks come with 1GB of RAM. Higher-end models will usually have 3GB or 4GB of RAM. Laptops with 8GB and 16GB of RAM are also available at the moment. 1GB of RAM is usually sufficient if you are an average user.

Storage
How much storage space you need depends upon how you use the computer. If you only store spreadsheets and your office documents, you will not need much space. But if you use your laptop to store movies, music and photos you will need to buy a model with a large hard drive. Basic laptops usually come with 80GB or 160GB hard drives. Pricier models with 500GB or 640GB of hard drives are also available.

Inside, we a look at the minimum system requirements for Windows 98, Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Home or Professional.

Remember that meeting the minimum requirements for an operating system, is always important. Running through this list will help you avoid headaches when shifting to a new platform.

Windows 98

Windows 98 is increasing getting outdated but it was once very popular. I’d avoid using it if I had a choice these days. Here are the minimum specs required.

Intel 486DX processor or better

128 MB of memory

128 MB hard disk space

VGA or higher resolution display

CD-ROM or DVD drive

Keyboard and mouse

Some folks may argue you need less memory, but to me this is the minimum.

Windows 2000 Professional

Windows 2000 Professional is still widely used in offices and its performance is pretty stable. Here are its minimum requirements:

133 MHz Intel Pentium processor or better

128 MB of memory

650 MB hard disk space

VGA or higher resolution display

CD-ROM or DVD optical drive

Keyboard and mouse

Windows XP Home or Professional

Windows XP Home and Windows XP Professional are among the most popular operating systems available today. Read on to find out more about what this operating system requires:

233 MHz Intel Pentium or AMD K6/Athlon/Duron processor or better

512 MB of memory

1.5 GB hard disk space

SVGA (800

There’s an old adage in the auto industry that says your vehicle loses value as soon as you drive it off the lot. The computer and technology industry is not so different, in that new parts and systems are constantly pushing the envelope of performance and value, making it impossible to have a top-of-the-line system for very long. The purpose of this paper is to step back in time 10 years and examine the technology landscape then to see how it compares to today’s technologies we know and love.

Moore’s Law:

Much has been written, and much is still debated about the technology axiom called; Moore’s Law. Some people interpret the law to mean a doubling of computer power every 18 months to 2 years, while others maintain it means a doubling of the numbers of transistors (microscopic on/off switches if you will) engineers are able to print into the same amount of silicon. In fact Moore stated that transistor counts would double every year, which he later amended to be every 2 years) Regardless, this trend of performance and transistor growth has held true for over 40 years.

More recently, Moore’s law has been applied to graphics processing units (GPUs) as well. The GPU is actually not even 10 years old at the time of writing. The official term GPU was coined with the nVidia GeForce 256 series of 3D cards. Released in August 1999, this was the first chip that was able to compute vertex transformations and pixel lighting in hardware. Since its release, graphics processing power has followed a similar trend of doubling performance every 18 months to 2 years. This article is not a technical document, rather a glimpse into the past 10 years ago to give you an idea of how far we’ve come in such a short time.

A Little History About the Author:

The year was 1999. It was my sophomore / junior year in high school. Now I’ll pause so that 90% of the readers who grew up in the 70s and 80′s can turn up their nose and stop reading.

Okay, now that that’s out of the way, let’s continue.

I am an internet child. I got into computers, and all manner of electronic geekery just as the Internet was becoming something that “just might catch on”. My high school was not quite on the bleeding edge of technology as it were, but we were one of the first public schools in my area to be equipped with a full T1 line and the 1.5Mbps of awesome dedicated bandwidth that it piped through the network. Our network was built from a hodge-podge mixture of nice PC computers labs (Mostly K6 200MHz/Win 95 machines), and a network engineers nightmare concoction of Macintoshes; LC II’s up through new G3 iMacs.

In 1999 I was still rocking a 486 DX-33 PC with 8MB of ram and Windows 3.11 as my PC at home, while my parents had a nice Pentium 100 Windows 95 machine my siblings and I would fight for time on. So what was the point of those last couple paragraphs you’re probably asking? Well, that is where I was, and what I was using 10 years ago in computing, and hopefully it got you thinking back a decade to what you were computing on.

Processors:

10 years ago today, The computer world was working itself into a frenzy, getting ready for the near future release of the brand new Intel Pentium III Processor. The best your money could do was a Pentium II processor at 450MHz with PC100 Memory. Rival AMD was doing alright for itself peddling its budget conscious K6-2 series of processors. Your average computer cost around $2000-$2500 at this time for a PC with a solid Pentium II processor. The Pentium III was due to be released on February 26th, and was the subject of a vicious debate over the merits of its built in unique ID number. Also noteworthy was its inclusion of the first SSE instruction set (The modern Core i7 processor is at SSE4+). However without software designed to make use of the new instructions the processor was not much faster than an equivalently clocked Pentium II CPU and took quite a bit of heat from the press.

Graphics:

On the graphics front the war between nVidia and 3DFx was raging. nVidia, a relative newcomer to the field, was riding high on top of their very successful TNT (Twin-Texel) video processor, while 3DFx was fighting to retain its market leadership title with its Voodoo3 line of graphics cards. The Voodoo cards were excellent performers, however the TNT cards had the advantage of 32 bit color while the Voodoo’s were stuck at 24 bits. ATI was around and kicking with their Rage series of 3D cards (especially popular as integrated chips in servers and workstations), however they never really entered into the hardcore 3D accelerator race until the Radeon line debuted in 2000.

Internet:

In 1999 the internet boom was just beginning and attracting massive amounts of attention and investment capital from all over the globe. The big business of the time was in the search and portal business. Yahoo, AltaVista, Excite, and Lycos were perhaps the most recognizable and sizable players in this industry. Google -say-wha? Other companies from other industries, such as television media, and ISPs were taking notice, and buying up internet portals right and left in an attempt to tap into the viral spread of the internet. New technologies like Java were coming into their own, and began to lay the groundwork for the internet as we know it today. Studies determined that by 1999 about half of US households had a computer, and most of the new computer purchases were being made to get online.

Other areas:

PDA’s were quickly becoming the new must have gadget. The Palm Pilot being the device that led the charge. I myself had a Palm IIIe towards the later half of 2000. Personal pagers were still hot sellers, but cell phones were getting smaller and more practical and affordable. Also a war was heating up in the computer memory segment. Samsung introduced new DDR memory chips that promised to double the effective bandwidth of existing memory chips in future setups, however Rambus was busy developing their own high speed RAM for use in high end Intel systems.

Software:

This field is perhaps a bit too large to cover here, but a brief OS recap: The PC world was running strong with windows 98, and anxiously awaiting the updated Windows 98 Second Edition due out in May 1999. The Macintosh crowd was plugging away happily on their Mac OS 8.5 Machines, while awaiting an update to OS 9 sometime later that year. Linux was also starting to come into its own, as big name vendors like IBM were starting to bundle distributions of Redhat, Caldera, and others with some servers.

Conclusion:

I’ll admit this article was more for my amusement and reminiscing than anything else. I hope that somewhere in the course of this mass of words and broken sentences, you too had some good recollections of computer equipment past. It’s good to remember the technologies we grew up with and we are fortunate enough to have the robust internet we are used to today to help conjure up images and technical specs of those glory days. Sites like the Tech Time Machine exist to help us relive those days, and have a few chuckles at equipment we thought we’d never use to its full potential. I remember touching a Pentium 200MMX machine for the first time and being in awe at its raw speed and seemingly infinite possibilities. Now I constantly get upset with the speed of my current 3GHz dual core Athlon X2 6000+ PC. I can’t even imagine how many windows that Pentium 200 would be thrown out of today. It’s a crazy world we live in.

Everyone should have these 7 tools I recommend here, use them to tune your Vista, these tools should help to recover lots of speed, but you still need more knowledge on your Vista to maximize its’ potential.

Tool #1 – SG TCP Optimizer

A very good tool from SpeedGuide, use to optimize TCP settings for your Internet and network connections. You should turn off TCP Auto Tunning on Vista or the settings won’t have any effect.

Tool #2 – WinClean Memory Optimizer

Always use this tool if your computer has 1 GB RAM or less, but never use it if you have more RAM, it will interfere and interrupt cache activity on higher memory computer.

Tool #3 – Process Tamer

A very useful tool, will automatic lower background process priority and boost foreground application speed. You can also set the process to any priority explicitly.

Tool #4 – Auslogics Disk Defrag

The best free disk defragmenter tool available, use it to replace Vista defragmenter, will finish the job a lot faster.

Tool #5 – Free Registry Defrag

Defrag your registry from time to time with this tool, accelerate application’s registry access.

Tool #6 – Rebranded Acronis TrueImage Clone

This tool official name is seagate DiscWiz, which powered by Acronis TrueImage, you may download and use it freely if you are using Seagate or Maxtor hard disk, won’t work with other brands.

Tool #7 – Thoosje Vista Tweaker

This is a new and a very useful tool for tweaking Vista registry, over 50 different tweaks. You can easily restore your settings anytime, idiot proof. You can play around it without worry about messing up the settings!

I won’t show you the download link, however, you shouldn’t have any problem finding them in search engines, download today and start to enjoy the fabulous speed from Vista!

(C) Copyright 2008 Kok Choon – Feel free to reprint this article in its entirety as long as all links and author resources box in place.

The list of the best laptops that have Windows 7 installed in them and cost less than 500$

Here goes the details of the notebooks which feature Windows 7 operating system and price less than 500$

HP G60t laptop
HP G60t delivers Pentium processor T4300 2.1 GHz, 1MB L2 cache
Laptop has Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit installed in it
The notebook features DVD with Lightscribe technology
This laptop has a display of 15.6 inches
The notebook includes integrated Wi-Fi
RAM inbuilt in the notebook is 2GB DDR2
You can upgrade your RAM to 3GB for free
The hard drive of the notebook is 160GB 5400 RPM, you can upgrade it to 250GB
The cost of HP G60t notebook is 499.99$

Dell Inspiron 15
Dell Inspiron 15 is one of the best laptops that one can have
Inspiron 15 is powered by Dual Core 2.1 GHz processor
The laptop has a display of 15.6 inches
We get Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit even with this laptop
The notebook comes with a hard disk of 250GB and has 3GB RAM
This laptop has a Dell wireless 1397 mini card
The price of Dell Inspiron 15 laptop is 499$

Lenovo G450
Lenovo G450 uses Pentium T4300 2.1 GHz processor
The display of the laptop is 14 inches WXGA and even G450 has Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit operating system installed in it.
The notebook has inbuilt RAM of 4GB DDR3 SDRAM 1GHz
Hard drive of the laptop is 320GB 5400 RPM
You get this notebook for a price of 499$

Lenovo ThinkPad SL410 and SL510 are the other two Lenovo laptops that have Windows 7 Home Premium 32
These laptops have Celeron 1.8 GHz processor
The hard disk is 160GB 5400 RPM in both the laptops
The display of ThinkPad SL410 is 14 inches HD and ThinkPad SL510 has a display of 15.6 inches HD
The price of each of these two laptops is 499$
Visit Notebook Solutions blog for more laptops information

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