Posts Tagged ‘Laptop’

Adding Wireless to Your Older Laptop

Almost every new laptop now includes a wireless transceiver built in to the motherboard or attached to it through a special port in the case. However, if your older laptop doesn’t include wireless facilities, you can easily upgrade and update.
Holding the card

Check the instruction manual or consult the manufacturer’s telephone support service or Web site to see if your laptop has a built-in compartment for holding a small wireless card. The good news is that this compartment (if your laptop has one) gives you a neat solution to upgrading your computer. The bad news comes in two parts:

    * The wireless card is almost certainly a proprietary part, meaning that you have to purchase the manufacturer’s card at whatever price the manufacturer sets.

    * Some manufacturers don’t encourage users to install cards in this special slot themselves. The manufacturer may have some concern that an improperly installed or poorly shielded card can interfere with other devices that use radio frequencies.

On the transceiving end

You can purchase a PC Card wireless transceiver, if you want to. These devices, which you can get from a number of competing manufacturers, are plug-and-play upgrades to a laptop.

Here are some of the disadvantages of using a PC Card for wireless:

    * Your laptop may have only one or two PC Card slots available, and you may want to use those slots for other things.

To counter this problem, some manufacturers combine a wireless transceiver with a network interface card (NIC) adapter, which lets your computer connect to either a wireless network or a wired Ethernet by using this one card.

    * PC Card wireless transceivers usually include a small antenna that projects from the side of the laptop; you may find the nub of an antenna an unattractive nuisance which you may easily break off, destroying the card or even the PC Card slot itself.

If you plan to use a PC Card wireless adapter, get into the habit of removing the card every time you turn off the machine, before you put the laptop away in its case. You may also want to find a small carrying case for the adapter – a box about the size of a deck of playing cards should fit the bill.
Buddying up to USB

To expand a laptop for wireless capabilities, you can add a device that connects to the USB port. Like PC Card devices, the USB-port approach is a plug-and-play solution. Most USB wireless adapters are about 2 inches long, about two-thirds the size of a tube of lip balm.

Like PC Cards, you can get USB wireless adapters from a number of manufacturers, which helps keep prices down and features improving over time. And although USB devices do project from the side of the laptop (actually sticking out a bit more than PC Cards), they’re less likely to damage the computer if you accidentally dislodge them somehow; the USB port is close to the edge of the case. You still may want to remove and store the little wireless devices when you put the laptop away in a case, though.

You can install USB devices directly in the port on the laptop, or you can attach them to a hub that connects by wire to the computer. Adding a hub lets you use multiple USB devices.

Source : http://tech.yahoo.com/gd/adding-wireless-to-your-older-laptop/153158

Conserving Your Laptop’s Power

You can do certain things to help your laptop’s battery last a bit longer. On the short list, you have computer components that consume a lot of power:

• The hard drive

• The CD/DVD drive

• The floppy drive (if you have one)

• The modem

• The network interface

• The display

Each of the above devices consumes power when you use it. Obviously, by not using those devices or by rationing their use, you can save a modicum of power.

For example, by setting a lower resolution and fewer colors on the display, you cause the computer to use less video resources (though this technique saves only a minor amount of power). For more savings, consider not using the CD/DVD drive, which requires real power to keep it spinning (such as when you’re watching a DVD movie).

But you can really take control by setting various timeouts in the Power Options Properties dialog box, Power Schemes tab, as you can see in Figure 1. Here, you can disable or timeout certain laptop features and help extend battery life in a dramatic way.

readmore ::http://tech.yahoo.com/gd/conserving-your-laptop-s-power/153162;_ylt=Atvjqry2R5vba5id7GI35HoFLZA5

How to Buy a Laptop: Summer 2007 Edition

Source :: http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/26470

It’s been about six months since my last laptop buying guide. Sounds like a short time, but you can’t stop innovation in this market, and you’d be surprised how much has changed in the last few months alone. I’ve also been surprised how many emails I’ve received in recent weeks asking for laptop purchasing advice, so it seems time for another update on what to look for in a laptop.

Here’s what I advise looking for in a new notebook purchase.

• CPU – I wouldn’t bother with any chip other than an Intel Core 2 Duo. Don’t get suckered into getting a cheap Celeron machine, and don’t go for an AMD system either. The speed of the chip isn’t terribly important, but you do want to make sure you’re getting a “Santa Rosa/Merom” system, which is more future-proof than older models. How do you know if you’re getting a Merom CPU? Just check the chips listed in the Merom section on this Wikipedia page. Just match up the model number on your laptop of choice and see where it falls.
• Memory – 1GB is a bare minimum today, but it should suffice for most laptops.
• Operating System – It’s hard to find a PC without Vista preinstalled on it right now, but it can be done. If it’s available as an option, I’d choose XP over Vista, no question. Of course there’s always the MacOS and Ubuntu, too.
• Hard Drive – While you can get hard drives with no moving parts now (called SSDs, or solid state drives), they are so expensive it doesn’t make sense to do so. Stick with an old-fashioned spinning-disc hard drive. Capacities haven’t changed much lately. While you can get up to a 250GB notebook hard drive, most come with 80GB as a default, which most users will find big enough. Upgrade according to your needs.
• Optical Drive - Both Blu-ray and HD-DVD are starting to make a splash on laptops now. Note that HD-DVD laptop drives are read-only; if you want to write to high-def optical media, you’ll need the Blu-ray option that some vendors offer. I doubt many users need this much high-capacity optical storage, though. And there’s no real advantage to watching high-definition DVDs instead of regular DVDs on a tiny laptop screen. I’d just stick with a dual-layer DVD-RW drive for the time being, at least for another six months.
• Graphics Card – With Vista, it’s more important than ever to invest in quality graphics. I wouldn’t recommend any integrated graphics solution. You’ll be very disappointed with the experience under Vista. That said, few notebooks offer much of a choice when it comes to graphics options, so juice it up as much as possible. Upgrading to discrete graphics from integrated can be as inexpensive as an extra $99, but it’ll make a world of difference in your daily computing.
• Screen – Nothing much changing here, except that LEDs are starting to appear as backlighting instead of fluorescent tubes. This means you get a brighter screen and lower power consumption, but the difference is not dramatic on either count. Don’t hold out for LED backlighting and choose instead based on how big a screen (and how much weight) you’re willing to carry. Laptop weight has not really changed at all lately: Expect to carry 8 pounds and up for a 17-inch system, 6 to 7 pounds with a 15.4-inch machine, and as little as 3 pounds with an ultralight.
• Wireless – The Santa Rosa chipset I mentioned above puts four flavors of Wi-Fi, 802.11a, b, g, and n into your notebook. You definitely want this: Nearly all upcoming Wi-Fi hardware will use 802.11n in some form. Wireless WAN (WWAN) is another option that many vendors now offer. Want to get high-speed access away from a Wi-Fi connection? Now you can do so without a bulky add-in card. Add it if you want the feature and can afford the monthly service fees.

That’s about the lay of the laptop land today. In case you’re wondering, Macs have seen only modest refreshes in recent months. If I was getting a Mac, I’d make an exception to my above rule and wait for the new LED-backlit models to show up (since that will be in a matter of weeks) and, if possible, until 2008 when the new MacOS arrives. It would still be OK to purchase one today, but I think you’ll get a better deal if you wait a bit.

As always, feel free to send me specs or a link to the laptop you’re considering via email and I’ll weigh in with an opinion. Happy shopping!