Things you need to consider before buying a new laptop

1) Processor

Processor or sometimes referred as Central Processing Unit (CPU) is the computer's brain. Generally speaking, Intel’s processors are better than AMD's in terms of power and heat management while offering speed. AMD processors are usually cheaper (about half the price) than Intel’s but I would highly recommend Intel’s processors. You could go with a desktop CPU like Pentium 4 by Intel or Athlon 64 by AMD but bear in mind that desktop CPUs are not designed for mobility so they consume more power and run hotter. The favourite processor now is Intel’s Core™ 2 Duo. Its perfect for home use to ultimate gaming experience but if you have some extra moolah go for Quad Core! Its ok spending a lil’ bit more here since you can’t easily upgrade the processor and you don’t want your processor get outdated pretty soon.

2) Screen

Screen is not a big deal but you must know what you are after. Most laptops come with Widescreen which has an aspect ratio of 16:19 than 4:3 standard screen. This means the images are sharper and better than normal screen. Widescreens are great for watching movies and multitasking. You can open up two windows (eg browsers) side by side.

3) RAM

The key hardware in determining the speed of your computer is the RAM. If you are doing multitasking with ‘heavy’ programs like video, audio and image editing while opening tabs of Firefox and working with a few other widows simultaneously you need a HUGE RAM. 1GB is fair enough for basic office apps but for high-performance 3D gaming and video editing opt for AT LEAST 2GB. It is a good idea upgrading the RAM when buying a new laptop if the pre-installed RAM is too small. The new models of laptop usually have two RAM slots each can take up to 2GB making up the total of 4GB. That’s HUGE!

4) Graphic Memory

You will need a graphic card installed if you are a gaming enthusiast. Good memory card offers smoothness and better image quality than laptops running on shared graphic memory. For playing high end 3D games, look for 512MB or 1GB of system memory. Common graphic cards are Sapphire ATI RADEON, NVIDIA nFORCE and geFORCE etc.

5) Get Connected

When you are looking for a new laptop, find the one that comes with variety of ports and slots like USB ports, FireWire etc. You will need a few USB ports to connect to your mouse, webcam, USB fash drives, printer and many other hardware that require USB connection. You may need a USB hub if you have many USB devices connected to your laptop. In the other hand, having a USB hub is good cuz plugs in and plugs out the USB ports so often will loosen the ports up. FireWire port is newer and faster than USB but the current hardware market shows that FireWire will take a looong time before it can displace USB. Other ports are VGA output and S-Video output. A VGA output is more common than S-Video output as almost every output device uses VGA. If you are going to do powerpoint or video presentation, you need to have VGA output because most of projectors have this kind of connection. Another thing I think a laptop must have is PCMCIA slot. This slot is very useful as nowadays there are many hardware designed to fit into PCMCIA slot like external sound card, modem card, 3G wireless modem or even a TV tuner card.

PCMCIA slot and cards

6) Wireless Connectivity

With the advancement of wireless technology, getting connected has never been easier than ever for everyone at anywhere and anytime. Thus, most of notebooks ship with a wireless capability. The fastest Wi-Fi is 802.11n radio. It gives ten times the speed and wider and better Wi-Fi coverage than the normal 802.11g. Bluetooth is another wireless protocol but using a shorter range of radio signals than Wi-Fi. Most of mobile phones and other peripherals like printers, keyboard and mouse have this kind of technology. Having a laptop with Bluetooth enables you to connect to those devices wirelessly.

7) Hard Drive and Optical Drive

If you have many files to be stored look for 120GB or 160GB of hard drive size. Besides capacity, another factor determines a good hard drive is its rotational speed. Buy the one that has rotational speed of at least 5,400rpm. The faster it spins the faster it reads the data. If you need more storage buy the external ones. You will need an optical drive to play or burn CDs and DVDs. Look for DVD writer not CD/DVD combo drive. CD/DVD combo drive can play both CD and DVD but can’t burn DVD

8) Warranty

Usually a brand new laptop comes with 1 year warranty. If you can afford, buy the extended warranty as a precautionary measure in case of any problem happens in the future. Some stores offer up to 5 years limited warranty for notebooks.

Software you must have!

1 – Kaspersky antivirus. The 1^st software you need to install after installing a fresh copy of Windows is antivirus. Don’t go online without having an antivirus otherwise you will end up reformatting your computer twice! This is a very good antivirus available in the market. It was listed as the second best antivirus after BitDefender in 2008 top 10 antivirus review by TopTenReviews™. Having kaspersky means you don’t need to worry anymore about security issues.

2 – C Cleaner. You need this to clean up your computer mess. It removes temporary files, clean up your system and most importantly it can speed up your computer!

3 – Internet Download Manager (IDM). If you are downloading files from the internet by direct download (not using utorrent, bitcommet whatsoever) you need to have this! IDM can speed up your download speed by 500% (compared to normal direct download of Firefox and IE). It can connect to up to 15 connections to give you the maximum download speed. You can try it for free.

4 – VLC Media Player. I think most of people have this software. VLC can play almost every video format (not real media format and few others). This free software is way better than any paid player. Sometimes you cannot play certain DVDs on Windows Media Player because it comes from different zone. This is because WM player sucks! You can play DVDs from any zone in the world by using VLC. Plus, it is fast and lightweight player too.

5 – Ad Aware SE. This is another good software to have. Well, I’ve mentioned you don’t need to worry about security issues if you have Kaspersky antivirus installed but I actually lied :p You need this software to remove Spyware and Adware from your machines. Antivirus cannot remove these things and that’s why you need to have a very specific remover tool to remove them. It is free to use

6 – Registry Mechanic. This is a supplementary of C Cleaner. C Cleaner is good but it does not created to fix registry errors like Reg Mech does. If the registry becomes messy, your computer will run slowly and sometimes they will be error messages popping up. It can easily be fixed by running a registry cleaner few times

7 – Audacity. This is one of my favourite software. I use this to cut songs to make ringtones for my phones. This is a basic audio editing software yet powerful. You can do many things with audacity. If you like karaoke, you can remove vocals from your favourite tracks and make your own minus ones.

How to Remove Vocals Tutorial

8 – Total Video Converter. Need to convert between various formats of video files? Or u wanna compress your movie files into smaller mp4 format for your Handhelds? Or you just wanna extract audio from your video files? Then TVC is the one you are looking for!

Computer Won't Start part II

Hi there..

At last I do have time to come back and share something i believe useful to people outside. Well, just finished my final exam. Gosh Organic Chem sucks! Like the title post, I'm not going to give a lecture about Organic Chemistry but I will continue writing about boot problem as promised in the last post.

After you've tried the method I've already mentioned before and yet still no success, you can try to fix the bootsector in your primary hard drive. Sometimes this sector in your hard drive is corrupted. Some crucial information needed by windows to start your computer might be lost. This could be caused by virus or spyware. That's why you cannot log in into windows.

Now, we gonna follow the same instruction as the last post until the step before the final step. Instead of running CHKDSK you will need to run a command called FIXBOOT. In order to do that just key in FIXBOOT instead of CHKDSK :C /P. Then just hit ENTER button and confirm your action by hitting Y key and ENTER again. The computer will now begin to repair the bootsector on your drive if there is any errors. After you have finished just reboot your computer. Lets pray your computer will boot like it should be :)

If there is still no luck, it maybe caused by more serious problems like hard disk failure or something. I won't recommend you to fix it by yourself because if you not really sure what you are doing it could lead to more serious problems. At this point, just get your computer fixed by authorised technician or person with extensive knowledge in computer softwares and hardwares. What a beautiful sunny day outside! Im gonna go for a walk. Thank you for reading and all the best! :)

Computer Won't Start!!!

Last night you were so happy downloading the latest episode of Gossip Girl, uploading new photos on Facebook, or chatting with family and friends on Yahoo Messenger but when you woke up this morning your computer won't start!! OMG what happened? How I'm gonna live without a computer? Tomorrow is due date for lab report. You need to submit an essay the end of this week (suddenly it is all about academic LOL). You don't know what to do. You told your flatmate but she can't help you either. She suggest you to get it fixed by technician but you don't have money and you also heard one of your friends got charged few hundred dollars for exactly the same problem as yours!

Well, you don't have to send your laptop to technician because sometimes (almost all the time) the problems are quite simple and you can fix it by yourself! Your computer won't log in into windows and some texts on black screen appear. Based on my experience fixing computers, the most common problem I've encountered is Can't Continue to Load Windows. I'm not going to explain why you get this error. Enough talking and let's fix it!

The first thing and the only thing you need to fix this is your original Windows installation CD. First of all you must set the boot sequence to boot from your CD first. In most cases, This has been setup as factory setting. Now insert Windows installation CD into your CD drive. Turn on your computer and a few seconds later this screen will appear:

If you do not see this, that means your computer is not booting from CD and you have to set this up first. Because every computer model is different, I will not cover this in this post. You can Google "how to change boot sequence" including your computer model. You can search using Google search engine on the top of this page. After you have changed your boot sequence to boot from CD as first priority, you should see this screen (make sure CD is inserted). Then just press any key to proceed. Allow the computer to do its stuffs. After a few moments you will see another screen like this:

Now you are going to repair Windows XP using Recovery Console so press R key. Later your screen will show this:

You will need to key in a value representing your Windows folder on your drive. Most of the windows folder will be at drive C so hit key 1 then press ENTER. Windows will ask you for Administrator Password. If you don't have any password just hit ENTER button. On command prompt, type this CHKDSK :C /P and again hit ENTER. Windows will perform disk check to scan any error on your disk and attempt to recover the issues. After the recovery is completed I would suggest you run this CHKDSK :C /P once again to ensure all issues are fixed. Type EXIT after finished. Remove your CD from CD drive. Your computer should now reboot normally. If these steps do not fix the error don't freak out! This is only the first method and you may want to try another ones. I will write on that in my next post. Thanks for reading and goodluck!

admin

Internet Security - Never Disclose Your Information on the Internet!!

Ola there!

Umm... Actually blogging is not my thing. I've seen numbers of people blogging about their personal life, what are they doing, what they feel etc etc... Don't they know that by doing so they just exposed themselves to vulnerable threats?

Cyberspace is not quite a safe place. There are sooo much bad people out there trying to take advantage on us. I hate spammers...Do you? Well, what is spammers? Spammers are people who fill your inbox with irrelevant ads. Sometimes you got emails regarding Viagra or someone claims you have won lottery of millions of dollars and asked you to give out your information to them in order for fund to be released. Blinded by large sum of money, you gave out your information to them. Bingo! You have been fooled! That is one way they might yield your information and sell the information to the other parties. That's why you got so many emails in your inbox everyday.

But how do they got your email address in the first place? Ummm...that's a tricky question. Well, you might have subscribed to social network website like friendster facebook etc etc. I always see people wrote this line in their profile "add me on friendster! 123456@123456.yahoo.com" There are computer programs created to yield information on millions of websites. They are called Spider, Bot, Robot or Crawler. They will 'crawl' and 'scan' through websites to look for specific iformation like email addresses. Then the information will be sent back to the 'master' who creates them. That's why it is not safe to disclose your information even it is just an email address!

I think that's enough for my first post. Wait!!! Last but not least do not send money to somebody you don't know through WesternUnion, MoneyGram or Internet banking. If you won an auction let say on eBay, you can pay securely via Paypal. You'll get covered under PayPal Buyer Protection in case somebody cheated you. You can fill in dispute form and you will get all of your money back (conditions apply). Another secure payment method is Credit Card. You can report any case of fraud to your bank and they will help to get your money back. Ok I think this is the end of this post. Keep reading my blog :) Thanks!

Tips of the day:
if you still want to show your email address on your friendster page, you can do so by modifying standard email address to 'non-standard' form that still can be read. Instead of 1234@yahoo.com you might want to write like this 1234(at)yahoo(dot)com. People can still read and add you on Friendster but robots can't :) Cheers

admin