0 Laptop buying guide

Laptop buying guide

What kind of laptop is right for me?

While a laptop has become a ubiquitous accessory for modern life, the actual process of choosing the right model can take some serious time and research.

In this guide, we'll outline the different categories of laptops and which types are best for different users. We'll also take a look at CPU, hard-drive, and networking options.

Below are a handful of typical user experiences that should help outline what type of laptop is right for you. Chances are, you'll fall somewhere in between two or more of these archetypes, so carefully consider what you'll be using your new laptop for.

The student
Students typically require low prices and portability above all. A laptop that can be carried from class to class is key, so many students turn to low-cost Netbooks, which are small, low-power systems that generally cost less than $500. The downside is that these have small screens and generally use underpowered single-core CPUs.

Another option is a 13-inch thin-and-light laptop, which is somewhat less portable, but makes for a better experience when sitting down to write papers and do research. These have dual-core CPUs and often include optical drives. Apple's 13-inch MacBook is a prime example.

What to look for: At least 1GB of RAM; 160GB or larger HDD; 13-inch or smaller display.

The business traveler
Those who work on the road require a robust computing experience, a sturdy, rugged system to safeguard data, and often, access to security and management tools to satisfy the requirements of their IT departments.

Lenovo's ThinkPad and Dell's Latitude are two popular examples of laptop lines made with the business traveler in mind. Both brands offer security features such as Intel's vPro platform and TPM chips, internal software and hardware components that work alongside your operating system.

What to look for: 2GB to 4GB of RAM; 160GB or larger HDD; 12- to 15-inch display; Windows Vista Professional or Windows 7 Professional; mobile broadband modem.

The photographer and/or videographer
Video game players aren't the only ones who need powerful processors, discrete graphics, and massive, fast hard drives. Those who work with high-definition video or high-resolution photographs are among the most demanding of laptop power users.

Apple's 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pro laptops are among the most popular for these purposes. This is especially true as Final Cut, the widely used video-editing software, is only available for Macs (Adobe's Photoshop, however, is cross-platform).

Either a 17- or a 15-inch screen that runs at a high native resolution is suggested. You should also look for plenty of RAM--up to 8GB is ideal--and a large 500GB hard drive that runs at the faster 7,200rpm speed (typical drives run at 5,400rpm).

What to look for: 4GB-8GB of RAM; 320GB or larger 7,200rpm HDD; 17-inch or larger display.

The gamer
While a bit of an endangered species these days, PC gamers are among the most fervent user groups. Most serious PC gamers will naturally gravitate toward desktop computers, with their flexible upgradeability, faster components, and better cooling. But gaming laptops have made great strides in recent years.

Intel's Core 2 Quad and Core i7 CPUs are recommended for 3D gaming, as is a top-of-the-line discrete GPU, such as Nvidia's GeForce N260. High-end brands such as Alienware offer flashy, expensive laptops that can be customized with the latest components, while Gateway's P-series is a good example of a budget-minded 17-inch gaming laptop, with slightly older parts, but excellent overall value.

What to look for: 4GB to 8GB of RAM; 320GB or larger 7,200rpm HDD; 17-inch or larger display; discrete graphics GPU.

The home user
Anyone who does not fall into one of the above categories is likely to fit in here. From parents and children gathered around the laptop at homework time to watching Hulu videos in bed, these are systems that typically stay anchored to one desk, den, or kitchen--perhaps taking the occasional road trip or moving around from room to room.

The traditional 15-inch laptop is still the most popular size, although 14- and 16-inch versions are becoming more common. Every PC maker makes standard mainstream laptops, and they generally have more similarities than differences.

For much less than $1,000, you can expect to find an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, 2GB of RAM, a 250GB or larger hard drive, and a DVD burner. Usually the most configurable of laptops, you can add extras, including a Blu-ray drive or discrete graphics, to many mainstream models.

What to look for: 2GB to 4GB of RAM; 250GB or larger HDD; 14- to 16-inch display; DVD burning optical drive

Read more

2 HP Photosmart e-All-in-One Printer - D110a

The good: The HP Photosmart e-All-in-One D110a's interactive touch screen adds Web connectivity to the standard print, copy, and scan functions, at a lower price than other HP ePrint-connected devices.

The bad: Print speeds are languid and the smaller paper input capacity makes it a hassle to refill for bigger households. You also must have a wireless connection to use the D110 to its fullest potential.

The bottom line: We wouldn't recommend it for high-output households or large offices, but the HP Photosmart D110a provides inexpensive access to HP's clever new ePrint and Web-connected apps.

The HP Photosmart e-All-in-One D110a wireless printer reaches beyond the standard print, copy, and fax functions of the typical multifunction output device to add ePrintCenter, Hewlett-Packard's ePrint remote printing service that gives access to downloadable content. Priced at $100, the D110a is a less fancy version of the HP Envy 100 with the same two-ink cartridge bay and a smaller 2.4-inch LCD touch screen. Although we're disappointed by its print speeds and other mechanical missteps, the HP Photosmart D110a is an affordable printer with useful Web-connectivity features for families, travelers, and business professionals.

Design and features

At 17.4 inches wide, 15.9 inches deep, and just 7.1 inches tall, the HP Photosmart D110a takes up so little real estate on your desktop that others might mistake it for a single-function inkjet. In fact, the printer has a copier and a flatbed scanner that tucks neatly into the top of the unit, and the rest of the front panel is limited to a paper tray, a memory card reader, and a 2.3-inch color touch screen LCD on the left with virtual buttons surrounding it that control the typical menu functions.

In terms of general printing functionality, the D110a is limited in two ways that you should consider before buying it: first, the media reader just underneath the display can only read Secure Digital (SD) and MultiMediaCard (MMC) storage cards and there's no available USB port for direct camera connections. That means Sony Memory Stick and Compact Flash card users are forced to use a computer to transfer photos for printing.

Second, the D110a works best for low-output work stations, as the printer has an 80-sheet paper input tray and a maximum monthly output capacity (also called a "duty cycle") of 1,000 pages. If you know you'll be printing a high volume of documents, you'll find yourself wishing for competing printers like the Lexmark S405 that hold up to 135 sheets of paper and can print over 5,000 pages a month.

We also wish you could adjust the angle of the touch screen, which instead is fixed in place, but we'll let that slide. The home screen has a set of scrollable icons for your favorite applications as well as four shortcut buttons at the bottom to bring up controls for photo printing, copy, scan, and fax. You can drag your finger across the list of apps to select one, delete ones you don't use, or download any apps from the growing list in the ePrintCenter.

The touch screen works well enough, although entering router passwords and other lengthy content on the small screen will certainly test your patience, and we also found the touch screen less sensitive than we like; it's not as responsive as the Apple iPhone, for example, and the touch delay sometimes causes unintentional button presses, although it's not nearly as frustrating to use as the e-Print-enabled HP Photosmart Premium e-All-in-One C310a, which omits all hard-button controls in favor of a clumsy touch screen.

The back of the printer is equally spare, with only a USB connection on the left and a thin power cord on the right--there's no wired Ethernet port available. Instead, HP offers a USB port for a wired connection to a host computer, or you can alternatively connect wirelessly with the built-in 802.11b/g/n print server inside, making it necessary to use both the ePrint feature and HP's ePrintCenter app store.

HP ePrintCenter

HP requires the printer and the host computer to access the Internet on the same wireless router to take advantage of the ePrintCenter apps, so you get no wired Ethernet port option. You do get the option to install the printer via the USB port on the back, but you'll be limited to the printing functions.

The ePrintCenter is an online hub where you can view job history, change settings, add printers to your account, browse and install apps, and cancel print jobs. All of the extra applications are free and HP breaks them down into categories within the App Store: entertainment, home, kids, news/blogs, photo, and tickets. Each one promises to streamline the printing experience by offering shortcuts to your favorite coupons, news articles, weather reports, recipes, and so on. HP tells us that it plans to release a Software Development Kit (SDK) in the near future so that software engineers can design their own shortcut apps for the store.

Using the onscreen Wireless Setup Wizard, we were able to connect the printer through CNET's protected network and took off browsing in less than 10 minutes. The Get More button took us directly to the store, where you can rate each app and even add comments for other potential users to read. The apps have potential, but prepare to battle long load times that require you to navigate through several submenu layers.

For example, the Google Maps app is an intriguing idea that could save time, but the touch-screen delays and irritatingly small virtual keyboard kept us in hunt-and-peck purgatory for so long that we began longing for the convenience of a simple keyboard and mouse for navigation. Another example is the Fandango Ticket function: we thought the process would be as simple as using the kiosks offered in actual theaters, but searching for movies and show times in the correct theater is hard enough to do online without waiting for a tiny map and listing to show up on a 2.4-inch screen.

HP ePrint

The D110a works with any modern Windows or Mac computer, but with ePrint you can also print from mobile devices like tablets or smartphones that don't have a USB port to connect with a traditional printer. ePrint bypasses this issue by enabling you to send jobs directly to the printer using a unique e-mail address. With that address, you can print from virtually any device that can send out messages.

It's important to note your home networking situation prior to buying the D110a, as you absolutely need a wireless network to take advantage of ePrint and the multitude of apps available for download--remember, the D110a has no Ethernet port. The first part of the ePrint setup process is to connect the D110a to your wireless network using the printer's Wireless Set Up Wizard. Once you establish a wireless connection and establish a partnership with your home computer (note that the printer and computer must be use the same wireless router), you can enable Web Services through the printer's settings menu, at which point the D110a will print a document with the unique ePrint e-mail address that identifies your printer to HP and lets you begin downloading applications through the ePrintCenter.

Read more

0 What makes a good HDTV?

(Credit: CNET)

A TV is a big purchase, and we all want to get the best TV for our dollar. But what makes an HDTV the best? If you spend more, are you guaranteed a better TV? With all the jargon, marketing, and hype, what performance and features matter the most?

Well, I'm glad you asked.

There are three main factors that determine how "good" a TV is. "Good" is clearly subjective in this case, which is why weighting the importance of the following factors is up to you.

Picture quality

When I sold TVs, I'd ask what people were looking for in their potential purchase. It was really just for my own amusement, because without fail people would say, "Good picture quality."

When pressed, though, most people couldn't elaborate on what constituted picture quality in their view.

(Credit: Geoffrey Morrison)

Contrast ratio
One of the most visible aspects of picture quality is contrast ratio. This is the difference between the darkest a TV can be and the brightest.

A high contrast ratio gives the image dimensionality, makes it "pop." Everyone wants high contrast, but as I explained in another article, it's hard to judge what TVs have a good contrast ratio.

Color
Personally, I'm a fan of accurate color. At first glance, this seems like a given, but many people prefer slightly oversaturated colors. In fact, most TVs when taken out of the box present oversaturated colors. What's important to me, in finding our dream TV, is the ability to adjust the colors. Most new TVs have modes in which you can choose between oversaturated and reasonably accurate color. Samsung LCDs often have very accurate color, as do TVs certified by THX (at least in their THX mode). Most newer Panasonic plasmas have accurate color as well. Thankfully, almost all modern televisions have adjustable color temperature, so this isn't the factor it once was.

Scaling/deinterlacing
More and more, the scaling or upconverting performance of a TV is becoming irrelevant. Most new televisions are sent a 1080i signal, either from a Blu-ray player or a cable/satellite box. So the TV's performance in this regard doesn't matter. Almost all TVs deinterlace correctly these days, so this isn't much of an issue either.

One might class overall light output, or how bright a TV is, under the heading of picture quality, but I disagree. Bright TVs are great, but it's easy for a relatively "dim" TV to have vastly better picture quality than an extremely bright TV. An easy example of this is Pioneer's old Kuro plasmas compared with many of the new LED LCD TVs. Side by side, a Kuro would be lucky if it could produce one-third of the light of an LED LCD. Subjectively, if the two TVs were judged on their own for picture quality, the Kuro would win easily.

Features

Most modern TVs do at least a decent job of creating an image. Some, of course, do a better job than others, but it's rare to find a "bad" television. (At least, from the name brands. If you're buying an LCD out of the back of a white van, your mileage may vary.)

So it's features that are the biggest differences between TVs.

Netflix and other streaming services
Netflix has gotten huge in the last year, and rightly so. Tons of streaming content, all for a low monthly fee. The question is, do you need Netflix streaming to come with your TV? If your Blu-ray player doesn't have streaming built in, then sure, get it in your new TV. Trust me, you'll love it.

If you don't have a Blu-ray player, well, you should get one. They're crazy cheap, and offer better scaling than most TVs. Even some of the cheapest models (under $100) have built-in streaming. So if you're going to get a Blu-ray player, don't worry about whether your TV does streaming or not.

(Credit: Geoffrey Morrison)

3D
3D is a huge push right now, mostly due to the premiums it's possible to charge at the theater and for 3D TVs. I'm pretty apathetic about the whole thing, but if you're into it, go for it. The most important thing to realize about 3D is that it is just a feature. You don't have to use it.

Most high-end models happen to have the ability to show 3D. Because they're high-end, they also typically look the best as well. Personally, looking for the "best" TV, I'd end up looking at 3D models, even though the 3D aspect is irrelevant to me, because of how well they show 2D.

Light and lighting: The TV vs. your room
Here's where light output comes in. In finding the best TV, it's best to ignore hype and marketing and just ask yourself how you'll use the TV. In a dark room, or at night, plasma offers the best picture quality. Plasma TVs aren't "dim," but in a brightly lit room, they're not going to look as good as one of the new LED LCDs, which often have prodigious light output. For daytime viewing LCDs still edge out plasmas, despite the anti-reflective and anti-glare coatings.

That said, a plasma is still plenty watchable during the day, and an LCD (with an adjustable backlight, anyway) will still work fine in a dark room or at night.

Price

Tally up what you've picked as important for your future TV. For me, I've focused on a TV with a decent contrast ratio, accurate (or adjustable) color, possibly streaming, possibly 3D, and probably a plasma, as I do most of my TV watching at night.

Finding a TV that matches all of your criteria is only half the battle, of course. The other half is the price. Price has a pretty direct relationship to the one thing we haven't talked about:

Size
Small TVs are cheap, big TVs are expensive. That much is generally true. There are plenty of guides that tell you what size TV you should get, but to be honest, I've yet to hear of anyone who actually follows them. Most people buy a TV in the 42-inch to 50-inch range because they think it looks right, and because it's affordable.

The truth is, you can go much bigger if you want. I sit 10 feet from a 102-inch screen, and it's epic. You don't need to go that big, but you can if you want to.

It's a tough call between a good TV that's big, and a great TV that's small. I'd generally err on the side of larger, but really this is something that's best judged on a case-by-case basis.

Read more

0 New Windows 8 build reveals virtual keyboard, SMS Read more:

Windows 8's Start menu.

The latest build for Windows 8, known as Build 7989, has leaked onto the Web, reportedly revealing a batch of potential new features.

Windows has long offered a virtual keyboard. But with Windows 8 destined for tablets and other mobile devices, Microsoft has reportedly revamped the keyboard with a new look and feel. Unlike the current keyboard, which requires mouse clicks to operate, the new keyboard will offer touch friendly buttons along with a split keyboard option, according to WinRumors, which has posted a video demo of the new virtual keyboard.

The Win 8 keyboard will reportedly provide built-in support for emoticons and feedback sounds similar to those heard in Windows Phone, WinRumors added.

Also new to Windows 8, at least as found in the latest build, is some type of per-feature licensing, uncovered by a "Windows enthusiast" on Twitter who examined the code for the latest build, according to tech site Redmond Pie. Though the code didn't reveal the use for this feature, Redmond Pie speculates that this could let Microsoft offer all users a "barebones" version of Windows and then prompt them to purchase new features as needed.

Another new feature discovered by Redmond Pie in the 7989 build was support for Short Message Service (SMS). Used for mobile communications, SMS would give Windows 8-based tablets and other devices the ability to directly send text messages. Along with SMS, geo-location is yet one more feature in the latest Windows 8 build reported by Redmond Pie, which says this could be used to automatically detect a user's time zone.

Beyond the many updates and new features that users will see in Windows 8, developers are also facing a slew of changes in writing for the new operating system.

Some developers have reportedly been upset due to Microsoft's lack of clarity over which programming platforms would be supported by Windows 8. Programmers accustomed to using Visual Basic, .Net, and Silverlight have been confused over certain Microsoft comments that HTML5 and JavaScript would be the tools used to develop Windows 8 applications.

A Q&A published today between three Microsoft developers and Mary Jo Foley from CNET sister site ZDNet attempts to clarify some of the confusion over the new Windows 8 programming environment.

Microsoft demoed Windows 8 earlier this month at the D9 conference in California. Windows President Steven Sinofsky touted the upcoming OS as one that would be geared for desktops, laptops, and tablets.

Read more

0 LG LW5600 review: Passive 3D TV, but better with 2D

LG's passive 3D-equipped LW5600 delivers solid 2D picture quality.

(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET)

By now you may've heard all about passive 3D, how it might or might not be better than active, how LG/Vizio and Samsung/Sony/Panasonic are at each others' throats trying to convince buyers to choose one over the other, and how 3D TV is here to stay. That's all true, and documented exhaustively in our 3D TV FAQ, but in our experience few TV shoppers care about 3D in the least. If you're one of the few, then you'll want to know that overall we like the picture quality of active better than what we've seen of passive from the LG LW5600 series--although passive definitely has its advantages.

That said, we can forget about 3D and focus on what really matters: 2D picture quality, where the LW5600 is one of the best edge-lit LED TVs we've tested. The dimming backlight, despite its flaws, is an asset overall (and no, it's not available on less expensive, 2D-only 2011 LGs) along with best-in-class color. Perhaps most importantly, the LW5600 has a matte screen that performs better than glossy screens in bright rooms. We liked LG's Internet features and even its funky remote this year, although buyers seeking a style statement will be disappointed. The LG LW5600 costs more than most LED-based LCD TVs, but it offers the complete package and deserves consideration. from buyers in this price range regardless of how they feel about 3D.

The good: The LG 47LW5600 evinced excellent color in bright and dark areas, along with relatively deep black levels and even screen uniformity for an edge-lit LED-based LCD TV. Its matte screen works well in bright rooms. The Smart TV Internet portal is well-designed with a solid selection of streaming services, and the motion-sensitive remote provides a cool, easy-to-use secondary control option. Passive 3D on this TV has minimal crosstalk, is brighter than active, and LG includes four pairs of lightweight, nonpowered glasses.

The bad: This LG LED TV is relatively expensive. Its edge-lit local dimming LED scheme produces some artifacts and blooming; highlights were somewhat muted in dark scenes; and even from off-angle the picture loses contrast worse than most such TVs. The LW5600's Smart TV lacks Hulu Plus and Pandora, and its search is next to useless. Passive 3D shows a softer image with more artifacts and worse overall quality than active.

The bottom line: While passive 3D has its flaws, the LG LW5600's 2D picture quality is very good for an edge-lit LED-based LCD TV, especially in bright rooms.

Read more