Archive for September, 2009

Every once and a while a notebook emerges on the scene that sets a whole new standard. In recent years laptops have come forth that are powerful, sleek, and lightweight. However, until now, most laptops have been lacking in the most important feature of all: battery life. This summer Acer released the Timeline Series – 13″, 14″ and 15′” laptops that have stellar battery life.  The Acer Timeline 4810T has a 9 hour battery life! Imagine that! Turn your laptop on in the morning & use it on battery power all day. Other positives abound: wireless N connectivity, slim 1″ of thickness, 4.2lb package, cool & quiet system. It’s two negatives, the mediocre screen and choppy high-def playback, are frustrating but in this case the positives vastly outweigh the negatives.

The 4810T has dual core 1.4Ghz processors, a 320GB (5400 RPM) Hard drive, 4GB (DDR3) RAM, 14-inch 1366 x 768 resolution screen, and Windows Vista. This laptop is designed for the consumer looking for a basic laptop or semiportable business machine. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year Best Buy introduced what they called Blue Label laptops – they were HP & Toshiba laptops that featured thin and lightweight designs, long battery life, backlit keyboards, and two-year warranties. This year Toshiba just released the the Satellite E105-S1602. It’s an improved Blue Lapel laptops with much lower recession pricing. Best Buy is the only store that sells E105-S1602 at the $899.99 price.

The E105-S1602 is built with sturdy construction, a longer 5.5hr battery life, and bright 14″ screen. The E105-S1602 comes with Intel Core 2 Duo (2 GHz), 4 GB (DDR2) RAM, 500 GB Hard Drive, has Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit Edition, weights 5.1 lbs, and has a nice sized 14.1 TFT active matrix LCD screen. See it on Toshiba’s website. Read the rest of this entry »

Alienware’s M17X is a top end gaming laptop that completely blows away all others in terms of sheer power and performance. It’s also $4,849! This high-end configuration has Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9300 processor, dual NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280M GPUs, 8GB of RAM, and 1TB RAID 0 array. The PC has  features ‘BinaryGFX’ technology which gives users have the ability to switch between discrete or integrated graphics and a ‘Stealth Mode’ in which the discrete graphics cards are turned off and other components throttle down to achieve a 65W power limit. If you’re looking for the best performing gaming laptop on the market today this is it.

Check the M17x out on Alienware’s website. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re scouting for a fast & inexpensive desktop for your home, office, or living room take a close look at the Gateway SX2800-01.  The best aspect about this PC is the price for the overall power – for $500 you get an system that has Intel Quad Core (2.33GHz), 4GB RAM (800MHz DDR2), and a respectful 640GB (7,200rpm) Hard drive. The SX2800 is all contained with a slim tower design that’s only 4″ thick. Excellent.

PCMAG says the SX2800′s video card (GMA X4500HD) is a good choice to support high-definition video via the built-in HDMI port. Web HD video playback was smooth and jitter-free thanks to the quad-core processor. The system is quiet, a plus for media PCs. You can add a blue ray driver a later date. See it on Gateway’s website. Read the rest of this entry »

Lenovo has come out with a very interesting all-in-one entertainment multimedia desktop. The 21.5-inch display has a respectful 16:9 widescreen with 1,920-by-1,080 resolution. The chassis is just over an inch thick at its slimmest point and 2.4 inches at its thickest. The A600 has a 2.13Ghz CPU, 4GB of DDR3-1066 memory, and a nice 1TB sized hard drive. The A600 ranges from an affordable $699 to $999.

Review Summaries

The Lenovo’s 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P7450 processor has a slower clock speed but overall results put the machine in fine company. Its scores a 87 in PCWorld’s WorldBench 6 test suite. The PC had a solid average of about 60 frames per second in a Enemy Territory: Wars and Unreal Tournament 3 tests (at 1024 by 768, and at normal and medium settings, respectively). Results fell to about 35 fps in each test when they bumped up the resolution to 1680 by 1050. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re scouting around for a small-form factor desktop for your business or home office consider the HP Pavilion Elite e9120f.  It’s small form factor has a great balance between performance & price. The PC has excellent upgradeability: 2 open PCIe slots and one internal 3.5 bay where you can install an additional hard drive later on.

The Elite e9120f is powered by a 2.6GHz AMD Phenom II X4 910 processor, comes with a robust 8GB of RAM, and a large 1TB hard drive. It has a door on the lower right side that reveals theproprietary Personal Media Drive slot. This slot can hold a specizlized  3.5-inch hard drive made by HP. The back has various ports: FireWire, Gigabit Ethernet, four USB 2.0, 7.1-channel analog audio, and digital audio-out. Inside the case you’ll find a graphics card in the PCI Express x16 expansion slot is and a network card in one of the three PCI slots.  Read more details in this Computer Shopper article. Read the rest of this entry »