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Laptop Tech Support: 2017 Reviews – Apple Hits The Spot Again

March 13, 2017 by Ian Orford Leave a Comment

It’s showdown time again with their yearly tech support showdown Laptop Mag again ranks (unsurprisingly) Apple as the number one tech company for customer service.

Is this the reason many Apple fans are choosing to stick with the Cupertino Giant, despite mass defection to Windows machines from some Pro users?

In a surprise move up the ladder comes Acer with a jump to the number 2 spot. Regular in the Tech Support top rankings is Lenovo sitting nicely at number 3.

Turning in totally miserable performance we find Samsung and MSI wallowing at the bottom.

We find this really hard to comprehend considering first of all the size of Samsung as a tech giant, and MSI who on the face of it make some really good laptops.

Not every company offers first-class tech support for its laptops. With confusing web resources, unhelpful social media accounts and clueless phone reps, many brands put a lot of unnecessary obstacles between consumers and the help they need.

After we spent several weeks evaluating 10 laptop makers based on their online support and live chat, social networking resources, and phone-based help, we found that Apple earns top marks once again for its extremely knowledgeable support staff and strong web resources.

The Latest Laptop Reviews – Weekly Round Up

December 2, 2016 by Ian Orford Leave a Comment

Plenty to look at this week with some really good, nice shiny new laptops being released, and some not so good. One of the stars of the week is stunning the Dell XPS 13 and 15, the not so good Lenovo N22 Touch Chromebook, the amazing Acer Swift 7, the worlds thinnest laptop, the absolutely fantastic Gigabyte Aero 14, and the beast that is the MSI GT62VR Dominator Pro. For good measure we’ve thrown in the Asus MB169C+ review, a portabel USB-C monitor which Kane Fulton of TechRadar reports is a joy to use. And of course right now no laptop review roundup would be complete without featuring the Microsoft Surface Book. Read on and enjoy…

A little on the dim side Carrying case is fiddly to use Kills your laptop’s battery Having more than one monitor is a boon for productivity, and it’s usually easy to get hold of a second panel if you’re working from home or the office. Asus MB169C+ review

The Dell XPS 13 and XPS 15 line of machines, with their unique Infinity Edge displays and gorgeous carbon fiber and aluminum adorned chassis, are some of the best looking, best built, and highest performing laptops on the market. Dell XPS 13 Review: Kaby Lake Makes A Fantastic 13-Inch Laptop Even Better

The computer’s mixed performance and poor speakers stymie those small innovations, though. This laptop will work for young pupils who focus on one assignment at a time, but competing machines offer stronger performance. Lenovo N22 Touch Chromebook Review

Acer Swift 7 Review at a glance Acer Swft 7 is a Laptop of Ultra-thin Proportions. Acer Swift 7 has Intel® Core™ i5 processor, 13.3″ display, 8 GB, 256 GB Solid Acer Swift 7 Review | The Thinnest Laptop Ever!

Even though I’ve done scores of notebook reviews over the years, I should confess that for the most part, I’d not buy the vast majority of them. Hardware review: GIGABYTE AERO 14

It’s a good chip and you can read more about it in my review of the Kaby Lake laptop chips. The CPU is paired with 16GB of LPDDR3/1866 in dual-channel mode and a Samsung 512GB PM951 NVME M.2 drive. A spot-check with Crystal Disk Mark 5. HP Spectre x360 review: Faster, smaller, and better than before

Dell Inspiron 11 3000 series 2 in 1 laptop is a weird mix of good and bad. You get a plastic body with a sturdy finish. The laptop sports a 11.6-inch screen and Dell Inspiron 11 3000 series 2-in-1 laptop review – Digit.in

The TravelMate’s keyboard offers 1.2 millimeters of key travel, which is less than the 1.5mm that we consider the acceptable minimum for most business laptops. Acer TravelMate P648 Review: Is It Good for Business?

Give me a laptop to review and I’m happy. There’s always plenty of clever little gadgets and features to play around with and learn from. A beast of a machine – the MSI GT62VR Dominator Pro

It’s a great machine. Our review focused on the things most daily users of the laptop will encounter, but we decided to return to it and examine how a professional user would use it. In this case a video editor. Surface Bo ok: Is it a worthy laptop for a pro user?

Laptops with the Longest Battery Life – Up To 17 Hours

December 2, 2016 by Ian Orford Leave a Comment

The best laptop in our opinion is the one you can work with unplugged for a long time. Michael Prospero, LAPTOP Reviews Editor over at Laptopmag.com obviously agrees because they have just tested a range of notebooks to see which one comes out at the top.

Laptop battery tests can often be tedious and over complicated so Michael and his team have kept this one really simple. They’ve well, just run the test machines, including models from Lenovo, Microsoft, Apple Dell and Asus, until the battery went flat.

Doing what most users do which is web based working and light tasks, they have compiled the list of winners with two Lenovo Thinkpad machines unsurprisingly in first and second place, the ThinkPad X260 and ThinkPad T460 with an amazing 17 hours of duration each, with third and 4th place going to Acer and Apple.

No matter how stacked its specs are, a laptop is useless if it can’t hold a charge. Fortunately, there are plenty of notebooks that go the distance. Using our Laptop Mag Battery Test, which involves continuous Web surfing over Wi-Fi at 100 nits of brightness, we’ve identified the longest-lasting notebooks on the market. We’re talking more than 10 hours of endurance, which should more than suffice for that cross-country fight, a long day of meetings or multiple, back-to-back classes. read more at laptopmag.com

Laptop vs tablet | Best convertible laptops and tablets 2016/2017

November 16, 2016 by Ian Orford Leave a Comment

The laptop versus tablet war hots up almost weekly and with the release of ever more powerful Tablets like the iPad Pro and the Surface Pro, lines are distinctly blury.

So if that’s the case and we all love the convenience of the Tablet which was originally designed to consume content, and we look to the power of a laptop clam-shell design with it’s supposedly more powerful processor and graphics, is a convertible the answer?

Microsoft certainly think so with the incredibly powerful Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book with its superb detachable screen, and Apple has taken the concept to heart with the iPad Pro 12″ and Smart Keyboard. So whats the answer? Check out PC Advisors run down…

Laptop vs tablet | Best convertible laptops and tablets 2016/2017 UK… look for in a convertible laptop or convertible tablet is the same. Like almost any tech device you’ll want to get the best specifications for your money including the processor, memory, storage and screen. Laptop vs tablet | Best convertible laptops and tablets 2016/2017 UK – PC Advisor

thumbnail courtesy of pcadvisor.co.uk

Windows 10 secret feature – Microsoft planning major changes for your laptop

October 17, 2016 by Ian Orford Leave a Comment

With it’s latest release it looks like Microsoft has added a whole load of features to Windows 10, including some very handy new ‘gestures’ to help us to speed with the process of navigating around our system using just the trackpad.

Look for all these new goodies in the Advanced Gestures Configuration Page. It’s also nice to know that Microsoft is on the ball with Security Updates. They have just found and fixed four zero-day flaws.

Windows 10 secret feature – Microsoft planning major changes for your laptop : Microsoft might be busy planning for a major hardware launch next week but that’s not stopping them from tweaking their popular software.read more at trendlogs.com

AMD Polaris GPUs To Deliver Revolutionary Jump In Performance

October 5, 2016 by Leave a Comment

When AMD’s Chief Architect Raja Koduri announced the next generation 14nm GPUs, code-named Polaris 11 and Polaris 10, designed specifically to power high-end desktops and deliver high-end console-class gaming performance to notebooks, he promised ‘Polaris as an architecture that will deliver a “historic” and momentous leap in performance per watt’

Why Polaris? Koduri explains that because stars are the most effective photon generators in our universe, AMD decided to name its most groundbreaking graphics architecture to date after “Polaris” because it’s the brightest star seen from the earth.

Raja Koduri, vice president of AMD and chief architect of Radeon Technologies Group has a huge and incredibly ambitious goal of powering 90% of the world’s pixels. With that aim in mind, just as stars are the most efficient photon generators in the universe, he wants AMD’s vast graphics expertise to create GPU’s that become the world’s most efficient pixel generators.

Check this Topic at wccftech.com

Image courtesy of wccftech.com

Thunderbolt Meets USB (At Last) | The Future Of Data Bus

September 30, 2016 by Ian Orford Leave a Comment

Merging Thunderbolt 3 and USB Type-C brings a huge amount of flexibility and power to the external data bus. Just why and how this is happening technically will be beyond the limits of comprehension for most of us mere mortals, all we have to know is that we now have 40Gbps available for much faster data transfer, more pixels pushed to our 4k displays, more charging power up to 100w and more protocols to connect virtually any dock, device or display.

It looks like we finally have a data bus standard that will provide the flexibility and bandwidth to drive and connect our devices that will expand virtually ‘on demand’.

A lot has been happening in the world of external communication buses over the past year. In the last 12 months the USB consortium has announced both 10Gbps “Superspeed+” USB 3.1 and the new USB Type-C connector, USB’s new compact, reversible connector that is designed to drive the standard for the next decade or more. Meanwhile with the introduction of USB Alternate Mode functionality – the ability for USB Type-C to carry other protocols along with (or instead of) USB Superspeed data – has made USB more flexible than ever, with the VESA announcing that DisplayPort will be supporting alternate mode to deliver DisplayPort video over USB Type-C ports and cabling.

As a result, the introduction of USB Type-C has led to a definite and relatively rapid transition over to the new standard. With the USB consortium having designed a very capable and desirable physical layer for Type-C, and then alternate modes allowing anyone to use that physical layer, there have been a number of other technologies that have started aligning themselves with USB in order to take advantage of what is becoming an even more common platform for external buses.

Check this Topic at anandtech.com

Image courtesy of anandtech.com

How To Upgrade Your Notebook with an External Graphics Card

September 27, 2016 by Ian Orford Leave a Comment

How To Upgrade your Laptop with an eGPU.

If you’ve purchased a laptop with thoughts of future proofing, in other words, bought the most powerful processor, the biggest hard drive and the largest chunk of memory you can afford, plus of course the best mobile graphics your budget will stretch to, your pretty well est for a few years.

Right? Wrong!

If you’re a gamer or avid media buff, the very first thing to hit dinosaur status is your graphics card. The super fast GPU that came with your shiny new Laptop could feel antiquated within 18 months.

Plenty of life left in the processor, but your new games are running like a dog.

So what to do? Well, in theory, the GPU on your notebooks motherboard is upgradeable, but in practice, its not a standard any manufacturer has adopted.

So your only alternative is an External GPU or eGPU. Now there are some mainstream OEM’s who have their own eGPU, MSI, Alienware, and the Razer Blade with the superb Razer Core. But these have proprietary interfaces so what if you want to upgrade your nongaming rig to the latest Desktop GPU heaven?

Well, the answer to your prayers may be here with the EXP GDC Laptop External PCI-E Graphics Card, or our choice, the Akitio Thunder2 PCIe Box. Now, warning, neither are just plug and play, but right now until a smart mainstream manufacturer like Nvidia fills the gap with a USB-C eGPU, this is what we are stuck with

Its no secret that upgradeable notebook graphics are a bit of an oxymoron. Despite the fact Nvidias MXM modular graphics card technology has been available to notebook designers for over a decade, few have fully adopted the standard. The lack of a universal solution for upgrading notebook graphics has left notebook owners at a significant economic disadvantage relative to desktop PC owners.

In the gaming world, and other graphics-intensive usages, the graphics card is usually the primary performance-limiting factor. Extending the life cycle of a gaming desktop or a professional 3D rendering workstation can be as simple as swapping in a new graphics card. On the notebook side of the equation, even if its processor, memory, and storage are up to the task (and they usually will be for many years after the fact) the lack of a powerful-enough graphics card means your old laptop is now obsolete. It can make the purchase of a gaming notebook or a mobile workstation a hard sell if youre interested in a longer-term investment.

Although not a new idea, using an external graphics solution has only recently caught on in the mainstream. These solutions allow you to plug in an external enclosure to your notebook, and enjoy the power of a desktop graphics card. The original DIY solutions, as well discuss in the next section, werent all that elegant, but they paved the way for the elegant plug-and-play solutions now being produced by mainstream notebook makers. Lets take a look.

Check this Topic at notebookreview.com

Laptop Buying Guide | Get It Right 1st Time

September 23, 2016 by Ian Orford Leave a Comment

Let’s get this right first time. Choosing the right laptop can be a pretty daunting experience and an expensive mistake if you get it wrong.

There’s a lot to consider and the first two questions are, Mac or Windows, new or pre-owned?

With notebook prices now almost being at commodity level, unless you’re looking at a real high-end business, gaming machine or MacBook Pro, we suspect that you will be as well sticking with new

On the other hand, the Mac versus Windows argument will probably rage forever, with Apple devotee’s declaring undying devotion to there beloved brand while Windows fans will brush it off as nothing but hype.

If however this is your first foray into the realms of a full blown fully featured laptop purchase, and you are already an Apple user with an iPhone, iPad or both, there is a lot to be said for buying into the beautifully interconnected system that is Apple.

So what exactly do you want out of your new notebook purchase? The obvious question is, what is your budget. It’s no good lusting after a new 15″ MacBook Pro with retina display, or a Thinkpad X1 Yoga if you only have a $/£200 to $/£300 to spend.

Grab a pad and start making a few notes, what exactly are you going to do? If you’re strictly limited to web surfing, email, and the odd NetFlix movie then a ChromeBook will do the trick. Gaming, video editing or number crunching and your right at the other end of the price and power spectrum. Get these things right, and you’ll have a laptop that’s right for you right now. And don’t worry about obsolescence, 2 or 3 years with the lightspeed rate technology is progressing and you’ll want to upgrade anyway.

In 2010, Apple carved a deep line in the history of portable computing, unveiling a device that would set the template for the imminent flood of tablets that would soon saturate the market. For a brief while, there was speculation that tablets would replace the previous standard of mobile computing, the laptop.

Tablets have certainly exploded in popularity, sure, but despite their ubiquity, the laptop remains a mainstay among computer electronics. It’s sturdy and dependable, and with hardware geared towards performance, laptops are still a viable option for people who want a mobile device that can do a good deal more than what a traditional tablet is capable of.

Choosing the right laptop can be a complicated process, given there are notable differences in terms of both design and hardware unique to each brand. When you buy a laptop, keep in mind what exactly you will be using your laptop for, whether you intend to lug it from place to place or simply use it as a device to snuggle up with in bed. There is a good deal to consider, so let us guide you through the process.

Curated Link From Digitaltrends.com

How to Upgrade Your Laptop’s Hard Drive to an SSD

September 2, 2016 by Leave a Comment

Upgrade your hard drive to SSD? Simple, just follow the tutorial. Upgrading the old style ‘spinning platter’ your laptop came with may seem like a daunting task but if you follow a simple routine you can have the job done in no time.

Installing an SSD or Solid State Drive will vastly improve laptop performance and now that prices are dropping significantly there really is no excuse not to get this job done. In the Dollar per Gigabyte war, the HDD drive still wins but the SSD is closing the gap. An SSD drive has no moving parts to fail and you’ll think you have just purchased a new laptop.

The speed difference is significant, particularly for gaming.

Follow Melanie Pinola over at Laptop Mag for her simple to follow tutorial

There’s no better way to speed up and upgrade a laptop than to replace its mechanical drive with an SSD (Solid State Drive). It’s a no-brainer, but if the thought of reinstalling Windows 10 and all of your programs and then tweaking all of their settings gives you the chills, don’t worry. In an hour or two, you can easily be up and running with a clone of your current system — except now your laptop will have blazing performance.

Here’s how to do it.

Check this Topic at laptopmag.com

Image courtesy of laptopmag.com