Laptops updated with Intel's latest Ivy Bridge processors are finally here, but is there as much to be excited about compared with last year's Sandy Bridge CPUs?
Intel hasn't made such dramatic claims this time around as far as pure processor speed, but there are plenty of other improvements including eight-way hyperthreading, Turbo Boost 2.0, integrated USB 3.0, and native Thunderbolt support. The only two parts any mainstream consumer's likely to care about are the CPU gains and new Intel HD 4000 integrated graphics, which promise to greatly boost gaming performance without dedicated graphics.
Soon enough our CNET Labs will be flooded with Ivy Bridge laptops, and we'll have more real-life examples of Ivy Bridge products than you can shake a stick at. Until then, we've tested two early examples of high-end quad-core Ivy Bridge Core i7 processors that Origin and Intel have sent us.
Unlike the truly generic integrated graphics-only product last year, the Asus N56V that Intel sent to us looks more like an actual retail unit, albeit one that may not ever match an actual production model. It has a 2.6GHz Intel Core i7-3720QM processor, along with discrete Nvidia GeForce GT 630 graphics. Last year's "white box" only had integrated graphics. We were able to disable the Nvidia GPU and run Intel's HD 4000 integrated graphics exclusively, to see what the performance gains were.
The Origin EON17-S, which we formally reviewed, featured a faster 2.9GHz Core i7-3920XM processor.
The Asus N56V is a 15.6-inch laptop weighing in at 6 pounds, a middleweight system approaching the "desktop replacement" category. The slightly bronzed notebook has a 1,920x1,080-pixel-resolution display, 8GB of RAM, a 750GB, 7,200rpm hard drive, and Nvidia GeForce GT 630M graphics. The speakers above the keyboard fired off loud and crisp sound, but I wasn't as concerned with system design in this case; I focused chiefly on Ivy Bridge CPU performance.
For comparison purposes, we looked at an extremely recent and somewhat similar Asus N53, a laptop with a Sandy Bridge-generation quad-core 2.2GHz Intel Core i7-2670QM and the same Nvidia dedicated graphics. We also compared these systems with a couple of equivalent Sandy Bridge laptops with midrange Nvidia GeForce 540M graphics. After running all our benchmarks, here's what our Labs editor Julie Rivera found.
CPU performance
The performance leap between Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge CPUs, even by Intel's claims, is supposed to be subtle. That's reflected on our benchmark comparisons across some equivalent systems from last year.
The Ivy Bridge-based Origin EON17-S and Asus N56V handled our benchmark tests faster than any previous Windows laptops. Obviously, these quad-core systems represent the highest end of the performance spectrum: I'm more curious how middle-range dual-core processors and ultrabook-oriented lower-voltage CPUs will fare when they emerge. However, this bodes well for Ivy Bridge laptops in general.
Graphics and gaming
Intel claims that Ivy Bridge's Intel HD 4000 graphics offer up to double the performance compared with last year's Sandy Bridge integrated graphics. The results varied by game, but it did seem to hold true that the Intel HD 4000 graphics were markedly improved. Even more impressively, they held their own against Nvidia GeForce 540M graphics. Read more here on the gaming power of Ivy Bridge's integrated HD 4000 graphics.
One note, however: next-gen Nvidia and AMD discrete graphics will provide graphics potential of a much higher order, especially on top-end gaming laptops. People who want to see the future of PC gaming are still best off shopping for high-end graphics, but the average laptop buyer should be really happy about how Ivy Bridge laptops will game.
The Asus N56V also has next-gen Nvidia graphics in the form of a GeForce GT 630M GPU. The Nvidia graphics performed admirably, but both Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge laptops feature these GPUs. That mirrors what you'll see in stores over the next few weeks:
Battery life
Battery life shows off only a subtle gain between our two tested Asus systems: 226 minutes with the Ivy Bridge N56V versus 214 minutes with the Sandy Bridge N53. It's hard to tell what the laptop battery life and power efficiency story is here, especially on a select pair of high-end systems. We'll have to wait for dual-core and ultrabook versions of Ivy Bridge processors to compare results down the road.
What does this mean for you?
What the average person will care about is: slightly faster processors on average, perhaps a more widespread use of Turbo Boost in mainstream laptops, and, hey, the average laptop will be better at playing games. Thunderbolt is also intriguing, but until laptops start actually having Thunderbolt ports -- and affordable peripherals become the norm -- no one will really care.
More-mainstream Ivy Bridge systems will be arriving over the next few months, and these will really show what Intel's new processors can do.
Many laptop manufacturers will, in fact, be selling new products with new designs and even new Nvidia and AMD graphics, but not necessarily new Intel Ivy Bridge processors. They'll be subtly swapped out when CPUs become available, but for many shoppers, the Moment of Ivy Bridge may get lost in the shuffle and be hard to identify. (To know if your laptop has a newer Intel processor, make sure the four-digit number at the end of your CPU starts with a "3"; for example, Core i7-3720QM vs i7-2670QM.)
The takeaway I've gleaned from early time with these laptops is that the CPU gains are small, while the integrated graphics on mainstream laptops could finally be good enough for most people to use for their everyday gaming. However, these early systems show off fast quad-core CPUs that don't really mirror what the average user will buy. Apples to apples comparisons show some modest gains, but nothing like last year's dramatic Sandy Bridge leap. That being said, if you're shopping for a laptop now, you're probably better off waiting for an Ivy Bridge version of your system to appear.
read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57417957-1/our-first-ivy-bridge-laptops-how-do-they-perform/
Low price ASUS netbook batteries: ASUS AL31-1005 Battery , ASUS AL32-1005 Battery .
Monday, April 23, 2012
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
GM: Explosion at battery research facility ‘unrelated to the Chevrolet Volt’
An explosion during "extreme battery testing" Wednesday morning of a prototype energy cell at a General Motors battery research facility in Warren, Mich., injured one person and did major structural damage to the building.
At the heart of the explosion was a lithium-ion battery, according to a fire department official cited in local news reports. The morning blast did not, however, involve batteries that power the Chevrolet Volt, the new plug-in hybrid car whose batteries caught fire weeks after a crash test, General Motors said in a statement.
But the flap over the Volt battery fire has left some insiders feeling more than a little peeved and defensive at the amount of news media attention being devoted to what they say is an almost inevitable, if not routine, event in the business of battery research and extreme testing.
"The whole reason they have these labs is precisely to do this kind of aggressive testing – anticipating the worst thing a consumer could do with this product," says one expert with direct knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the explosion, who asked not to be named. "This is going to turn out to be a mountain out of a mole hill. Yeah, we're doing a lot of testing. That's what we have to do. Sometimes things explode."
“The incident is still under investigation by GM and the Warren authorities," the GM statement said. "Any information or discussion of the nature of the work in the lab or cause of the incident is entirely speculative and cannot be confirmed at this time. The incident was unrelated to the Chevrolet Volt or any other production vehicle. The incident was related to extreme testing on a prototype battery.”
Despite criticism of the Volt by conservative pundits, a follow-up investigation by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration concluded the new car was no more prone to fire than any other vehicle.
"The debate over batteries recently really hasn't been about safety so much as about their longevity," says Tom Turrentine, director of the plug-in hybrid and electric vehicle research center at the University of California, Davis. "I think we are mostly over the hump with battery safety. But there's no question that battery labs are notorious for explosions when they're testing."
Lithium-ion batteries are attractive to automakers because they can hold so much power – about four times the amount of energy a conventional lead-acid battery. Even so, earlier lithium-ion batteries used in other commercial applications burst into flame on occasion. Laptop computer manufacturer Dell Computer recalled millions of batteries after a handful of its laptops burst into flames several years ago.
t's a peril automakers were well aware of. Automakers now building the Volt and other first generation plug-in vehicles that run primarily or exclusively on advanced lithium ion batteries have selected less-volatile battery chemistries – and added engineering safety features as well, industry experts say.
Robert Kruse, GM's then-executive director of global vehicle engineering for hybrids, electric vehicles, and batteries, explained his thoughts on emerging plug-in hybrid vehicle battery technology in a 2009 interview with the Monitor. On safety, cell chemistry, and to avoid "thermal runaway" in which lithium ion batteries have been known to burst into flames, "many layers of safety built into the Volt," Mr. Kruse said.
"We have adopted [independent] safety standards and have employed those requirements into our cell and pack designs. I can assure you we've met those standards with what we've designed."
Vehicle makers like GM are now on the hunt for new battery chemistries that hold a lot more energy than today's lithium ion battery, but are also less volatile. But it's a hunt fraught with occasional explosions.
"The challenge of the battery designer is to come up with a high voltage battery, but one that doesn't suffer from instability," says Donald Sadoway, professor of chemistry and an authority on new battery technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "If you have a high energy battery, that means you've got a lot of energy inside that case and you can, in an unabated release, end up with thermal events or, in an extreme case – an explosion."
Ann Marie Sastry is CEO of Sakti3, a next generation company that GM has invested in to produce a cutting-edge source of power for future vehicles that would far exceed conventional lithium ion batteries.
"Intensive testing is required right now to validate the technology for use by consumers," Dr. Sastry writes in an e-mail interview. "But, there are disruptive technologies coming down the pike which will obviate some of these challenges. So the today solution is to test, and the tomorrow solution is to productize the next generation technology, and that's why we are partnered with GM – they're taking the right approach."
Though not discounting the seriousness of any battery explosion, Dr. Sadoway says it's still much more dangerous to be near a gasoline explosion of equivalent energy value. Indeed, there were 184,000 vehicle fires in 2010 involving conventional gasoline-powered vehicles that killed 285 people and cost $1 billion in property damage, according to the National Fire Protection Association.
"If I had to choose," he says, "I would rather be present when a battery that explodes – rather than a car whose gas tank explodes."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
ACER laptop batteries replacement:
acer aspire 5515 laptop battery
acer batbl50l6 laptop battery
ACER AS07A41 Battery
At the heart of the explosion was a lithium-ion battery, according to a fire department official cited in local news reports. The morning blast did not, however, involve batteries that power the Chevrolet Volt, the new plug-in hybrid car whose batteries caught fire weeks after a crash test, General Motors said in a statement.
But the flap over the Volt battery fire has left some insiders feeling more than a little peeved and defensive at the amount of news media attention being devoted to what they say is an almost inevitable, if not routine, event in the business of battery research and extreme testing.
"The whole reason they have these labs is precisely to do this kind of aggressive testing – anticipating the worst thing a consumer could do with this product," says one expert with direct knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the explosion, who asked not to be named. "This is going to turn out to be a mountain out of a mole hill. Yeah, we're doing a lot of testing. That's what we have to do. Sometimes things explode."
“The incident is still under investigation by GM and the Warren authorities," the GM statement said. "Any information or discussion of the nature of the work in the lab or cause of the incident is entirely speculative and cannot be confirmed at this time. The incident was unrelated to the Chevrolet Volt or any other production vehicle. The incident was related to extreme testing on a prototype battery.”
Despite criticism of the Volt by conservative pundits, a follow-up investigation by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration concluded the new car was no more prone to fire than any other vehicle.
"The debate over batteries recently really hasn't been about safety so much as about their longevity," says Tom Turrentine, director of the plug-in hybrid and electric vehicle research center at the University of California, Davis. "I think we are mostly over the hump with battery safety. But there's no question that battery labs are notorious for explosions when they're testing."
Lithium-ion batteries are attractive to automakers because they can hold so much power – about four times the amount of energy a conventional lead-acid battery. Even so, earlier lithium-ion batteries used in other commercial applications burst into flame on occasion. Laptop computer manufacturer Dell Computer recalled millions of batteries after a handful of its laptops burst into flames several years ago.
t's a peril automakers were well aware of. Automakers now building the Volt and other first generation plug-in vehicles that run primarily or exclusively on advanced lithium ion batteries have selected less-volatile battery chemistries – and added engineering safety features as well, industry experts say.
Robert Kruse, GM's then-executive director of global vehicle engineering for hybrids, electric vehicles, and batteries, explained his thoughts on emerging plug-in hybrid vehicle battery technology in a 2009 interview with the Monitor. On safety, cell chemistry, and to avoid "thermal runaway" in which lithium ion batteries have been known to burst into flames, "many layers of safety built into the Volt," Mr. Kruse said.
"We have adopted [independent] safety standards and have employed those requirements into our cell and pack designs. I can assure you we've met those standards with what we've designed."
Vehicle makers like GM are now on the hunt for new battery chemistries that hold a lot more energy than today's lithium ion battery, but are also less volatile. But it's a hunt fraught with occasional explosions.
"The challenge of the battery designer is to come up with a high voltage battery, but one that doesn't suffer from instability," says Donald Sadoway, professor of chemistry and an authority on new battery technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "If you have a high energy battery, that means you've got a lot of energy inside that case and you can, in an unabated release, end up with thermal events or, in an extreme case – an explosion."
Ann Marie Sastry is CEO of Sakti3, a next generation company that GM has invested in to produce a cutting-edge source of power for future vehicles that would far exceed conventional lithium ion batteries.
"Intensive testing is required right now to validate the technology for use by consumers," Dr. Sastry writes in an e-mail interview. "But, there are disruptive technologies coming down the pike which will obviate some of these challenges. So the today solution is to test, and the tomorrow solution is to productize the next generation technology, and that's why we are partnered with GM – they're taking the right approach."
Though not discounting the seriousness of any battery explosion, Dr. Sadoway says it's still much more dangerous to be near a gasoline explosion of equivalent energy value. Indeed, there were 184,000 vehicle fires in 2010 involving conventional gasoline-powered vehicles that killed 285 people and cost $1 billion in property damage, according to the National Fire Protection Association.
"If I had to choose," he says, "I would rather be present when a battery that explodes – rather than a car whose gas tank explodes."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
ACER laptop batteries replacement:
acer aspire 5515 laptop battery
acer batbl50l6 laptop battery
ACER AS07A41 Battery
Monday, April 2, 2012
The Reasons You should Spend More Money on Next Laptop
These days, you can purchase a passable laptop for little more than the cost of an iPad. As of February, the average Windows notebook cost just $513 and, for less than that, you can find a strong system that comes with modern specs like a Core i3 CPU, 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive. But just because you can grab a low-rent laptop for $399 at Best Buy doesn't mean you should. Our friends at Laptop Magazine explain.
Whether you're buying a notebook that's made to order or choosing between different ready-made models, you need to pay a little extra to be happier and more productive. Here are five laptop features worth the splurge:
1. High-Resolution Screens
You can never be too rich, too thin or have too many pixels, but unfortunately most notebooks today come with lame 1366 x 768 screens that show even less of your favorite Web pages above the fold than their 1280 x 800 counterparts from 2007. When it comes to surfing the Web, editing documents, sending email or viewing photos, it's all about vertical real screen estate. Having 900 vertical pixels instead of 768 can allow you to see an additional paragraph or more of text without scrolling. When you're not scrolling all day, you can read more and get more work done.
If you're purchasing a MacBook, make sure to buy one with at least a 1440 x 900 resolution (MacBook Air 13-inch, MacBook Pro 15-inch or higher). If you're buying a PC notebook, spend the extra money to get a screen that's at least 1600 x 900. And if your notebook is 15.6-inches or larger, try going for a 1920 x 1080 resolution display.
On sites that provide configure-to-order notebooks, the cost delta between a 1366 x 768 screen and a 1600 x 900 screen is anywhere from $50 to $100. For example, HP.com charges $100 to upgrade the $579 Pavilion dm4t's screen to the higher resolution, while Dell charges $50 to up the $499 Latitude E5420′s screen to 1600 x 900 and $150 to move the XPS 15′s screen from 1366 to 1920 x 1080. The one caveat is that many of the systems that come with a higher-res screen option are marketed as business notebooks, but that's no reason a consumer couldn't buy and enjoy them.
Solid State Drives
Every second you sit there waiting for your computer to boot or Photoshop to load is bringing you a second closer to the end of your life. Why not use those seconds to do something more rewarding, like opening more applications?
The speed delta between using a traditional hard drive and an SSD is greater than the difference between riding a Big Wheels on a cobblestone road and racing down the Autobahn in a Porsche 911. In our tests, our favorite SSD, the Samsung 830 Series, took less than half the time of a 7,200-rpm hard drive to open a 500-page PDF in Adobe Reader X (3.8 vs 7.1 seconds), and less than a third of the time to open a Excel 2010 to a large spreadsheet (4.2 vs 14 seconds) and to launch Photoshop CS 5.1 with a 400MB TIF (8.4 vs 25.9 seconds).
What can you do with the extra 17.5 seconds you won't be waiting for Photoshop to open? How about opening 17 more browser windows (at less than 1 second each), reading five more tweets from your friends or observing 1.7 billion particle collisions?
Unfortunately, the price delta between buying a notebook with an SSD and a hard drive is significant, but anything around $200 for 128GB of storage should be considered good. For example, Lenovo charges a reasonable $180 premium to upgrade a ThinkPad Edge E420s to SSD while Dell charges $230 to bump the Latitude E6420 to SSD. In those cases where the premium is unreasonably high, look for preconfigured models with an SSD built-in like the $849 Toshiba Portege Z835. Bottom line: SSDs are worth the money because you're buying time.
Longer Battery Life
Unless you're buying an 8-pound notebook you plan to leave on your desk as if it were a desktop, you need as much endurance as you can get. Most low-cost notebooks don't come with enough to juice to last more than 3 or 4 hours on a charge, which is barely enough time to watch a single "Lord of the Rings" movie, let alone write a detailed report for work or school.
Whether you're hopping from conference room to conference room in the office, heading from one classroom to another or walking around the show floor at CES all day, you don't want to worry about finding an outlet. Even when you're just lying in bed using your notebook, it can be a real pain to be tethered to the wall or stop to charge every few hours.
Save yourself from laptop battery panic by choosing a notebook that gets a bare minimum of 6 hours on a charge, with 8 to 10 hours preferable. High-endurance notebooks like the ASUS U31 series cost a little more than the $500 average notebook price, but when you can get 9+ hours of battery life, spend the money.Long battery life review:aspire 4730z battery, AS09A61 battery.
If a notebook is available with different battery choices, such as Acer laptop battery,always go for the higher-capacity battery, even if it adds a little bit of weight or sticks out the back. For example, the Lenovo ThinkPad X220 lasts a strong 7 hours and 51 minutes on a charge with its standard 6-cell battery. However, when you pay an extra $30 to upgrade to the 9-cell unit, it lasts an incredible 12 hours and 39 minutes while only adding 0.2 pounds to the laptop's weight and 1 inch to its depth. If you don't mind another 1.5 pounds of weight and another 0.6-inches of thickness, an optional battery slice takes the battery life up to 20 hours and 18 minutes, enough time to fly from New York to Taipei with a 3-hour stopover in Tokyo.
More: 11 Ways to Increase your Windows Laptop's Battery Life
More Powerful Processors
When you invest in a new notebook, you want to hold onto it for a good three years, without feeling like it's too slow to run today's apps, let alone tomorrow's updates. The lowest-priced notebooks on the market use sluggish Intel Pentium or AMD Athlon chips, while many average-priced systems sport modest Intel Core i3 chips.
Spring for a system with an Intel Core i5 or Core i7 processor to give yourself enough oomph to crunch videos and spreadsheets today while future-proofing you against the next couple of years of innovation. Core i5/i7 CPUs can turbo boost up to a higher frequency while performing processor-intensive tasks, so your 2.5-GHz laptop can actually overclock itself up to 3.1-GHz while you're playing a game.
he cost delta between Core i3 and Core i5 is fairly minimal in most cases. The price difference between a Dell Inspiron 14R configuration with Core i5 and one without is just $70 on Dell.com. However, when you jump up from a bargain basement Intel Pentium CPU, you pay a larger premium. For example, HP.com charges $170 to upgrade its Pavilion G6t from Pentium to Core i5. Spend the money.
Discrete Graphics
While the integrated HD 3000 chip on Intel's 2nd Generation Core Series processors offers decent graphics performance for everyday tasks and video playback, many applications benefit from discrete graphics. Though we're able to run "World of Warcraft" at modest settings on integrated graphics, we don't even bother to test out serious titles like "Crysis" or "Batman: Arkham City" without a dedicated Nvidia GeForce or AMD Radeon chip on board, because those games won't be playable at even low settings.
When you have a discrete chip, you can also achieve significantly better performance in photo and video editing apps, as many are optimized to run filters, compress files and show previews more quickly by using the GPU. More importantly, the latest Web browsers have hardware-accelerated graphics capability that affects the playback of next-gen Internet applications. More and more sites are adding 3D elements and animations that run so much smoother with discrete graphics. Check out Microsoft's Beauty of the Web site to see some great examples.
The cost of upgrading from integrated to discrete graphics is usually in the $75to $150 range for vendors that sell configure-to-order or sell notebook configurations with this feature. For example, HP.com charges just $75 to upgrade from integrated Intel HD Graphics to an AMD Radeon HD 7470M GPU when you buy the Pavilion dv6t.
Whether you're buying a notebook that's made to order or choosing between different ready-made models, you need to pay a little extra to be happier and more productive. Here are five laptop features worth the splurge:
1. High-Resolution Screens
You can never be too rich, too thin or have too many pixels, but unfortunately most notebooks today come with lame 1366 x 768 screens that show even less of your favorite Web pages above the fold than their 1280 x 800 counterparts from 2007. When it comes to surfing the Web, editing documents, sending email or viewing photos, it's all about vertical real screen estate. Having 900 vertical pixels instead of 768 can allow you to see an additional paragraph or more of text without scrolling. When you're not scrolling all day, you can read more and get more work done.
If you're purchasing a MacBook, make sure to buy one with at least a 1440 x 900 resolution (MacBook Air 13-inch, MacBook Pro 15-inch or higher). If you're buying a PC notebook, spend the extra money to get a screen that's at least 1600 x 900. And if your notebook is 15.6-inches or larger, try going for a 1920 x 1080 resolution display.
On sites that provide configure-to-order notebooks, the cost delta between a 1366 x 768 screen and a 1600 x 900 screen is anywhere from $50 to $100. For example, HP.com charges $100 to upgrade the $579 Pavilion dm4t's screen to the higher resolution, while Dell charges $50 to up the $499 Latitude E5420′s screen to 1600 x 900 and $150 to move the XPS 15′s screen from 1366 to 1920 x 1080. The one caveat is that many of the systems that come with a higher-res screen option are marketed as business notebooks, but that's no reason a consumer couldn't buy and enjoy them.
Solid State Drives
Every second you sit there waiting for your computer to boot or Photoshop to load is bringing you a second closer to the end of your life. Why not use those seconds to do something more rewarding, like opening more applications?
The speed delta between using a traditional hard drive and an SSD is greater than the difference between riding a Big Wheels on a cobblestone road and racing down the Autobahn in a Porsche 911. In our tests, our favorite SSD, the Samsung 830 Series, took less than half the time of a 7,200-rpm hard drive to open a 500-page PDF in Adobe Reader X (3.8 vs 7.1 seconds), and less than a third of the time to open a Excel 2010 to a large spreadsheet (4.2 vs 14 seconds) and to launch Photoshop CS 5.1 with a 400MB TIF (8.4 vs 25.9 seconds).
What can you do with the extra 17.5 seconds you won't be waiting for Photoshop to open? How about opening 17 more browser windows (at less than 1 second each), reading five more tweets from your friends or observing 1.7 billion particle collisions?
Unfortunately, the price delta between buying a notebook with an SSD and a hard drive is significant, but anything around $200 for 128GB of storage should be considered good. For example, Lenovo charges a reasonable $180 premium to upgrade a ThinkPad Edge E420s to SSD while Dell charges $230 to bump the Latitude E6420 to SSD. In those cases where the premium is unreasonably high, look for preconfigured models with an SSD built-in like the $849 Toshiba Portege Z835. Bottom line: SSDs are worth the money because you're buying time.
Longer Battery Life
Unless you're buying an 8-pound notebook you plan to leave on your desk as if it were a desktop, you need as much endurance as you can get. Most low-cost notebooks don't come with enough to juice to last more than 3 or 4 hours on a charge, which is barely enough time to watch a single "Lord of the Rings" movie, let alone write a detailed report for work or school.
Whether you're hopping from conference room to conference room in the office, heading from one classroom to another or walking around the show floor at CES all day, you don't want to worry about finding an outlet. Even when you're just lying in bed using your notebook, it can be a real pain to be tethered to the wall or stop to charge every few hours.
Save yourself from laptop battery panic by choosing a notebook that gets a bare minimum of 6 hours on a charge, with 8 to 10 hours preferable. High-endurance notebooks like the ASUS U31 series cost a little more than the $500 average notebook price, but when you can get 9+ hours of battery life, spend the money.Long battery life review:aspire 4730z battery, AS09A61 battery.
If a notebook is available with different battery choices, such as Acer laptop battery,always go for the higher-capacity battery, even if it adds a little bit of weight or sticks out the back. For example, the Lenovo ThinkPad X220 lasts a strong 7 hours and 51 minutes on a charge with its standard 6-cell battery. However, when you pay an extra $30 to upgrade to the 9-cell unit, it lasts an incredible 12 hours and 39 minutes while only adding 0.2 pounds to the laptop's weight and 1 inch to its depth. If you don't mind another 1.5 pounds of weight and another 0.6-inches of thickness, an optional battery slice takes the battery life up to 20 hours and 18 minutes, enough time to fly from New York to Taipei with a 3-hour stopover in Tokyo.
More: 11 Ways to Increase your Windows Laptop's Battery Life
More Powerful Processors
When you invest in a new notebook, you want to hold onto it for a good three years, without feeling like it's too slow to run today's apps, let alone tomorrow's updates. The lowest-priced notebooks on the market use sluggish Intel Pentium or AMD Athlon chips, while many average-priced systems sport modest Intel Core i3 chips.
Spring for a system with an Intel Core i5 or Core i7 processor to give yourself enough oomph to crunch videos and spreadsheets today while future-proofing you against the next couple of years of innovation. Core i5/i7 CPUs can turbo boost up to a higher frequency while performing processor-intensive tasks, so your 2.5-GHz laptop can actually overclock itself up to 3.1-GHz while you're playing a game.
he cost delta between Core i3 and Core i5 is fairly minimal in most cases. The price difference between a Dell Inspiron 14R configuration with Core i5 and one without is just $70 on Dell.com. However, when you jump up from a bargain basement Intel Pentium CPU, you pay a larger premium. For example, HP.com charges $170 to upgrade its Pavilion G6t from Pentium to Core i5. Spend the money.
Discrete Graphics
While the integrated HD 3000 chip on Intel's 2nd Generation Core Series processors offers decent graphics performance for everyday tasks and video playback, many applications benefit from discrete graphics. Though we're able to run "World of Warcraft" at modest settings on integrated graphics, we don't even bother to test out serious titles like "Crysis" or "Batman: Arkham City" without a dedicated Nvidia GeForce or AMD Radeon chip on board, because those games won't be playable at even low settings.
When you have a discrete chip, you can also achieve significantly better performance in photo and video editing apps, as many are optimized to run filters, compress files and show previews more quickly by using the GPU. More importantly, the latest Web browsers have hardware-accelerated graphics capability that affects the playback of next-gen Internet applications. More and more sites are adding 3D elements and animations that run so much smoother with discrete graphics. Check out Microsoft's Beauty of the Web site to see some great examples.
The cost of upgrading from integrated to discrete graphics is usually in the $75to $150 range for vendors that sell configure-to-order or sell notebook configurations with this feature. For example, HP.com charges just $75 to upgrade from integrated Intel HD Graphics to an AMD Radeon HD 7470M GPU when you buy the Pavilion dv6t.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
